Sharia Law faculty, Kabul University: Girl Power!

I got to meet the director again who called in the younger (Who did not give me a card--I'll get his name later) to translate. This is the third time I have met him and he is less intimidating now that I have gotten to know him a bit. For some reason the first time I met him I had the impression that he was a giant but now he is just a bit taller than me.

the director had concerns about the sample. He said that you can't tell about a country from taking the soil from one place. I said that sometimes you can tell a lot about a river from just one glass of the water. He said that there are many rivers in this case. I was going to point out that there is only one river in Kabul but thought it better to pass. He seems to like using metaphors. we had one go round last year about learning about Islam from a waiter versus and expert.

The young professor took us to a class and I was quite surprised to find that it was an all girls' class. Mirwais had said that last year the girls were enthusiastic about the survey while the boys last year were initially suspicious. I certain found that the girls in this third year class were not shy about giving their opinions (what Afghans are?), but that they also made rather sharp and cogent arguments. Again, I found that people gave small speeches rather than engage in a shorter give and take. I don't know if this is a broader characteristic of the culture or just something that happens in academic settings though I my sense is that it is the former. Unfortunately it was apparently not "OK" to take pictures.

One young lady said that the human rights groups are always criticizing Afghanistan, saying, for instance, that we should not kill a murderer because it is a violation of human rights. But isn't endangering the community by letting a murderer go violating the human rights of the community as well as the victim?

Another young woman made an intriguing point about the NGOs and women's rights. I am not sure that I fully got her point, but she was critical of the women's rights NGOs. She made two points. First, that by constantly talking about "women's rights" rather than human rights, they create the sense that their is some set of rights that are peculiar to women and, by being specific to women, somehow inferior to general human rights. Second, she argued that by talking about the special rights of women they undermined the family. These two points seemed to me to be somewhat contradictory but I didn't really have the chance to probe the issue very deeply.

There does seem to be a tension in the Western Intellectual world that has not really been faced straightforwardly in that we talk about multiculturalism (treating all cultures as equal) and a universal set of human rights as if those two propositions were completely compatible if not interchangeable. But what if individuals in a culture does not want the rights we classify as universal? We can sometimes dismiss the refusal or some rights as being a product of ignorance or fear, but that hardly seems a tenable answer in the case of these rather impressive young women. Indeed, the young women in the Islamic Law class had more cogent arguments and every bit as much confidence as the rather more loquacious young men in the economics department.

The younger member of the Sharia Law faculty who had been charged with shepherding us around proved to be quite talkative once we were alone. In the presence of the Department chair he had been quite deferential, not venturing to give his own opinions. When we got a chance to talk to him alone he was very interesting. One thing that struck me was that as conservative as they are he hated the Taliban. Two things he mentioned stand out.

He had a friend at an NGO. She worked in Afghanistan for a few years but as the Taliban's terrorism got more and more extreme her movements were more and more restricted. He said that near the end she would send him emails asking him to come visit her in her 'prison'. Like most of the foreigners in Afghanistan she was being picked up in a dark-windowed SUV and kept in a "guest house" with the same NGO types. There is a list of 11 restaurants they can go to. Luckily for me I am expendable and can go wherever I want.

The other thing he mentioned was a student that he had in class. Something came up where they had to give the students a couple of days off. This student was so happy because he would have time to go back to his village and fight with the Taliban for a few days, doing his duty of Jihad. The professor was shocked that he had someone in his class that thought like this and that would declare it openly.

I asked him if he was afraid of the Taliban. I said that he was a conservative Muslim with a beard and a Pashtun, so he would be safe right? He looked at me as if he were dealing with a particularly slow child……