The article by Hirstchkind and Mahmood depicts two points: The crucial role the United States had played in creating the miserable conditions under which Afghan women were living; and secondly, a whole set of questionable assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices embedded in the notion of Islamic fundamentalism.
Another important point that was mentioned in the article was the fact that the Feminist Majority made no attempts to join the calls issued by a number of humanitarians Organizations--including the Afghan Women's Mission-to halt the bombing so that food might have been transported to the Afghans before winter set in, which played an imperative role in inequality between men and women.
Attitudes about the proper place of public religious morality in modern Islamic societies, and in particular how such morality is seen to shape and constrain women's behavior. The Taliban in many ways have become a potent symbol of all that liberal public opinion regards as grievously wrong with Islamic societies these days, proof of the intense misogyny long ascribed to Islam, and most emphatically to those movements within Islam referred to as fundamentalist.
That from the rubble left behind by the game of super power politics played out on Afghan bodies and communities, we can only identify the misogynist machinations of the Islamic fundamentalist
testifies to the power this image bears, and the force it exerts on our political imagination.
There was a statement in the article that really shock me and that was: “A Muslim woman can only be one of two things, either uncovered, and therefore liberated, or veiled, and thus still, to some degree, subordinate”. This says so much about how the society is structured in a patriarchal way that it might seem women have options but deep down they don’t have an option.
