You are Weak, I am Strong

Women are oppressed in all Moslem societies. But among the rural Pathans, women simply don’t exist. “They’re not even in the background. They’re just not there”, said a Pathan woman who left the Northwest Frontier to live in New Jersey. Here are three Pathan proverbs:

Women have no noses. They will eat shit.

One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.

Women belong in the house or in the grave.

You rarely see women on the Northwest Frontier or in Afghanistan; you do see moving tents with narrow holes for the eyes. Photographers who walked through minefields and sneaked into Soviet bases were afraid to take close-ups of Pathan women unless they were at least a hundred yards away and had a lens the size of a mortar – and provided not a single mujahid was looking. A close-up of a Pathan woman was more prized and difficult to get than a photograph of the undercarriage of an MI-24 helicopter gunship.

The only Pathan females I ever allowed to see were all five years old and younger. Some of those girls were beautiful, with long, dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and doe eyes. What Pathan women look like when they are older is a secret that only Pathan men know.

    From ‘Soliders of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan’

    by Robert D. Kaplan (New York, 2001), p. 49

These words were first published in 1990 following the end of the Soviet occupation in the previous year. Much has changed and now there is a new occupying force (American/ISAF) and resistance to it (not exclusively Taliban). However, this short extract offers opportunities to reflect upon my impressions of nine months in northern Afghanistan and the men I lived alongside during that time. One of these, a chess-playing horseman from the desert called Agha Khan (AK for short), is a Pashtun. The term Pathan is a long out of date English word which is no longer used but was commonly used up to the publication of Kaplan’s book to refer to Pashtuns - Pashtu-speaking people who are far more populous to the south of Afghanistan and in the western border regions of Pakistan. Just as the word Pathan has become an anachronism, my conversations with AK offered little suggestion that he agreed with the sentiment of the proverbs above. Here was a man who not only cooked for me often but also at home for his wife and family. It was something he enjoyed and which he did not consider beneath him. Part of the reason may have been that he had time on his hands. Like many men of his generation he has seem much war, hardship and lack of work. Unlike his siblings, most of whom have moved abroad, AK has remained in the town and as a somewhat educated man (he is a keen reader) he often struck me as bored and lonely. I guess cooking is something to do. That said, the majority of men I got to know never cooked at home. Afghanistan remains deeply divided and defined by gender roles and while a man may cook for his friends or as a job, in the family environment it is undeniably women’s work. Women were not equals in the eyes of the Afghans I knew - I had limited exposure to very few females and none of them enjoyed the same freedoms as men - with the notable exception of one who grew up in Europe and was married to a westerner. She operated largely in the same way as other expats in town. 

Not just among Pashtuns but also females in northern Afghanistan, young girls up to the age of perhaps seven could be seen playing on the potholed and dusty street which became rutted and muddy in winter. They seemed relatively free to play near the family home and aoli (the household yard with high wall) enclosing at least one but often two homes of relations (sometimes the separate families of a man with two wives). This is not uncommon but not the norm. It seems to be about school-going age that girls have their freedoms curtailed and from that time they can be seen walking (girls and women do not ride bicycles) to and from school in uniform which includes at minimum a scarf as a head covering. Around town you simply would not see a woman’s hair and over fifty percent of adult females wear burkas (usually powder blue or occasionally white garments with a mesh rectangle for eyes and which cover the body from head to knees, a bit higher at the front so hands can be employed usefully. Let me be clear here, the reason women wear burkas is because the men of the household have decided this. I have heard of some women affirming or defending their usage but this is of dubious merit as an argument where this is a practice done under duress, not freedom, in a male-dominated society where the consequences for violating rules all to often threaten or involve violence. Physical movement is usually closely controlled which means trips to school, to town or beyond the aoli require permission and often the journey can only be undertaken if a male family member is in attendance. In short, women are subservient to men and their world is that of an underclass. Of course this is dangerous talk when engaged in conversations with Muslim men, especially in their country, and perceived in some circles as politically incorrect doing so in the UK. However, the truth often offends those with power and those who benefit from the dominant position they hold in the status quo. That they stand to lose is wrong-headed and comes from a place of fear which also holds them in bondage. Not of course of the sort that describes the situation of their women folk (yes, they are possessed as chattels to some degree) but equally life-taking. In this context no one is truly free to live.

It is interesting what motivates men to impose such restrictions. To some degree it boils down to the fact that they do not trust other men. Usually the closest relationships Afghan people have are with those of the same sex, even if they are married. This dramatically affects the way boys, girls, men and women relate with each other. Deprived, at least according to the strict moral code I observed, of any meaningful relationships with the opposite sex except familial or sexual ones until married, men have no natural outlet or expression for their desire for friendship, intimacy or sexual gratification. What boys growing up see is largely defined by the dominant model of relations with women who enter their new husband’s household when married (often when they are in their teens) to take up a position junior to other women in the aoli who all have a clearly defined place in the domestic scene doing cooking, laundry and raising children which is normally a lot in Afghan families. Men have the role of providers but are free to roam. They invariably have much more exposure to the world outside the walls of the home and at work find companionship and their  sense of identity in the male groups of which they are a part. Unmarried men, especially youth and men up to the age of thirty will rarely have contact with their female contemporaries unless they take some risk to enter into relationships outside of wedlock. However, if caught the perceived shame for the families is such that the girl could reasonably expect punishment (quite possibly physical with permanent effects) or even death. For the boy, the consequences are less severe and can usually be paid in money of kind. Yet, if sufficiently dissuaded by these risks, men may turn their amorous attention towards men or more commonly boys. It is not uncommon to see young men seeking intimacy (often just close platonic friendship) or walking hand in hand.

