Re: Taliban hatred for women?

At 10/11/2001 13:45, Rene Barendse wrote:

 > Yes that all agrees perfectly with the theory and sounds very nice and
 > convincing but there's sadly not a shred of evidence that women in
 > pre-nineteenth Afghanistan were well treated ... `tribal' women yes - but in
 > the city ?


Wonderful stuff as usual. Let us not forget that in the 12th century the 3 
biggest cities in the world were Peking, Herat and Baghdad, and of these 
Herat was possibly the largest with at least a million citizens, almost 
certainly the most productive, technically advanced and 
highly-commercialised, and the lynchpin of the Silk Route which itself was 
the axle around which the entire medieval world-system revolved, uniting 
the entire Eurasian landmass from Dundee to Peking. People do not 
understand the true history of Afghanistan. It was the most prosperous part 
of the Persian empire, until Genghis Khan turned up.

Mark