When someone is described as "having his voice heard," it means he is influential or powerful. The voice is a tool of power and empowerment, and because it is so, those who object or make demands "raise their voices." If their demands are not met, they raise their voices even higher, eventually beginning to scream.
It is no coincidence that the Arabic term for "voting" means "revealing a voice" (tasweet), because, through their voices, citizens declare the choice they have made for their lives and the world around them. In turn, the first thing newborns do is make sound; we thereby begin our lives and let others know that we are alive through our voices.
Historically, the voice remained, throughout the many millennia in which culture was oral, the medium of knowledge and the bridge through which humanity accessed everything they learned. Beyond the basic functions played by speaking and singing, some see the human voice as the first musical instrument in the history of music.
Others add that sound changes and is changed, and that it, like light, is known for having a particular speed. "The speed of light" and "the speed of sound" are used as benchmark measurements, while darkness and silence lack movement, and by extension, have no speed.
In response to all of this influence, the silencer emerged - a weapon that mutes its own sound temporarily to permanently silence the voices of its victims. Silencers prevent voices from asserting, protesting, screaming, sharing their narrative, and singing, treating them, in defiance of nature, like something that can be eradicated.
In Afghanistan, the silencer is a political and cultural system, and it is, as such, targeting the women’s voices. A woman’s voice should not be heard in public spaces because, according to recent reports, it is seductive and alluring, and to avert strife and chaos, seduction and allure must be silenced.
Before silencing their voices, the silencer had already covered women's hair, faces, and bodies. It prohibited them from working, traveling without a male guardian, and accessing parks, amusement centers, sports clubs, and public baths. To prevent them from going to beauty salons, it shut those salons down.
While "educating women" was a slogan of the early attempts to give rise to a renaissance in the Islamic world, Afghanistan has become the only country in the world that bans girls from pursuing their studies beyond primary school. As the authorities in Kabul boasted of having destroyed 21,000 musical instruments in a single year, UNESCO announced that 1.4 million Afghan girls had been denied an education.
This is a war on women in every sense of the word. Because this is the case, an entire country has been turned into a camp for torturing women and turning them into helpless corpses. However, if wars are waged to kill the enemy and turn them into corpses, what is happening here, through successive belligerent measures, is that the corpse is being mutilated and stabbed repeatedly. Mere killing does not quench their thirst for revenge nor suffice to liberate these fearful, hateful men from their pathological fear of women and their even more pathological hatred for them.
However, while Afghanistan is at the forefront of the war on women, it is not the only other party to the conflict. Popular fatwas, both the televised and non-televised, have not found themes that rival those which they have identified in women, their bodies, and questions related to family, sex, and marriage.
As has become widely known, a draft law in Iraq would make it legal to marry minors. It is being deliberated at a time when "anti-imperialism" hinders any mention of Khomeini's book "Tahrir al-Wasilah" (Exegesis of the Means of Salvation) - which is composed of collection of his fatwas, including one in which he permits men to engage in "every enjoyment" - to say nothing about warning against these "teachings" and disparaging them.
Nonetheless, Afghanistan presents a unique test to popular theories of national liberation, especially since it freed itself from the Americans in the summer of 2021, to broad fanfare. Afghanistan provides a stark example of abstract principles disappointing after they are put into practice. The worst thing that can happen to principles is for them to remain mere principles that are never grounded in reality and facts that validate them. That is why we find ourselves in situations that the simple-minded had not expected, like independence and liberation, both virtuous principles, being confronted with their victories, which go against every virtue.
This country was born, and remained, decolonized. That is, Afghanistan was among the few countries in the world that had never been colonized. It might have been the most isolated country on the planet, and the most cordoned off from "contamination" by Westerners. In recent decades, the Afghans, through their "Mujahideen" and then the Taliban, managed to repel two "white" incursions by the world's two most powerful military powers: the former Soviet Union and the United States.
The Taliban's ongoing animosity for the latter led it, according to numerous journalistic reports, to go so far as to allow Al-Qaeda to reestablish its military presence in Kabul. Meanwhile, Russia and China now enjoy good relations with Afghanistan that are not paralleled by those of any major Western country. However, this country, which deserves the title of the world's bride of liberation, is busy waging a war on women- one whose medieval label is an insult to the Middle Ages.
As for women, regardless of all the noise it is popular to make about colonialism and decolonization, theirs remains among the most noble of the causes in our contemporary world, if not the most noble of all.