Although the statistics are not clear there are plenty of eyewitness accounts (including my own) of men engaging in homosexual activity and a peculiar variation of paedophilia known as bacha bozi (lit. boy play). In bacha bozi an older man will sexually exploit a younger man or boy sometimes under duress and/or for payment. The incidence of this type of sexual expression and deviant variations seems symptomatic of a repressive culture where pre-marital male-female friendships and relationships involving a sexual component are not tolerated. As established in other contexts such as Victorian Britain and to some extent prisons, these environments give rise not just to alternative sexual preferences but also new derivations which may involve force or dominance. Given the reality of this Afghan context I observed and the depravity sometimes in evidence it is hardly any wonder that women are locked up (sometimes literally) and objectified as objects of desire for sex (and the bearing of children). The men want some kind of outlet for expressions of friendship, love and intimacy but can so often only find that in men. Added to this is  the fact that many men in their twenties cannot get married because of the bride price required to pay the woman’s family. You could say women are sold into marriage. The culture dehumanizes women certainly and I would argue men also. It casts them both in roles which are very rigid and imposes conformity to oppressive societal strictures rather than the freedom to be fully human and truly live. The result is a patriarchal and perhaps even women-hating culture. It is not uncommon for an unaccompanied woman walking down the street to attract unwanted attention and abuse in the form of insults such as ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ because without a chaperone she is deemed in breach of moral conventions and scandalous to the point of provoking attack. I have heard of men latching onto and attempting sexual assault in such cases and defending their actions with the reply that the women had provoked him by virtue of walking past without a companion. The bigger point beyond the obvious discrimination (even crimes) against women this type of scenario is what it says about men. They seem to see themselves as untrustworthy sexual predators without any self control whatsoever. Also, as a cultural group they have created a self fulfilling prophecy.

As a caveat I feel must write that this is not a comprehensive account of sex and gender in Afghanistan. I am not from this country of which I write and where I spent only nine months. That said, though I write with (and with some self-awareness of) prejudice I know what I saw and heard. I also do so with a good grasp of the local language and culture. I spent hours chatting with various Afghan males of different ethnicities working, having a laugh but also debating the matters above. Most of the men I knew I respected and found to be kind and decent - not men I saw involved in the overt abuses or depravity I’ve been considering above. However, although not obviously misogynists they were undoubtedly pretty relaxed about the role of women in their society, a society in which men distrust each other, women are subservient and men have sex with boys while at the same time questioning the virginal chastity of a girl if she looks at a boy the wrong way.  

What kind of man is my friend AK? I ask this because he was one of the truest friends I had while in Afghanistan and also one who seemed to epitomize Afghan masculinity but also operate beyond it in some really interesting ways. We were able to discuss almost any topic and did so regularly - ranging from buzkashi (the Afghan national game where men ride horses and compete over the headless carcass of a goat), cooking, Islam, God, women, alcohol and war. He had fought and survived to reach his sixties in relatively good health through decades of drought, famine and war. Big and strong as an ox, he naturally enjoyed being dominant in competition and conversation. He could also be a good listener and was patient when my language limitations required it. He would accept help from others but didn’t like to show weakness or losing. Whenever he beat me at chess he would stand up, beat his chest and lord it over me saying: ‘You are weak, I am strong.’

The most intimate thing an Afghan man could talk about would be his female family members. Only on a couple of occasions when one was sick would direct reference be made in any detail. It has been said that to talk of one’s wife, sister or daughters with another man is the equivalent of showing him your penis - degrading, intimate, embarrassing. To invoke this imagery is also to say that females in one’s family are a man’s most personal possession. We joke in the West about man’s private parts being the family jewels. In Afghanistan this possessive tendency concerning women has been taken beyond the status of treasure in the non-pejorative sense (eg. to treasure the ones you love). Instead it has been distorted to become a self-loathing in which women are a great source of potential shame because of the imagined value ascribed to them as treasured objects but also the sexual repression and depravity that has resulted in Afghan society. At once women are untrustworthy like their male counterparts but also the scapegoats for a warped society where sex cannot be talked about and women are largely neither seen or heard. Any kind of women’s liberation is going to be a painful struggle in Afghanistan and will not be realized in any meaningful way until men stop oppressing women and start valuing them as equal human beings. In a country that has seen so much war, this battle will take more courage and strength than ever.