Behind the Burka

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ABSTRACT: Guardian - September 28, 2001

BURKA: Cloak of felt or woven wool cloth.

In the little visited tribal areas of south western Pakistan it is still very rare to see a woman on the streets. They are confined to their homes and only her immediate family will ever see a woman's face. Should she be allowed to leave the home it would always be accompanied by a young male family member and even then she must be covered completely in the tent-like 'burka'. PHOTOS: www.web.onetel.net.uk/~lhopcraft/slides/fimage4.htm

We should make the Northern Alliance sign a contract on women's rights, writes Polly Toynbee

Something horrible flits across the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There it is, a brief blue or black flash, a grotesque Scream 1, 2 and 3 personified - a woman. The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities.

More moderate versions of the garb - the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf - have much the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it's liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber fetishes - but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of women with no choice.)

The pens sharpen - Islamophobia! No such thing. Primitive Middle Eastern religions (and most others) are much the same - Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust for women's bodies. There are ritual baths, churching, shaving heads, denying abortion and contraception, arranged marriage, purdah, barring unclean women access to the altar, let alone the priesthood, letting men divorce but not women - all this perverted abhorrence of half the human race lies at the maggotty heart of religion, the defining creed in all the holy of holies.

Moderate, modernised believers may claim the true Bible/Koran does not demand such things. But it hardly matters how close these savage manifestations are to the words of the Prophet or Christ. All extreme fundamentalism plunges back into the dark ages by using the oppression of women (sometimes called "family values") as its talisman. Religions that thrive are pliable, morphing to suit changing needs: most Christianity has had to moderate to modernise. Islamic fundamentalism flourishes because it too suits modern needs very well in a developing world seeking an identity to defy the all-engulfing west. And the burka and chador are its battle flags.

The war leaders are coy about this mighty cultural war of the worlds that is fought out over women's bodies. Other considerations always did come first. When the mojahedin were western heroes against Russia and western TV reporters pranced about hilltops in teatowels extolling them, the Guardian women's page had just about the only non-Russian inspired writers pointing to the plight of hidden mojahedin women. Now again there is a danger western leaders seek to blur the issue, to mollify semi-friendly Arab countries.

Already our new allies, the "Northern Alliance" or the "United Front" sneak into the language now as our brethren, the good guys. Already their name emits a warm glow of security as we imagine our boys going in behind their lines to support them to victory for democracy, freedom, human rights and equality for women. But wait, what's that in the background of all those nightly pictures of our gallant allies? Flitting burkas, just like the Taliban women.

Talking to those in the UN, aid agencies and others who have lived there, they all say there is little difference between the two sides beyond old ethnic and tribal allegiances. The Taliban are Pashtuns, the Alliance are an unstable mix of minority ethnic groups. Turn to the Amnesty or Human Rights Watch websites and there are atrocities aplenty on both sides. As for women, a UN official I spoke to was sitting in his office in Kabul back in 1992 when our friends the Alliance barged in to demand all women staff be sent home at once: they banned women from jobs long before the Taliban.

Far from a "united" front, this makeshift Alliance are just tribal warlords each with their own supporters abroad, some selling heroin, many with a history of ratting and re-ratting across the battlelines. Their assassinated leader, Ahmad Shah Masood, had a pleasing, French-speaking westernised educated aspect, but his past was hardly savoury. He cannily wooed western support with promises that women can work and girls attend school, with a few women engineers in evidence, but life for women in burkas on both sides of the divide is virtually identical servitude.

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Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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