Re: Taliban hatred for women?

The Taliban  dont hate women any more than do the imperialist bourgeoisie. It is
not an abstract question of hating women. The specific form of the oppression of
women in Afghanistan has nothing to do with hating women. To reduce a complex
political, and indeed historical issue, issue to the moralistic level of hatred
is to feed into the kind of shit butcher Bush and Blair hypocritically espouse
to.

This rubbish of separating the treatement of women under the brand of Islam
practiced by the Taliban from so called mainstream Islam is reactionary garbage.
There is no essential difference between the different flavours of Islam. In
general Islam is particularly oppressive towards women. The difference is one of
degree. This is why Salman Rushdie book is makes such interesting material. It
exposes the contradictions between Muslims living in an imperialist country such
as Britain and the practice of their religion. There is such a stark
unresolvable contradiction between the two that the entire scenario contains an
absurdity. It is this vadildity of this absurdity and the danger that it posed
to Muslim backwardness that played a role in its being anathematised by the
Iranian fucking Aytollah. I use this foure letter deliberately. As some of you
may kn ow I am not prone to swearing. But here I use it for political effect.
Lets call these mullahs, aytollahs and all the rest of the shit for what it
is --just reactionary sectarian rubbish.

I just  would like Salman Rushdie to have the courage to stand by  his book. I
beleive that among the best things that could be done is to send a copy of
Rushdie's book to every member of the Taliban in Pashtun. Perhaps too Salman
could, with all his royalties, send free copies of it to the US troops as well.
Salaman almost wants to forget about the book. His opportunist interventions,
badly advised, should be refrained from. It will not save his neck. Surely he
should have the courage of his art. His book is a case where art was
significantly involved with the political. This is how he must see his book.
Salman seeks to escape from his own art --from the very thing that he is. This
means he wants to escape from being an artist. This means he cannot develop any
further as an artist. After that his literature ceases to be literature and
collapses into apolgetics.
He should be promoting his book now more than ever. He should use his energy to
promote this book, I intentionally call it the book, rather than producing and
publishing new stuff. Instead of developing the theme of that book he retreats
from it. What artistic cowardice. Surely he published the book as a form of art
that was political. He seems to lack the conviction of his own art. When his art
was taken seriously he retreated. Surely, as with Sartre maybe, art cannot but
be political. Salman is a political figure by virtue of his art and not by
virtue of his pragmatic political interventions. Let his art speak. Let his art
speak the way Miles Davis trumpet speak. His art is inherently political. When
it is not political it is not art. When he engages in expliciti political
statements he is not politicla but banal.
Let him be the James Joyce of the Muslim community. Whether he reads these
postings I just dont know. I just hope he reads this and accepts his political
significance as an artist. His book is among the best  books he has written. He
should stand by his art --even now more than ever. Come on Salman be the
anti-heroic hero. He produces a piece of art that achieves a political status
that is in many ways unprecendented in the recent past. He then turns on his own
creation. Did James turn on Ulysses?

Even in terms of his own sanity please forward this piece to him. It may be of
some help at this level alone.

Please excuse the very hasty character of this posting.


Karl Carlile
Be free to visit the web site of the Communist Global Group at
http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/


"Louis Proyect" wrote:

In the Nov. 4, 2001 Los Angeles Times there's an
article by Barbara
Ehrenreich titled "Veiled Threat" that addresses the
question of
Taliban hatred for women.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000088146nov04.story
She speculates that because men in places like
Afghanistan suffer
from diminished economic expectations, they take it
out on women.

"I don't know, but I'm willing to start the dialogue
by risking a
speculation: Maybe part of the answer lies in the ways
that
globalization has posed a particular threat to men.
Western industry
has displaced traditional crafts--female as well as
male--and
large-scale, multinational-controlled agriculture has
downgraded the
independent farmer to the status of hired hand."



This is logical because before globalization and
colonialism when "places like Afghanistan" were so
much better off, women were treated so well.

Clint Ballinger


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