New
Age Islam News Bureau
01
October 2021
• ‘Anti-Feminist’, Believed To Be Ultra-Orthodox Extremists Vandals in Israel Deface Images of Women
•
Qatar Calls Taliban Moves On Girls Education ‘Very Disappointing’
•
Iranian Harasses Woman For Singing in Public, Calls It 'Sin', Gets Schooled By
People
•
Pakistani Women Are Leading the Struggle for Human Rights
Compiled
by New Age Islam News Bureau
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/tajik-prison-islamic-afghanistan/d/125486
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Tajik
Woman Gets Lengthy Prison Term For Allegedly Fighting With Islamic State In Afghanistan
September
30, 2021
Afghan security personnel escort arrested alleged
Islamic State militants during an operation in Jalalabad Province in October
2019.
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VAHDAT,
Tajikistan -- A Tajik court has sentenced a local woman to 12 years in prison
for allegedly fighting alongside Islamic Sate (IS) militants in neighboring
Afghanistan in 2015.
The
court in the city of Vahdat, near Dushanbe, on September 30 found 31-year-old
Olima Kamolova guilty of taking part in the Afghan war in an area of Afghan
territory that was at the time under the control of an affiliate of the
extremist group.
A
prosecutor had asked the court to hand Kamolova a 15-year prison sentence.
The
mother of four has pleaded not guilty, saying she was pregnant twice while in
Afghanistan, and that she would be unable to take part in any military
operations there.
She
insisted that her late husband Parviz Sangov brought her to Afghanistan and
kept her there against her will before he was killed near the eastern city of
Jalalabad.
Kamolova
was detained by Afghanistan's government forces before being repatriate along
with her children earlier this year after she appealed to Tajikistan's
authorities in January, asking them to help her return.
But
she was arrested in Tajikistan in July and charged with taking part in a
military conflict abroad, which is a crime in the Central Asian nation.
In
recent years, thousands of Central Asian citizens have joined the IS group in
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They were in many cases accompanied by their
wives and children.
Source:
Gandhara
https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/tajik-woman-islamic-state-afghanistan/31486198.html
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‘Anti-Feminist’,
Believed To Be Ultra-Orthodox Extremists Vandals in Israel Deface Images of
Women
By
LAURIE KELLMAN
Oct
1, 2021
JERUSALEM
(AP) — The joyful glint in Peggy Parnass’ eyes is so sharp it can be seen from
the walls of Jerusalem’s bustling Old City. Posted across the street at the
gateway to City Hall, twin images of the Holocaust survivor and activist gaze
out at the ancient warren of holy monuments of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
But
just outside this centre of spirituality, someone saw her image as a problem.
Five times since the photos of Parnass were posted as part of an exhibition
that began in April, vandals — widely believed to be ultra-Orthodox extremists
— spray-painted over her eyes and mouth.
The
graffiti was cleaned each time, leaving Parnass smiling again. For many
Israelis, however, the short-term fix highlighted a familiar pattern that’s all
the more painful because the destruction is coming not from enemies across
Israel’s borders but from within.
“It’s
not anti-Semitic,” said Jim Hollander, the curator of The Lonka Project art
installation at Safra Square. “This is anti-feminist.”
For
all of its modernity, military firepower and high-tech know-how, Israel has for
decades been unable to keep images of women from being defaced in some public
spaces. Billboards showing women -- including soccer players, musicians and
young girls -- have been repeatedly defaced and torn down by religious
extremists in Jerusalem and other cities with large ultra-Orthodox populations
over the past 20 years.
Even
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was erased from a 2015 photograph of world
leaders in Paris published by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper.
The
pattern is especially uncomfortable now.
“This
is not Kabul, this is Jerusalem,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a Jerusalem deputy
mayor. “This is a concerted campaign by radicals to erase women from the public
space, which belongs to all of us.”
The
double photo of 94-year-old Parnass, who lives in Germany, is posted on an
outside wall of Jerusalem’s City Hall complex.
