Daily Times

The Af-Pak region as a whole has disintegrated abysmally when it comes to its treatment of women. The ghastly daylight murder of a 28-year-old Kabul woman, Farkhunda, by a mob of savages in the Afghan capital city has set off a tidal wave of protests by women there, who are determined that Farkhunda’s memory should not be murdered like her body was brutalised. According to reports, Farkhunda seemed to have gotten into an argument with a mullah at a shrine for trying to sell amulets to women. This minor tussle turned into a blood-soaked rampage when the cleric, angered at having been defied, whipped up a frenzied mob by claiming that the woman had burnt copies of the Quran. No investigation occurred, no saner heads prevailed and no humanity was witnessed when the crowd of men kicked her, beat her with wooden sticks, threw her from the roof of a nearby building after which a car ran over her dragging her body that was then set on fire. Such a morbid display of barbarism is hard to imagine, much less witness in broad daylight. Farkhunda, a religious studies scholar and Islamiat teacher, was trying to make the mullah aware of the fact that amulets were not a sign of religious devotion and that they had no place in Islam. For raising her voice, even for a rational debate, Farkhunda was condemned to a most gruesome death. It seems not much has changed for the women of Afghanistan.
The mob murder has unleashed loud and unprecedented protest by women in Afghanistan, who braved all kinds of social taboos by carrying Farkhunda’s funeral casket to her grave, an act usually reserved for the men of that patriarchal society. A Twitter campaign called #JusticeforFarkhunda has been launched and on Tuesday hundreds of women marched upon the nation’s Supreme Court (SC) demanding that justice be served. It is painfully obvious that precious few reforms have been made in improving the lot of women there. The US may have pushed back the Taliban and its influence but the cultural and mental malaise that has afflicted this land will take lifetimes to be overcome. In Pakistan, too, we see the same horrific attitude towards women and charges of blasphemy. A pregnant woman was stoned to death in front of the Lahore High Court (LHC) just last year and many hundreds have been murdered for even the slightest provocation of blasphemy. What happened to Farkhunda was the barbaric amalgamation of both these demons our societies carry on their backs. She was an innocent woman who was falsely accused and she suffered for daring to debate with a mullah. There are no words left to castigate this heinous crime, only the hope that Afghanistan’s women can be the change they want to see. *