February 1, 2002 Candlemas
Afghanistan -- Restoring the Balance
by Lauren Raine
My father was a diplomat, which is why I graduated from an international high school in Afghanistan. The summer we left, I went with my family to a resort town outside of Kabul, Istalif, to celebrate our return to the States. While our parents ate in a fashionable restaurant, my best friend and I took a walk. Dressed in our '60s finery, we sat on a rock by a stream, gossiping. Nearby we saw a familiar sight - a group of veiled women, doing their laundry by the stream. We hushed as one ghost-like figure approached us. Her eyes obscured and her body muffled by shroud-like gray fabric, she stood before us. Carefully, she pulled back her burka, revealing a dark-eyed, teenage face. With a shy smile, she then covered herself and returned to the silent group of women. Perhaps she wanted us to know that she, also, was young and beautiful, with a life ahead of her; but a life without any of the freedoms we took for granted. I have never, since that day, forgotten my privilege.
When I lived in Afghanistan in the late '60's, it was a good time for that country. A benign and westernized monarchy opened schools to women who would become doctors, teachers, artists and intellectuals. In the cities at least, women took off the Chador, and many dressed as they pleased. During the Russian war many of the women, widowed or with husbands away at war were the sole providers for their families. With the advent of the Taliban, these women were no longer able to work, and their children starved. A woman could be put to death for speaking in private or in public. She could be put to death for revealing her feet on the street. In Kabul, where I lived, women used to professions, or the simple pleasures of going to market, having tea with friends, or buying lipstick, could no longer leave their homes without the danger of being beaten.
In the years since I have become a feminist. I pray to the Goddess to bring us back into balance. What has happened in Afghanistan, from my perspective, is almost a caricature of our world's imbalance. I want to believe the true destructiveness of dominator society is now becoming more visible, through the media's coverage of the suffering of the women of Afghanistan.
The Taliban exemplifies the extremity of patriarchal religion. This is the Old Testament, monotheistic male God. There's no room for the diversity of life and people in this paradigm. If you aren't in His club, you are right out for all of eternity. There is no birth/death/rebirth cycle here, and He does not believe in "turning the other cheek" or "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you". He is resolutely against the "moral decay" of nature, women, and the flesh. This kind of fundamentalism does not include music, art, beauty, sexual pleasure, partnership, consensus, and most importantly, women. So, what is left to make life meaningful? Devotion, and a Jihad if you're lucky. A good holy war, and the hope of reaching Paradise as reward for it all, because otherwise the joylessness of life here is hardly worth living.
In certain sects of Shiite Islam, women are not believed to have souls, any more than animals have souls. A good man who achieves Paradise is ministered to by lovely Houris, "pure" female spirits who have never been polluted by the flesh, and hence presumably are free to spend all of eternity peeling grapes and plucking lyres. Such a strange mythological inversion of a humanity that still cannot entirely exclude it's other half! But is it any stranger than a yearly celebration of a "virgin" mother, also unpolluted by the "profanity" of sexual desire, who gives birth to the savior? Or the Hasid custom of placing a sheet between the bride and groom, lest their flesh touch, of shaving the women's hair, lest they incite desire? These are the "hysterical" myths of patriarchy that do, indeed, contribute to war - "hysteria" meaning a profound fear of the feminine, the womb. This denial of life, which, like it or not, must ultimately issue from the bodies of women, is not unique to fundamentalist Islam. It can be found in the reasoning of fundamentalist Christianity, or Judaism, and religious systems that precede them. Shortly after Sept. 11th I listened to Jerry Falwell, whose rhetoric struck me as amazingly similar. Substitute "God" for Allah, and "Devil" for Satan, and I can't help but feel these guys would get along fine if they were stuck in the same train station over night.
I don't mean to sound facetious. What has happened to the women of Afghanistan is a holocaust more terrible than anything Hollywood could dream up, from The Stepford Wives to The Handmaid's Tale. There, as mythologist Joseph Campbell might say, is a myth for you. A myth that breaks humanity in two, that elevates one half to divine and the other to profane, and hence, dangerous. Within this fundamentalist archetype of a supreme male God, women, sexuality, and reproduction, the very vitality that brings life onto the Earth, is evil, and woman is the scapegoat endlessly in need of punishment and control. What has been happening in Afghanistan is a manifestation of an ancient patriarchal myth that has so long eclipsed the Goddess, from the women's prisons of Kabul, to the horrors of the European Inquisition, to the misogyny of endless Hollywood films in which beautiful young women are raped and killed.
Today, as I look at photographs of Afghanistan, the women, children, and men, I see once again the sad faces of the victims of these psychopathic gods of war. The faces of the captured Taliban soldiers fill me with pity: because most of them, after all, are young men barely out of boyhood, caught in a dogma they rarely had a chance to question or comprehend. I do not believe, in their moment of terror and loss, they call to their warrior god. I imagine, like most human beings, they call, in some recess of memory, to the mother that once held them.
I remember Faroud, and Chaista, and Soraya, and Wallid, so many young faces from my youth. They haunt me these days. I don't know if any of them are still alive, but I hope their country will ultimately come upon better times, and their suffering will somehow not be in vain. I hope the world awakens, and sees what the events of September 11th, and the destruction within Afghanistan mean on deeper levels of our mythic, spiritual, and common humanity. I pray to my own personification of deity, She Who Hears The Cries Of The World, that this is a wake up call toward restoring the balance.
Lauren Raine created the Masks of the Goddess for the 20th Annual Spiral Dance, created by the members of Reclaiming for Samhain in San Francisco, and The Goddess 2000 Project, an international project founded by Abby Willowroot that inspired community artworks and events dedicated to the Goddess throughout the world. Since then, the masks been used in ongoing ritual events by other communities.
See Lauren's article Masks and the Goddess in our fall issue.