Hollander
said he specifically chose it among dozens of others posted around the complex
to hang in the marquee spot because it projects vitality, perseverance and survival
across one of Israel’s most famous expanses. Its central location makes it
visible to thousands every day.
The
vandalism is widely blamed on a small number of fringe members of the insular
ultra-Orthodox community, which emphasizes modesty among women and has
traditionally carried outsized influence in Israeli politics. The photo is
posted next to a street that borders an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood and is a
popular walkway to the Old City’s Western Wall, the holiest Jewish prayer site.
Ultra-Orthodox
Jews make up about 12.6% of Israel’s population of 9.3 million. That
community’s population is growing faster than those of other Israeli Jews and
Arabs, according to the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan Jerusalem
think tank. A majority of Jerusalem’s Jewish community is ultra-Orthodox, the
institute said.
There
is a difference, one expert cautioned, between the more pragmatic mainstream
ultra-Orthodox Judaism and the vandals defacing photos of women.
“In
the mainstream, they know that the world outside is functioning in a different
way,” said Gilad Malach, who leads the ultra-Orthodox program at the Israel
Democracy Institute. “And they know that in some situations, they need to
cooperate with that.”
In
the mainstream Orthodox community, some women have begun to push back on social
media.
“The
men aren’t in charge there,” said Kerry Bar-Cohn, 48, an Orthodox chiropractor
and performer who a few years ago started posting YouTube videos of herself
singing children’s songs. Recently, she tried to publish an ad in a local
circular with her photo on it, and was refused.
“It’s
straight-out discrimination,” said Bar-Cohn, wife of a rabbi and a mother of
four. “I was thinking I want to sue them, but No. 1, who has the time? And No.
2, you don’t want to be that person.”
Advocates
say erasing women carries dire societal risks.
“You
don’t see women, you don’t hear their needs and their needs are not met,” said
Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, 46.
Keats
Jaskoll recently launched the subscription-only Jewish Life Photo Bank, a
collection of what she calls “positive” images of Orthodox women for the
Chochmat Nashim organization. The idea is to sell images of women that are
acceptable to an Orthodox audience and better understood by people in general.
None
of these initiatives has halted the constant wave of vandalism.
The
Israel Religious Action Center, which is connected to the liberal Reform
movement of Judaism, has tracked the vandalism and other attacks on women’s
images for five years and filed a court petition to compel the city of
Jerusalem to crack down.
Over
time, the municipality has responded by saying it is engaged in “massive,
effective and focused enforcement” of city bylaws against vandalism, but it
acknowledged difficulty in collecting testimony and prosecuting suspects.
“The
Jerusalem municipality has and will continue to condemn any damage to public
images and deals with the problem if appears on the spot,” the city said in a
statement.
Police
say they investigate all complaints of vandalism and property damage and try to
find those responsible, but had no information about the Parnass case.
By
refusing or being unable to crack down, “the state sponsors this practice,”
said Ori Narov, an attorney for IRAC. “We keep getting this impression that
they keep making excuses,” ranging from a shortage of labor to even more limits
due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The
municipality said the Parnass photos have been restored and it has increased
patrols around City Hall.
Parnass’
niece, Keren-Or Peled, who lives in Israel, says Parnass has been told what
happened. After her photos were cleaned for a third time, Peled traveled to
Jerusalem to take a photo to send to her aunt.
By
the time Peled got there, however, the set of photos had been defaced again.
She helped clean it herself.
“They
paint over your picture time and time again because you are a woman,” Peled
wrote to her aunt in an article published in Haaretz. ”A beautiful, strong,
confident 94-year-old woman.”
Source:
AP News
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Qatar
calls Taliban moves on girls education ‘very disappointing’
30
Sep 2021
Qatar’s
top diplomat says the Taliban’s moves on girls’ education in Afghanistan are
“very disappointing” and “a step backwards”, and called on the group’s
leadership to look to Doha for how to run an Islamic system.
