In Afghanistan, Women's Rights Still Struggle to Take Root
Girls in Afghanistan. DFID UK Flickr.
This November Afghan women and men on Facebook joined others around the world in posting Facebook profiles as part of a two-week-long United Nations initiative to Unite to End Violence Against Women.
A recent televised debate highlights the scale of that task in a country wracked by foreign invasions and riven by internal differences.
Earlier this month, two female public figures were debating an anti-harassment law which was recently passed by the Afghan parliament at a round table with a deputy of the Kabul clerical council on Aryanna TV.
The cleric shocked many netizens by calling the women “rationally paralyzed” with “defective brains” and backed up his argument with a selective sampling of Islamic religious texts. The two women were reduced to resorting to a cliched defense of women and girls as wives and daughters, seemingly unable to make the simple argument that men and women are of equal worth.
The social media-active cleric's comments about women proved a hot topic on Afghan sections of social media.
Nilofer Tahiri wrote angrily on Facebook:
معاون شورای علمای کابل: زنان ناقص العقل اند.
#نكته: پس تو بد بخت كه از يك #ناقص العقل به دنيا آمدي هيچ #عقل نداري.Posted by Nilofer Tahiri on Saturday, November 12, 2016
سیلی غفاری زن شجاع و دلیر افغان که همیش در جنایت کاران را در برنامه های سیاسی تلویزیون های با حرف هایش مانند مشت اهنین پولادی کوبیده است.
Posted by Sayed Paise Kunari on Saturday, April 25, 2015