Women are not allowed to work outside the home according to the Quran, there are exceptions but this is not generally allowed.[1]
Anand Gopal is very anti-US so he seems to be sugar coating things a bit.
[1]https://islamqa.info/en/answers/106815/guidelines-on-women-w...
> Pashtun villages enforce a rigid gender segregation, confining women to the home in order to preserve the family’s honor.
Gender segregation is currently practiced in many Islamic countries (Saudi Arabia, Iraq to give some examples)..
It doesn't feel right to justify Sharia law by saying "oh, but under tribal law women are just property". Both are too old fashioned and should be discarded or amended.
While I'm not supporting Sharia in any way, I support its amendment rather than complete abandonment, because a) it's easier and allows an iterative and a more acceptable way forward for its practitioners, b) It's supposed to evolve with times, anyway.
I remember talking with a religion teacher that one of the most prominent Sharia law books start with "These laws are made for this era. Modernize and change them when times change".
I think it's too inconvenient to preserve that page for some people.
Islam is no different from the other Abrahamic religions. It is the culture of organized Islam that is uniquely violent, conservative, and extreme in its views today.
But please, DYOR.
You can't really separate the religion from its culture is what I'm saying. If you go to into a cave and practice your own pure form of Islam, that is commendable, but has no impact on the rest of the world and thus isn't worthy of discussion.
But it is. For one, it claims its book, the Quran, is the literal word of god. This makes wiggling out of the (many) nasty bits much harder.
The more common interpretation of that verse and the ones sourouding it is about prefering to pray at home instead of going to the mosque. And when going to the mosque to not go in "revealing" clothes/fashion that would attract perverted men's attention.
Here's another website interpretation. https://recitequran.com/tafsir/en.ibn-kathir/33:33
If by extremist you mean unpopular that's not true.[3]
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Al-Munajjid
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country#:~:text=Mos....
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_labor_force_in_the_Mu...
Based on my limited experience with human people is that any position that relies on the individual acting in good faith and not being corrupt will immediately attract people who are unbelievably corruptable.
So that's probably not great long term.
Subsequently, I don't know if it's me being paranoid, a new spin being allowed, or just seeing behind the actual veil now, but I've been seeing more "maybe the taliban aren't so bad" stories lately. Interesting.
Well… a dictatorship works too if the leader is above corruption. The reality is that this is not usually the case.
That's weird. The last newspiece I read about the Taliban is how female suicide is spiking.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-set...
What weird kind of revisionist news feed are you following?
This is of course a different spin from 20 years ago when it was "Lets deliver democracy and beer, America, Fuck Yeah!", but it's similar.
The issue is human rights and those who need it. People who do not believe in religion, women who want equal freedoms as men, lgbt people who don't want to be executed, etc.
Theocracies like any authoritarian dictatorship can "work" in providing the basic needs of it's devoted citizens.
The common law could learn a lot from Sharia law, just not the punishments. (Although even those harsh punishments are rather similar to common law punishments of not long ago.) Want a trial in your own language? Want a codified standard of proof for specific crimes? You won't get those under the common law. You would in Sharia.
If you're curious to compare and live in the UK, just pop into your local Sharia court. Between 30-85 such courts are estimated to exist in Britain. They generally call themselves "councils" rather than courts but sometimes the mask slips:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/applying-sharia-l...
>Common misconceptions around sharia councils often perpetuate owing to the use of incorrect terms such as referring to them as ‘courts’ rather than councils or to their members as ‘judges’. These terms are used both in media articles but also on occasion by the sharia councils themselves.
"Article 107: A person requesting the oath of his adversary must precisely specify the events concerning which he wishes said adversary take an oath. The court shall prepare the formula of the oath as prescribed by the Shari'ah."
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"To say that a society is well-ordered conveys three things: first (and implied by the idea of publicly recognized conception of justice), it is a society in which everyone accepts, and knows that everyone else accepts, the very same principles of justice; and second (implied by the idea of the effective regulation of such conception), its basic structure— that is, its main political and social institutions and how they fit together as one system of cooperation—is publicly known, or with good reason believed, to satisfy these principles. And third, its citizens have a normally effective sense of justice and so they generally comply with society’s basic institutions, which they regard as just. In such a society the publicly recognized conception of justice establishes a shared point of view from which citizens’ claim on society can be adjudicated.
"This is a highly idealized concept. Yet any conception of justice that cannot well order a constitutional democracy is inadequate as a democratic conception."
Oh, so if I show up in a random Sharia court in Saudi Arabia they will switch the entire court proceeding to Swedish will they?
Whataboutisms do not change the validity of such claim. I don't know what point you thought you were making.
As I posted in another reply, female suicide is spiking in Afghanistan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/28/despair-is-set...
If women are Afghanistan's canary, the country seems to be spiraling down a shit sink.
They ARE sidelined. The few schools for them ARE closing. Their already limited means of feeding themselves ARE becoming more and more limited.
There are some protesters and advocates, mostly in urban centers. These woman do take a lot of risk, are cracked on, get tortured.
The Western media missed this story. Part of the reason was that the war-torn
countryside had been difficult—though not impossible—for foreign reporters to
access, so the scale of the crimes committed by U.S. forces and their allies
went undocumented.
Even if you're a non-US national living in a completely separate, supposedly "allied" country.
The most prominent example of course is Julian Assange.
The US for example cares and are ashamed of the war crimes you speak of.
The Taliban CELEBRATE their war crimes, beheadings, lynchings of women.
Maybe in words, but not really in deeds/actions.
The US quite literally goes out of it's way to suppress any info about war misdeeds. Which of course directly enables those misdeeds and similar to continue.
Along those lines, the Guantanamo Bay facility is still operating to this day. All that seemed to do was enable torture and related activities (crimes?) in some weird finger pointing / blame shifting exercise.
“Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
Which makes i pretty clear how those things have quite hard limits to their applicability.
"Much of the press saw U.S. troops as defending a pro-Western populace against a deeply unpopular Taliban insurgency. But Blue quickly realized that, in the insurgent heartlands, which lie in rural areas, the story was much more nuanced. To begin with, U.S.-occupied Afghanistan had been a divided realm; Afghans living in areas of relative calm tended to oppose the Taliban, but those living in war-racked regions often saw the Taliban as a better alternative to the corrupt U.S.-backed government. The Western media missed this story."
Is there an example of such a story (that describes near universal support for the US backed Afghan government and ignores the attitudes of rural areas) from any of the newspapers he mentions (WSJ, New York Times, Washington Post)?
I tried searching for "NYTimes rural Afghanistan 2019" and this is what I got:
"As American diplomats push for a peace deal with the Taliban to end the 17-year war, a strong voice of protest, largely coming from urban centers, has been cautioning against a rushed deal that could endanger some of the gains of past years. Those include women’s right to work and education, as well as an independent news media.
On the other hand, however, is the nearly half of the country that is caught between the two sides of the seesawing conflict. The constant fighting has deprived these rural Afghans of most of the improvements — schools and institutions — at the center of concerns over peace negotiations. And the voices of those Afghans are notably underrepresented in the debate."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi
Bacha bazi is the systematic rape and abuse of young boys by Afghan men. The Taliban banned it and killed rapists when they found them. This was one source of the Taliban's initial popularity. The US hired child rapists to be Afghan army and police commanders. When they engaged in bacha bazi, US troops were told not to interferee. Numerous US soldiers were discharged or relieved for beating Afghan "allies" who kept little boys as sex slaves. Some boys were even raped on US military bases. This is all documented on the Wiki article and has been common knowledge among those who care to know for more than a decade.