More about QED later, but meanwhile, something I missed while packing – Afghanistan’s Ulema Council issued a statement outlining “the rights and duties of women under Islam” and Karzai backed it. Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch reports:
The statement said some good things. It prohibited a traditional practice of giving a girl to another family to resolve a dispute (“baad”). It spoke against forced marriage. It confirmed women’s rights to inherit and own property.
On women’s duties, however, the statement took a turn for the worse: Women should not travel without a male chaperone. Women should not mix with men while studying, or working, or in public. Women must wear the Islamic hijab. Women are secondary to men.
The last item is the most striking one, in a way, if only because the others are already familiar. Clerics and their stooges in other religions have learned not to admit that that last item is what underpins all the others; they pretend to think and affirm that women are equal to men but complementary, as opposed to unequal to men because “secondary.” They don’t mean a word of it, but they’ve learned to say it. Ulema Councils haven’t, and don’t plan to.
Well, if Ulema Council unheeded, I’ll leave your council unheeded, too! So take that already, all’y’all,eh.
The non-secondary clerics have much to learn from Apartheid-era South Africa. Lots of good ideas on how to segregate significant parts of the population. But I suppose they don’t read enough.