Malala Yousafzai urges Muslim leaders to challenge policies restricting girls and women's schooling.
Summary
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women at a Pakistan summit on girls’ education in Muslim communities, stating, "The Taliban do not see women as human beings."
She criticized their policies banning Afghan girls from education and work as "gender apartheid" and un-Islamic.
Afghanistan is the only country banning education for girls beyond grade six, affecting 1.5 million girls.
Malala urged Muslim leaders to challenge these practices and advocate for girls' education globally.
She isn't wrong. Imagine not seeing half of the population as human, even though they carried you and everyone who has ever been born in the womb for 9 months and gave birth to you.
If the US had not invaded Afghanistan and done such a shitjob the Taliban would have been overthrown by now. The Taliban was highly unpopular in 2001, but thanks to the US fucking everything up, they regained more land than they had otherwise by 2017 or so.
Something about the "not human" phrasing is bothering me. I get what they're trying to convey and I don't dispute it, but it also feels inaccurate in a way that might lead us to miss important aspects of the situation.
I'm sure if you asked an Afghan man how many people live in his home, he'd include women and children in his answer. So I don't think they literally see women as a separate species.
My gut feeling is more like Afghan men don't generally believe in the concept of human rights, as opposed to separate sets of rights for men and women. Hell, they may not even believe in the Western concept of rights at all, and may think only in terms of things like religious obligations and cultural norms.
I wonder if there's a different phrasing we could use that has the same emotional impact but doesn't suggest questionable conclusions about the world view of Afghans.
The word “chattel” sometimes gets used in conversations like this one, and I think we should stop doing that. It’s a confusing word that most people don’t understand, and is often confused with “cattle” ie cows. I mean just look at this definition:
Chattel is a catch-all category of property associated with movable goods . At common law , chattel included all property other than real property . Examples include leases, animals, and money.
TBH I think “livestock” is a better word all around. It means live animal property, which is accurate. People know what it means. And it has the right negative connotations, too: associating human beings with pigs and chickens, as if they’re on the same level.
The dichotomy of the west running a literal concentration camp in Gaza and then taking the moral high ground on Afghanistan as if that is where human life is not valued is hillarious.
I would like to point out while she may be right about this, she has been very silent on whats going on in Palestinian and when she was called out on it she released a vague PR statement. She is compromised.