WTF 9/26/2024

First they came…

In August 2021 The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan and the new government quickly imposed far-ranging restrictions on women.

In the time since then, the laws and the rules of how women were to dress, appear and act in public and what they could and could not do were interpreted and enforced throughout the country in varying degrees of application… when it came to interpretation of the Taliban’s strict morality code, the urban sectors of Afghanistan were considerably more lax in its application than were the country’s rural, conservative sectors.

Notice the use of the word “were” … as in the “past.”

The more conservative powers that be within the Talban in Afghanistan recently decided there should no longer be a difference in how its mortality code was to be interpreted as well as applied throughout the country and last month began enforcing new draconian laws. For whatever reason the Taliban’s morality police… the most conservative and strident element within the Taliban… has been given an unprecedented amount of power and the white robed enforcers of the Taliban morality code that were once upon a time rare in cities like Kabul are now all over the damn place.

Included among the restrictions within the new religious code are a ban on women from raising their voices, they can’t reciting the Quran in public and looking at men other than their husbands or relatives… fuhgeddaboudit. Women are also now required to cover the lower half of their faces in addition to donning a head covering… which mostly was already enforced country wide.

And while Afghan young girls were already banned from going to school above sixth grade and were all  essentially barred from universities except in some special instances, some managed around the restrictions to some level or another usually in an effort to read and write English, since the morality police began its crackdown on enforcing its morality code most Afghan families are now keeping their daughters home from any form of education whatsoever due to the fear of the long reach of the morality police’s arm and the inevitable harsh terms of enforcement of the that arm.

A Justice Ministry spokesman recently told media sources that the new regulations that are now being strictly enforced in effort to maintain a “respect for human dignity of individuals” and any restrictions upon Afghan women is simply for their own benefit… their own good.

Afghan women’s rights activists on the other hand say that there is nothing in the Quran that bans women from getting educated and that the Quran itself imposes far fewer rules about proper dress… what is moral or not moral for women to wear and have on in public or not moral…  than the ones mandated the Taliban choose to impose upon Afghan women.

Personally I believe that  life in Afghanistan under the Taliban is becoming as intolerable as it has ever been due to the fact that the Taliban government systematically represses the population in general and denies the Afghan people even the most basic individual rights and that among the Afghan people… women are the most heavily persecuted and effected and by the most appalling means and method that can be employed by the Taliban’s morality police.

I also believe that for the most part the men in Afghanistan tended to mostly look the other way about what the Taliban was doing and how they were doing it… the rules are fine especially as those rules are applied to women. And that many Afghan men… possibly even most Afghan males… probably believe it is the lot of the Afghan woman to be subservient to them and their needs and the Taliban and its morality code makes it “easier to keep them in their place.”

But a funny thing happened along the way to the Taliban imposing its more strict morality code…

 The stricter and more ”moral” laws are also being applied to Afghan men, too.

And that’s something many… if not most… Afghan men did not see coming…

Afghan women have always  faced an onslaught of severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago but in general men, especially in the country’ s urban areas, could “carry on freely.”

But when the new laws went into effect last month it not only intensified and redoubled the morality police efforts in applying Sharia law to make sure  women were being “moral” in their daily lives but it now was inserting itself more directly into how “moral” the men were living their daily lives also.

In the last month or so the Taliban’s morality police has brought significant changes for men in Afghanistan…  men must grow a fist-long beard; they can no longer imitate non-Muslims in appearance or behavior… no jeans and their hair must be cut according to strict Taliban specifications… and above all  men can no longer look at a women unless she is his wife or a relative.

As a result, men are growing beards, carrying prayer rugs wherever they may go and not wearing western style clothes like denim jeans.  

Men in Afghanistan began to bitch.

The Taliban’s new rules governing men pale in comparison with restrictions the government has placed on girls and women but now the newly empowered religious morality officers have been visiting the home of certain men who haven’t been seen attending mosque services. Even various government apparatchiks are now looking over their shoulders in fear of their job security due to their inability. or failure, to grow a Taliban approved beard. And the morality police enforcers have bene increasingly on the prowl in many Afghan cities and actually stopping cabbies by having unaccompanied female riders in their cars, or for playing music in violation of the Taliban’s gender segregation rules.

In short the rules and how they are applied to women are now becoming more and more frequently applied to men in the same way, also.

And to paraphrase words that are usually attributed to German Lutheran priest and theologian Martin Niemöller… suddenly there was no one left to speak up for Afghan men.

Niemöller was an anti-Communist and early supporter of Hitler’s rise to power but when Hitler formally assumed being the final word in Germany’s politics and over the people’s lives and he insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemöller became in a word… disillusioned. As a result he became one of the key folks among a group of German clergymen who were in opposition to Hitler.

In 1937 Niemöller was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Ultimately he was freed from captivity by the Allies who came into Germany and shut down the nazi concentration camps. After being freed from the nazi death camps he continued his career in Germany as a cleric and in doing so became a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people for what was allowed to take place in Germany and eventually in the world in Hitler’s quest for world domination and his desire to fulfill his obsession to create a “racially pure” Germany.

In January 1946 Niemöller made confession in his speech for the Confessing Church in which he included these words…  

“… the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—”should I be my brother’s keeper?”

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it’s right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn’t it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note.

Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren’t guilty/responsible?

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.

Those words were eventually developed into the now well-knowns and often quoted poem entitled… “First they came…”

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

Now the men in Afghanistan are with no one left to for them.

Men in Afghanistan who are suspected for violating the new Taliban morality laws can be detained by the morality police for up to three days.

In severe cases… e.g., repeated failure to pray in the mosque… a man can now be given over to the Taliban controlled courts for trial and sentencing based on their interpretation of Islamic Sharia Law.

Just like women currently are…

Men found guilty by these courts can now be expected to be punished by fines or prison terms but in very extreme circumstances… e.g., adultery… flogging or death by stoning could be the punishment given out.

Just like women are currently handed those same punishments by the Taliban “justice system…”

Amir, who lives in eastern Afghanistan, says he used to support the Taliban but now… “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us.”

He added that, “Even people who have supported the Taliban are now trying to leave the country.”

Funny about all that, right? Maybe he and a bunch of his make cohorts should have spoken sooner, more often and louder?

Maybe he and the rest of the male population… in particular the ones doing the bitching now that the Taliban holding them accountable to Sharia Law just as they have held the  women accountable down through the years…  should have thought it through more thoroughly about what the Taliban was doing and was up to.  

A 36-year old male cabbie in Kabul said the new restrictions feel “enormous” and pose a growing hardship for his work. He adds that the enforcement of the new laws by the morality has caused his revenues to go down by 70%.

Another man, and now a former Taliban supporter,  says he knows a man who worked who had his salary withheld because his beard wasn’t long enough per the Taliban’s directives. Another man, under conditions of maintaining his anonymity, said, “We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments.”

For the past three years Afghan women were more or less left to fend for themselves with most men keeping their silence in the probable face  of Taliban retribution for their speaking out in the support of women’s rights.  

Several women anonymously have told media sources that they hope Afghan men will now join them in their protesting the Taliban government and its inhumane dispensation of their version of Islamic law and justice. One hopeful woman said, “Men were silent from Day 1, which gave the Taliban the courage to keep imposing such rules. Now, the Taliban is finally losing men’s support.”

However many other women aren’t even that hopeful in Afghanistan.

One man expressed words that kinda, sorta out it all out there  for the world to see when he said, “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.

He added, “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated.”

If it were only so simple and easy for the women who live in Afghanistan.

Another thousand words…