Foreign
Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was referring to, among other
things, the Taliban’s refusal to allow Afghan female secondary school students
to resume their studies, weeks after the group took power.
He
spoke at a news conference on Thursday with European Union Foreign Policy Chief
Josep Borrell in Doha.
“The
recent actions that we have seen unfortunately in Afghanistan, it has been very
disappointing to see some steps being taken backwards,” he said.
Doha
has become a key broker in Afghanistan following last month’s withdrawal of US
forces, helping to evacuate thousands of foreigners and Afghans, engaging the
new Taliban rulers and supporting operations at Kabul airport.
“We
need to keep engaging them and urging them not to take such actions, and we
have also been trying to demonstrate for the Taliban how Muslim countries can
conduct their laws, how they can deal with the women’s issues,” said Sheikh
Mohammed.
“One
of the examples is the State of Qatar, which is a Muslim country; our system is
an Islamic system [but] we have women outnumbering men in workforces, in
government and in higher education.”
The
Taliban has been accused of human rights abuses in recent weeks, including
publicly stringing up the bodies of four alleged kidnappers from cranes in Herat
last week.
The
display of the dead kidnapping suspects, who were killed in a shootout, was the
most high-profile public punishment since the Taliban swept to power last
month.
It
has been seen as a sign the Taliban will adopt fearsome measures similar to
their previous rule from 1996 to 2001.
The
Taliban follows an extremely strict interpretation of Islamic law that
segregates men and women, and have also slashed women’s access to work.
It
has been almost two weeks since girls were prevented from going to secondary
school, and isolated rallies led by women have broken out across Afghanistan in
recent days.
Sheikh
Mohammed called on the Taliban to “maintain and preserve the gains made in past
years” but warned the international community and “friendly” states not to
isolate Afghanistan.
Borrell
echoed the Qatari top diplomat, calling “some of the things that have happened
in Afghanistan recently … quite disappointing”.
“Let’s
hope we can manage to reorient … the Afghan government,” he said adding that he
hoped Qatar could use its “strong influence” on the Taliban to encourage the
group to improve its treatment of civilians.
EU-Qatar
relations
Al
Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from Doha, said it was “interesting” to see
how Qatar has evolved from being a reliable energy partner for the EU to an
“equal partner on the international stage to try and solve global problems”.
The
EU is likely to “lean on Qatar more and more” as a diplomatic ally and partner,
Basravi said.
Since
the topic of Afghanistan dominated the talks, it is clear that the EU wants to
resolve the Afghan crisis and to “contain a potential displacement of people
from leaving the region,” he added.
Meanwhile,
the two diplomats discussed other “international topics including the nuclear
agreement with Iran,” Sheikh Mohammed said.
Borrell
said he believes nuclear talks with Iran will resume within an acceptable
period of time.
“We
continue to work towards a quick resumption of negotiations in Vienna,” he
said.
Source:
Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/30/qatar-taliban-afghanistan-eu-borrell
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Iranian
Harasses Woman For Singing in Public, Calls It 'Sin', Gets Schooled By People
September
26, 2021
Aman,
who harassed a woman for singing in public, was schooled by a group of people
present at the scene for unnecessarily trying to disturb peace in Iran.
In
a video shared by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, a crowd was seen defending
a woman who was harassed by a man for singing in public.
In
the video, a woman was seen playing a guitar and singing in the street when a
man approached her and stopped her from singing In public. While another woman,
who was present at the scene, intervened and asked the man why women were not
allowed to sing in public.
To
this, the man replied, "It's 'haram' (sin) for a woman to sing in public.
You (to the woman who was singing in the street) keep singing but not in
public."
Following
this, a crowd gathered at the scene and asked the man to focus on other
problems in the country including robbery and embezzlement.
They
then asked the woman to continue with her singing as they cheered for her.
