The next day, however, when Niazi showed up at Farkhunda's burial, mourners asked him to leave. Within days, the police department dismissed its spokesman and, after the Deputy Minister of Culture and Information appeared on television to defend her views, she, too, was sacked. This time, it seemed that the threat of an Islamist uprising in Kabul, a menace that had intimidated government officials for a decade, had hit a wall. This time, the uprising turned out to be on the other side.
Facts and Memory
President Ghani had asked the commission he appointed to consider the murder of Farkhunda from three perspectives: Islamic Sharia law, Afghan law, and Afghan society. The commission itself included three eminent Sharia scholars who instructed their colleagues on the difference between Islam and its Afghan extremist distortions. Under Sharia, they said, a man who repudiates Islam by burning a Quran should be imprisoned for three days and offered a chance each day to repent. If he has not by then returned to the faith, he should be executed. A woman who commits the same crime should also be jailed and offered a similar chance to change her mind. If she refuses, she should not be put to death. Instead, she should be held in prison indefinitely. It followed that those who killed Farkhunda must be held accountable not only because she was innocent of the offense alleged against her, but also because to take her life in the belief that she had burned a Quran was itself a violation of Islamic law.
The question of Afghan law required less erudition. Murder is murder. The police had found no mitigating circumstances at all: no physical evidence of a Quran burning, no witnesses to such an event, no photos, nothing. Working from photographs and tips from citizens, the police quickly detained most of the principal instigators and assailants, and more than a dozen negligent policemen who stood by and watched the murder unfold. Within 10 days they had arrested almost 50 people. But at least four of the killers were still at large. They were known to be members of a popular body-building club sponsored by a prominent and influential man. This being Afghanistan, such simple facts immediately raised the question of whether the offenders would ever be "found," or if found charged, or if charged prosecuted, or if prosecuted convicted, or if convicted sent to prison, or if imprisoned actually kept behind bars for the duration of their sentences. The previous Afghan president Hamid Karzai had a habit of ignoring crimes against women and pardoning men inconveniently charged with committing them. Legal procedures under the new president had yet to be tested.
To place this murder in the context of Afghan society was the hardest task the presidential commission faced. For even after 35 years of war and brutality, few could recall a public event that had elicited as much grief -- as much shame among men, as much anger and fear among women -- as this enthusiastic murder. The victim had been a devout Islamic woman, beyond reproach. Her killers were not bad men, neither criminals nor mercenaries nor drug addicts nor foreign thugs, but ordinary Afghan citizens, as were the thousands who stood by and looked on. Across the country, men and women watched the murder on Facebook and wept. Men and women alike said they could not sleep afterwards, that they had to struggle to hold themselves together, and repeatedly broke down in tears. Few, it seemed, could talk about anything else. In Kabul, young women students left the university to stay at home. Women of any age were scarce on the city's streets. People of all social ranks kept their children and their friends close. They asked themselves a hard question: Is this who we have become?
The Afghan historian and political commentator Helena Malikyar had the answer: yes. In an article for Al Jazeera, she recalled Afghanistan before the long wars: a poor, underdeveloped country to be sure, but characterized by dignity, a code of honor, and an "Islam, heavily influenced by Sufi culture, [that] was moderate and tolerant of the ‘other.'"
"Above all," she wrote, "the pre-war Afghan leadership always maintained moral authority and used it to implement the rule of law and reforms." Three decades of war had changed all that, codifying a culture of violence that was passed from one generation to the next. She summed up the disaster of twenty-first-century Afghanistan this way: "Since the U.S.-led international intervention of 2001, strongmen have thrived tremendously, having become financially rich and politically powerful. Using force and brutality, therefore, pays off. Crime is rampant and goes mostly unpunished. Corruption among the police, prosecutors, and judges has emboldened criminals, and citizens have little faith in the rule of law. The lines between morality and immoral behavior, lawful and illegal acts, and righteous and sinful deeds have blurred to the point that most people are not even aware of their wrongdoings."
It would be nice to believe that the historian exaggerated, but the clerics and the public officials who reflexively praised the murderous mob illustrated her point perfectly. So, too, did a confused and divided public. Was beating a woman to death in the street the right thing to do? Or not? A male parliamentarian from Herat made a predictable point, if further proof were needed. Farkhunda, he said, should never have gone to the shrine in the first place.
The Collective Crisis of Kabul
Even before the murder, Kabulis were facing a collective identity crisis. It seemed as if they no longer recognized themselves. Over the previous decade, the city had almost tripled in size. It now teemed with displaced people driven into the capital by never-ending combat in the countryside, as well as refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran with new beliefs and behaviors. They brought music and violence from Pakistan, makeup and religiosity from Iran. Television boomed. Especially popular with the non-literate public, it drew viewers in to alluring imported lifestyles: the sexy song-and-dance sagas of Bollywood, the overheated family dramas of Turkish soaps, and the endless high-tech violence of American films.
The city itself had been brutally transformed by "developers" laundering excess cash skimmed from the country's flourishing narco trade or copped from foreign-aid projects or delivered by the CIA for secret schemes. Until recent years, Kabul had been a collection of distinctive districts differentiated by style and function. In many neighborhoods, high walls had concealed traditional low-lying adobe houses and grass-carpeted gardens of flowering almond and apricot trees. Now, these remnants of that old city are dwarfed by immense, garish, colonnaded Pakistani palaces and unfinished Persian-Gulf-style office towers made of glass and wrapped in tattered green tarpaulins (their owners presumably having skipped to Dubai when the aid caravan left town as the international contingent of troops began to draw down). Afghans old enough to remember, like novelist Rahnaward Zaryab, see this new foreign city half-built upon the rubble of the old and mourn the burial of Afghan culture itself.
Many foreign visitors and journalists new to Kabul mistake this development for "progress." That's how they commonly describe it in official reports and in the international media. Yet they have only to look around at this disorienting urban chaos to note, as Afghans do, that all those billions of dollars in corrupted foreign aid scarcely touched the city's poor. Thousands of small boys and girls, who should be in school, still sell phone cards and other items in the streets; old men still push their heavily laden delivery carts amid the traffic, and shabby laborers still wait near the Haji Yacub Mosque for the offer of a day's work. In the midst of ostentatious ill-gotten affluence, the poor represent the country's deepest, saddest, most permanent reality. They are timeless reminders to a people who no longer seem to remember who they were or wished to become.
