by PRAVEEN SWAMI
Kamalshah, son of Pahlawanshah, son of Said Ahmad Faqir, a resident of Laqlick, stormed into the shari’a court of the remote Afghan district of Kunnar in February 1886, demanding justice.
His wife Qalandar Bibi, Kamalshah told the qadi, or religious judge, had eloped with another villager and was pregnant with his son. But, it turned out, that wasn’t the problem he wanted dealt with.
“This woman has jewels belonging to me,” he declared, “two necklaces, one bracelet, one hundred and ninety pins and one pair of golden earrings — the price of which amounts to sixty rupees.”
“I want my things,” Kamalshah complained, “but she refuses to give them up.”
Eight years before Kamalshah appeared before the qadi of Kunnar, journalist Howard Hensman, embedded with British forces during the Afghan war of 1879, offered a somewhat different account of the culture of Afghan men.
The Afghan woman, he claimed — though he never met one — was “shut up and kept from mischief within the four walls of her master’s harem.”
The men were “particularly jealous of their women”; insults to their honour were certain to be “confronted by some buck Afghan with a knife in his hand and an oath in his mouth.”
Kamalshah’s subversion of our stereotypes of the Afghans offers a prism through which we may reflect upon the intellectual foundations of an extraordinary project that will be key to United States foreign policy in the first decades of this century: its effort to undo the seismic ruptures opened up by 9/11 by seeking a rapprochement with the global Islamist movement.
Envoys from Ennahda, the Tunisian Islamist party, met with key lawmakers and State Department officials in Washington DC in May. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also said she would welcome dialogue with those of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, long reviled as irredeemable fascists, “who wish to talk with us.” In Afghanistan, President Barack Obama’s administration is locked in a secret dialogue with the Taliban.
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(Thanks to Harsh Kapoor of SACW)