Earlier,
Taliban banned music and female voices on television and radio channels in
Afghanistan's Kandahar. This comes after some media outlets removed their
female anchors after the Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15. Local
media in Kabul also reported that several women staff members were asked to
return from their workplaces since the takeover.
Source:
India Today
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Pakistani
Women Are Leading the Struggle for Human Rights
By
Hasan Ali
SEPTEMBER
28, 2021
ISLAMABAD—When
the journalist Asma Shirazi landed in Lahore on the night of July 13, 2018, she
found her Twitter feed awash with insults. She had just been aboard the flight
that had brought former prime minister Nawaz Sharif back from London after the
courts convicted him, in absentia, of corruption. Her crime—for which she was
called a prostitute, threatened with rape, and accused of taking bribes—was
that she had interviewed Sharif about the verdict delivered against him.
“We
live in a society where the most vulnerable demographic is women, and a single
sentence can destroy our reputations,” says Shirazi. “It [the trolling] was
part of an organized campaign to silence those voices that were speaking up
about the manipulation of the 2018 election.”
Shirazi—a
20-year veteran of the media industry—is no stranger to threats or political
pressure. Her reporting has taken her from Swat to Beirut and put her on the
radar of any number of militant outfits, from ISIS and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to the
Pakistani Taliban, all of which have tried to stop her from speaking. “I’ve
never been afraid of death; what used to scare me was insults. Now I’m not
afraid of either.”
Instead
of being cowed, Shirazi has continued to speak up for democracy and to hold the
military-civilian rulership to account. “Truthfully, surrendering isn’t in my
blood. There were many occasions when I asked myself if I shouldn’t just
compromise but then I would also have to ask myself, ‘to what extent?’ The
demand [from the hybrid regime] is to be completely blind and deaf and
silent…and that was something I couldn’t accept.”
It
is one of the peculiarities of Pakistan, a country among the most patriarchal
in the world, that the struggle for civil liberties is being spearheaded by
women. Indeed, there is a sense in which the reality of having to struggle
against men in the public and private spheres has conditioned Pakistani women
to resist oppression. Amber Rahim Shamsi, a journalist and political
commentator based in Islamabad, says, “It is because of the mettle that women
have developed that they are able to exude so much power.”
A
fervent defender of freedom of expression, Shamsi came under intense pressure
in June 2020 when she grilled former finance minister Asad Umar on the drastic
increase in petrol prices presided over by his government. She says that while
she was on her way home that night, she received a phone call from Col. Shafiq
Malik of Inter Services Public Relations, who chastised her for asking too many
“political” questions. “It’s unfortunate that saying certain names or revealing
certain truths or doing certain stories has become an act of resistance,” says
Shamsi, who was sacked from her job under mysterious circumstances at the end
of August 2020. “Because if you’re not able to give the full picture to people
in a democracy they don’t have the information they need to make those
decisions.”
In
the two months between that interview and her termination, Shamsi became a
victim of the same sort of organized trolling that had earlier been used
against Asma Shirazi. One of Shamsi’s former colleagues told The Nation that
the PTI government was looking for an opportunity to target her and had
organized the campaign as a form of revenge for her criticism. “Pakistan is a
country where if a man rapes a woman, conservative elements find a way of
blaming the victim,” he said. “They knew that by assassinating her character on
social media, it would hurt her more than if they had done the same thing to a
man.”
For
Nighat Dad, who heads the Digital Rights Foundation, social media bullying is a
legal problem. “Constitutional rights should translate to online spaces,” she
tells The Nation. “The same mindset that harasses women on the street also
harasses them online.” Nighat, who set up the cyber harassment help line in
2016, sees her fight to empower women in digital spaces as a wider attempt to
“break the patriarchy.”
In
2005, a year after completing her law degree, she was forced into an arranged
marriage with a man who refused to let her work. “My ex-husband told me that
practicing the law was a profession for prostitutes,” she says. “Then when he
found out I had secretly got my license to practice, he said, ‘Oh so you are a
whore aren’t you?’”
