Opinion/Brown: The faded yellow burqa nobody wanted to wear - and the lessons it carried
One afternoon years ago, one of my school parents dropped by with a gift from Afghanistan. It was a yellow burqa, the traditional covering that Afghani women are being forced to wear — again — since their Taliban rulers returned to power a year ago.
What I was being given was the top piece of a multi-layered set of garments that stretch to the ground. Under American occupation, Afghan women in the cities might get away with a head scarf, but in the traditional countryside, Taliban or not, this was not an optional fashion statement. Wear one or die.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the thing. Then every year when my geography program reached the Middle East, I’d pull it out and invite volunteers to try it on. Usually, all the girls and several of the more daring boys would put it on. It would be spring by then and already hot enough that kids would emerge gasping after only a few minutes.
Burqas are claustrophobic. The view out front is reduced to an open window a little bigger than a credit card with a fabric mesh sewn across. Try to walk around and you bang into things and trip over obstacles you can’t see. To make matters worse, many of the burqas are solar-absorbent black. In blistering summer, temperatures inside the burqas soar. Women stagger, sometimes vomit.
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Back in 1999 at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in South Africa, I met the head of the World Islamic League. We fell into a conversation as we walked through Cape Town. We were in a museum when I asked his thoughts about the Taliban’s mistreatment of women. This scholarly, soft-spoken man wheeled and shouted at me.
“That makes me very angry!” he roared.
I backed away with my palms raised in front of me. Instantly, he put a soft hand on my forearm.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m not mad at you; I’m mad at them. Understand,” he said, “there is no sin greater than a sin committed in the name of God.”
That from a descendent, if I recall, of the prophet Mohammed.
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A few years ago, our Middle School did a focus day on Malala, the brave Pakistani girl who spoke out for women’s rights. Assassins boarded her bus and shot her in the head, leaving her for dead. A huge banner with her face on it was plastered across the wall where the middle schoolers met. More banners with quotes festooned the classrooms.
“Let us wage a global struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism,” Malala said. “Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.”
Until Sept. 11, 2001, nobody really cared what happened to girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Afghani women were beaten if their shoes made a sound walking down the street. Women couldn’t work, couldn’t teach. The Afghani school systems fell apart. Women couldn’t go outdoors without a male escort — and could be shot for a second offense. One year after America’s departure, this is all coming back.
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We held the burqa as I explained this to my students. Soccer game halftimes consisted of pickup trucks driving onto the field, each holding wailing women who were dragged to the ground, shot and hauled back onto the trucks to drive away. My kids just sat. Who could possibly want to do this to women?
Thank Pakistan, who set up orphanages for Afghani boys after years of fighting the Russians, then civil war. The schools were, in fact, training camps to radicalize and train young warriors. (Taliban means student over there.)
Orphaned, they had no mothers … no women at all, in fact. Women, they were told, are temptations put in their way by Satan to rob them of their purity. Women would have to be controlled — but God was OK with their being given out as door prizes for righteous warriors. My kids just shook their heads. We had soldiers serving in Afghanistan back then. Maybe they were there to save the women.
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Trouble is, women need saving all over the world. I had a girl ask what a foreign policy would look like if women’s rights were a primary objective. I suggested she write one. No one in Washington has ever really tried, and neither did she. She had an excuse, though. She was 12.
As a sort of stand-in for all the global horrors inflicted on women, I had this stupid yellow burqa. I offered extra credit if any of the kids would wear the thing for a whole class day, then write a report on what it was like. I offered for years — and there were no takers. Ever.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Cape Cod opinion: A burqa, Afghanistan and the oppression of females
