Liberalism is Unneeded for Women’s Rights
By: Saffiyah
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
Date: August 23, 2021
Recently, Western media outlets have been publishing great quantities of creative fiction in the form of news on the Taliban and their treatment of women and girls. Their lies have ranged from the Taliban forcing 10-year-olds into sexual slavery to them simply killing a woman upon her refusal to cook them food.
The authors provide no evidence for the abovementioned in the same way others like them can provide no evidence for the ideology they fear for in Afghanistan — liberalism. When western accusers are not blatantly lying, ‘women’s rights violations’ generally refer to women’s rights as understood through a liberal lense. Despite numerous Taliban reassurances of women’s rights being protected within an Islamic framework, widely-read western media outlets not only publish malicious lies but also portray this caveat (“within an Islamic framework”) as an indication that women’s rights will be violated. This is because they argue from the liberal premise that the Shariah is something repressive.
Such is the arrogance of the liberal that he cares little to prove his premises and liberalism-rooted judgements. He does not prove why his ideological framework is superior to that of the Shariah. None of them explain or prove why women’s rights as understood through a liberal framework are more correct, good, or are more moral than women’s rights as understood through an Islamic framework. And they cannot.
Liberalism has no objective morality to provide humankind. Its morality is constantly shifting as per the white man’s preferences. Neither is liberalism the social or cultural norm of Afghanistan as it is of the West. Yet anything incompatible with liberalism in a land far from their own (and which they also incidentally ravaged), causes westerners to become hysterical and robotically classify it an abuse or violation of someone’s rights, as though God has appointed them the global judge of who must be given which rights. Their behaviour is like that of a colonial overlord who demands his subjects’ obedience without regarding it necessary to offer any convincing explanation.
Liberals must explain more than they question. They must explain and prove the liberal presuppositions lying in their interrogations and accusations. Alongside asking, for example, why a Muslim woman must be legally obliged to wear hijab in an Islamic state, they too must explain why she should have the freedom not to. Rarely will one hear a sound response detached from liberal emotionalism and empty of pre-built assumptions that liberal principles are unquestionable and therefore in need of no proof. In fact, most of these people know little about the feeble starting principles upon which liberalism is built, may not even identify as liberal but continue to harass Afghan Muslim society on the basis of values taken directly from liberalism.
What is required of factually deceptive liberal criticisms by westerners who cared nothing for the lives of Afghan women during a two-decade-long imperialistic occupation (but whose sympathies have suddenly awakened) is that they must include in them not only explanations and proofs of why the liberal moral framework is true and should be preferred over the Islamic framework but also justifications for their hypocritical solidarity. For example, why did the hijab ban of a liberal French state not solicit as great an outcry from the liberal world compared to Shariah dress laws that are in conformity with the culture and religion of the people bound to them? Why does a liberal state that prevents hijab-wearing girls from education not induce as great a sympathy in them compared to false reports of Taliban preventing girls from education?
When they are not lying about women’s rights violations by the Taliban, when they are truly critiquing women’s rights under Shariah, they ought to unpack their liberal presuppositions first and then prove them as true, moral and worthy of adopting by a non-western, non-liberal Muslim Afghanistan. Otherwise, they are simply assuming the form of preachers, of ideologues, before the Taliban: preaching the religion of liberalism, but not proving it.