Two
years later, after an acrimonious divorce, she represented herself in a custody
battle for her infant son and witnessed firsthand what she calls the “misogyny”
of the courts. “I had to scream just to be heard,” says Nighat. “It was a place
where female lawyers would be arguing and the men behind them would be
laughing.”
Because
her own struggles coincided with the explosion of smartphones and the
proliferation of social media, Nighat decided to focus her attentions on making
the Internet a safer space for women. The Digital Rights Foundation lobbies
government on how to legislate for women to have greater access to information,
notifies social media companies of threats being made on their platforms, and
provides a help line for women to call in and share their grievances.
The
issue of women’s digital rights is being discussed as part of a larger
conversation about female empowerment. The emergence of groups like the Women’s
Democratic Front—a socialist feminist grassroots organization founded in
2018—coupled with a recent spate of highly publicized attacks against women has
ignited a culture war between reactionary and progressive elements in society.
Tooba Syed, who organizes the Women’s Freedom Rally in Islamabad every March
describes the resistance to this new wave of feminist activism as a form of
societal censorship. “In Pakistan, the entire concept of chaddar [veil] or
chaar divari [four walls] basically means whatever happens to women inside the
four walls remains there,” she says. “What young women have done in this
movement is brought the home to the city square.”
It
is this publicization of the private sphere that has offended the right. The
slogan “My Body, My Choice”—which has become a rallying cry for women around
the country—has been perceived as an attack on family values, while the march
itself has been targeted by a coalition of conservative and religious groups
who have filed a number of blasphemy suits against it. “When the movement started
it was really about the intimate,” says Syed. “It was about what happens to our
bodies…it was about consent and violation of our bodies in all kinds of ways.”
In
spite of conservative resistance, however, the work of activists such as Tooba
Syed has made it much more difficult for the state to ignore cases of
gender-based violence. The Islamabad Police force has just introduced a Gender
Protection Unit specifically tasked with serving women who are victims of
abuse. The policewoman responsible for launching the unit, Amna Baig, told The
Nation that she pitched it as a help line with a responding team comprised of
female officers. “The reason I insisted on a responding team of female officers
was that half of the time we were getting calls about domestic violence and
when the police would go and knock on the doors, the women would come out and
half of the time would go back inside and not report it.”
Baig,
who describes herself as a feminist, sees the introduction of the unit as a way
of increasing access to justice. “If I’m not making a contribution towards
improving the lives of women, there’s no point in inducting female police
officers.”
But
for Imaan Mazari-Hazir, a human rights lawyer who works with the Journalist
Defense Committee in Islamabad, the subjugation of women, which she describes
as an ideological tenet of the state, will not stop unless the military’s role
in politics is curtailed. “There’s a whole state-backed apparatus—the
mullah-military alliance—that is opposed to women being active publicly or part
of mainstream political discourse,” she says. “When women step out of their
roles of supporting men and cheering men on and being the good obedient women,
they are always looked down upon and there are always justifications for any
harm that comes to them.”
What
makes Mazari-Hazir’s case particularly interesting is that her mother, Shireen,
is currently serving as minister for human rights in Imran Khan’s cabinet. “I
think my mother’s political career has suffered a lot because of me,” says Mazari-Hazir,
who has surfaced as one of Khan’s fiercest critics. “But whenever this comes
up, I always say to her, ‘You chose to raise me this way. You taught me to
question everything.’”
Mazari-Hazir’s
work defending journalists from state-sponsored prosecution and her vocal
opposition to the country’s powerful military have put her life in danger.
Threats of violence are routinely made against her, and she claims that her car
was once rammed by a motorcyclist in Rawalpindi. But more than her own safety,
what concerns her is the future of Pakistan as a cohesive country. “The state’s
role has been destructive,” she says. “If you continue to oppress your own
people and carry out acts of violence with impunity against them, you are going
towards something that will shake the structure of the country.”
Source:
The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/pakistan-women-human-rights/
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