A mystery of misogyny.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Islamic fundamentalism and women rights

A feminist can take some dim comfort from the fact that the Taliban's egregious misogyny is finally considered newsworthy. It certainly wasn't high on Washington's agenda in May, for example, when President Bush congratulated the ruling Taliban for banning opium production and handed them a check for $43 million--never mind that their regime accords women a status somewhat below that of livestock.

In the weeks after September 11, however, you could find escaped Afghan women on Oprah and longtime anti-Taliban activist Mavis Leno doing the cable talk shows. CNN has shown the documentary Beneath the Veil, and even Bush has seen fit to mention the Taliban's hostility to women--although their hospitality to Osama bin Laden is still seen as the far greater crime. Women's rights may play no part in U.S. foreign policy, but we should perhaps be grateful that they have at least been important enough to deploy in the media mobilization for war.

On the analytical front, though, the neglect of Taliban misogyny--and beyond that, Islamic fundamentalist misogyny in general--remains almost total. If the extreme segregation and oppression of women does not stem from the Koran, as non-fundamentalist Muslims insist, if it is, in fact, something new, then why should it have emerged when it did, toward the end of the twentieth century? Liberal and leftwing commentators have done a thorough job of explaining why the fundamentalists hate America, but no one has bothered to figure out why they hate women.

And "hate" is the operative verb here. Fundamentalists may claim that the sequestration and covering of women serves to "protect" the weaker, more rape-prone sex. But the protection argument hardly applies to the fundamentalist groups in Pakistan and Kashmir that specialize in throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women. There's a difference between "protection" and a protection racket.

The mystery of fundamentalist misogyny deepens when you consider that the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist Third World movements of forty or fifty years ago were, for the most part, at least officially committed to women's rights. Women participated in Mao's Long March; they fought in the Algerian revolution and in the guerrilla armies of Mozambique, Angola, and El Salvador. The ideologies of these movements were inclusive of women and open, theoretically anyway, to the idea of equality. Osama bin Laden is, of course, hardly a suitable heir to the Third World liberation...