babble home
rabble.ca - news for the rest of us
today's active topics


Post New Topic  Post A Reply
FAQ | Forum Home
  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» babble   » current events   » international news and politics   » Afghan presidential candidate attacked for Challening Islam

Email this thread to someone!    
Author Topic: Afghan presidential candidate attacked for Challening Islam
Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 02 October 2004 05:55 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
A most unlikely candidate for Afghanistan

quote:
Several weeks ago, speaking before a group of women, Pedram, a dapper poet, journalist, philosopher and intellectual, said that Islamic scholars should consider whether a man could truly deliver justice to multiple spouses, although Islam ostensibly permits it.
.
He also said that women should have more rights for divorce.
.
The conservative chief justice of the country's Supreme Court got wind of Pedram's remarks, summoned the tape of the discussion, and decided, in committee, that Pedram should be disqualified from the ballot for having dared to challenge Islam.
.
Two letters to that effect were sent to the Joint Electoral Management Board, which has sole authority to remove a candidate. The board finally politely responded to the court that, with all due respect, Pedram would stay on the ballot.
.
Even before the contretemps, Pedram in some ways seemed an unlikely presidential candidate. He has never held political office and, in a field crowded with former fighters, or mujahedeen, he has never wielded any weapon more powerful than his pen.
.
Yet he argues that he is exactly the right figure for the post-cold-war politics - free of both the Communists and the fundamentalists who rose to fight them - that now needs to evolve in Afghanistan.
.
He has spent much of his life resisting, with the written and spoken word, both extremes. During the Soviet occupation, he went into internal exile in the territory of the rebel leader Ahmad Shah Massoud so he could continue to speak and write freely. Under the Taliban, he fled north, to the territory of the Northern Alliance, and then eventually to France, where he studied Islamic theology.
.
His views on women, he says, were influenced in part by the history of the feminist movement in France. And he says his comments at the women's forum were simply meant to generate a discussion.
.
The Koran says that a man can have multiple wives, provided he can give justice to all of them. Pedram said he simply wanted a debate on whether it was truly possible to provide uniform justice.
.
You can divide food, you can divide clothes, he says, "but how can you divide the love or the honesty or the friendship among them?" Inevitably, he said, the younger, more beautiful wife would win more of those spoils. (Pedram, who is 42, for the record, does not have even one wife.)
.
Having survived the challenge to his candidacy, Pedram has continued to speak out on the rights of women. There are Islamic countries where multiple marriages are illegal, he notes. Even in Afghanistan in the 1920s, under King Amanullah Khan, a group of Islamic scholars agreed that it was forbidden to have more than one wife, he said.
.
Amanullah was ultimately deposed for being too much of a modernizer; among other things, he said women did not need to wear the veil.
.
Now, Pedram argues, things should be different.
.
"This is the 21st century," he said. "The fundamentalists want that we should not mention anything about women's rights. It is not good to go back in time and not talk about these things. Women are beaten in Afghanistan, there is tension against them, their rights are violated. These are issues we cannot ignore."
.
For all his efforts to push what amounts to a Western, liberal agenda for Afghan women, Pedram shares something in common with his fundamentalist opponents. He wants relations with the United States, but not in the current form. On the campaign trail, he has been a critic of the abuses in American prisons, and called for a set time for the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The soldiers of the American-led coalition are seen as "strangers," he says.
.
He is unsparing in his opinion of President Hamid Karzai, who is expected to win the election, in part because of informal American support. "The people of Afghanistan think Bush and his representatives in Afghanistan have put someone as their puppet, their servant, as the head of state," Pedram said.
.
He is not shy about where his sentiments lie in America's election as well.
.
He believes Bush's policies are doing as much to create new terrorists as to end terrorism. He says that he hopes the American people will select a leader who can "rebuild the destroyed relations with Islamic and non-Islamic countries."
.
Many of Pedram's campaign appearances have been at schools and universities, and he has a clear following among youth, as well as the educated Dari-speaking elite. He favors a federal system that would devolve more power to the regions, but denies accusations that he is a Tajik nationalist. He opposes the domination of any ethnic group in Afghanistan, he says, and that would include the majority Pashtuns.
.
He was born in a small village in Badakshan Province, not far from the border with Tajikistan. His family cultivated its land, but was also full of poets and writers. One grandfather was a judge, the other a politician.
.
After secondary school he went to Kabul University to study literature. He eventually made his way to Iran, where he studied logic and philosophy. He returned to Kabul after the fall of the Communist government, and ran a publication.
.
He was in Pul-i-Khumri when the Taliban retook the city in 1998. In an article written in 2000, he recounted watching from a hideout as the Taliban burned thousands of books from the Hakim Nasser Khosrow Balkhi Cultural Center in the main public square.
.
Referring to the Talib leader, he wrote, "It was as if Genghis Khan, disguised as Mullah Omar, had entered the city with his army to repeat the most tragic event of our history." That event was the Mongol sacking of the mosque and library in Bukhara.
.
The one common trait among the three tyrannies that have dominated Afghan society - Mongol, Communist and Talib - was their hatred for books, he wrote.
.
He returned from France last spring, and immediately began his political career. He does not care if he actually becomes president, he said. "Whether I win is not very important," he said. "I want to create a new way of thinking."
.
The New York Times KABUL Abdul Latif Pedram is the first of 18 candidates listed on the ballot for Afghanistan's presidential election, to be held Oct. 9. He also was nearly the first one pushed off of it.

Several weeks ago, speaking before a group of women, Pedram, a dapper poet, journalist, philosopher and intellectual, said that Islamic scholars should consider whether a man could truly deliver justice to multiple spouses, although Islam ostensibly permits it.

He also said that women should have more rights for divorce.

The conservative chief justice of the country's Supreme Court got wind of Pedram's remarks, summoned the tape of the discussion, and decided, in committee, that Pedram should be disqualified from the ballot for having dared to challenge Islam.


[ 02 October 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
NDP Newbie
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5089

posted 02 October 2004 04:37 PM      Profile for NDP Newbie     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Why the fuck are we in Afghanistan again?
From: Cornwall, ON | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged

All times are Pacific Time  

Post New Topic  Post A Reply Close Topic    Move Topic    Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
Hop To:

Contact Us | rabble.ca | Policy Statement

Copyright 2001-2008 rabble.ca