Now, with the death of Farkhunda, Kabul's civil society took to the streets to reveal what the real contest has been all along: a struggle between ultraconservative Islamist mullahs and warlords, clinging not just to faith but to power, and progressive Islamic men and women intent on moving Afghanistan into the modern world. Not the secular world of the West, but a new Afghan world that would reclaim the old prewar values of a peaceful, humane, more equitable and tolerant Islam.
The commission met at the palace to discuss a draft of their findings with President Ghani. While he was away, unimaginable things had occurred in Kabul. Civil society had taken a stand and large numbers of ordinary Kabulis, perhaps even a majority, had stood with it in repudiating the ultraconservative religious and political authorities who had celebrated the murder of Farkhunda. Yet Ghani reminded the commissioners of the risks involved in disturbing the fragile balance of Afghan society -- especially with no government yet in place and bombs exploding all around. What if the presidential commission's report were to add further heat to the already simmering contest between civil society, with its interest in clean, transparent government, the rule of law, and human rights, and the deeply entrenched power of the ultra-conservative Islamist clerics? Would that provoke a violent confrontation? And in such a showdown, would the seemingly indestructible un-Islamic Islamists win?
Extreme fundamentalist mullahs have threatened the moderate Sufi inclinations of Afghans for a century. In 1929, King Amanullah banned ultraconservative clerics of the Indian Deobandi school from the country, denouncing them as "bad and evil persons" who spread foreign propaganda. But the modernizing king, an early proponent of women's rights, was forced to abdicate and the ultraconservative mullahs came back. (Currently, the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, though not fully qualified as a mullah, is Afghanistan's most famous Deobandi.)
In 1959, when King Zahir Shah authorized the unveiling of women, his prime minister, Daoud Khan, took the precaution of throwing all the ultraconservative mullahs into prison, saying he would release them if they could find a passage in the Quran requiring women to be veiled. (They couldn't.) Many years later, for unrelated reasons, Daoud overthrew the king, only to be overthrown and assassinated himself in a coup that brought communists to power. The result: little more than 20 years after King Zahir Shah came down on the side of modernity, the United States and Saudi Arabia were funding the return from exile in Pakistan of the seven ultraconservative Islamist parties of the mujahidin.
CIA Director William Casey, a conservative Catholic, believed that conservative Islamists would make ideal allies in Cold War combat against the "godless communists" of the Soviet Union. In that way, with the American urge to give the Russians their own "Vietnam," the Cold War turned hot by proxy in Afghanistan. Thirty-five years later, many of those aging former proxies of the United States still wield power as members of the Afghan government, as members of the Taliban, and even more forcefully as authorities of a deformed and punitive version of Islam that has dominated the country's political and social life throughout the American occupation.
But to many Afghans, the national shock of the murder of Farkhunda felt like a turning point. Frozan Marofi, a longtime fighter for women, wrote in the Guardian of her newfound hope for her country: "People all over Afghanistan, in Badakhshan, in Herat, in Bamyan, all are saying the killing of Farkhunda was bad. Even the Taliban have come out to say it was not a good thing." Nader Naderi, formerly a distinguished member of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, agreed. "This is a turning point for civil liberties that is real," he insisted. "It will be difficult to return to the former status quo when only self-proclaimed religious leaders held the high moral ground at the expense of justice and the constitution. If this struggle continues, the outcome will be what the country needs, to make rule of law clear and have religion understood in its place within the context of the law."
At the same time, a thousand Islamist clerics gathered at the site of Farkhunda's murder to denounce civil society and warn the Ghani government that, if it did not silence the advocates of women's human rights and the rule of law, the clerics would withdraw their support and "bad consequences" would follow. Just how bad might those bad consequences be? Islam, in Afghanistan, is represented by the Ulama, a number of elite scholars such as those President Ghani appointed to the fact-finding commission, and by a much larger group of clerics that includes many illiterate, self-appointed mullahs who may hold extreme and violent un-Islamic views yet identify themselves as Ulama. Such men dominated the meeting.
One mullah proclaimed to the gathering: "I tell Ashraf Ghani and civil society to be heedful... the gun is still in the hand of the mullah. It takes the Ulama only a fatwa to take down... this government." Another cleric called for the media to be punished for insulting the Ulama in reporting on Farkhunda's murder. If the insults continued, he warned, "women will be killed more heinously... and many people will be eliminated in a far worse way. Then, nobody will dare raise their voice... If you value your life, shut your mouths."
In the end, this meeting of the "Ulama" issued a statement that directly contradicted the view of the Islamic scholars on the presidential commission: the killing of Farkhunda was justifiable, the statement said, because the killers' "action was based on the intention of protecting the Quran and divine rights." The Ulama also commanded the government to adhere to the critical clause in the Constitution affirming that Sharia trumps all other laws. Chief executive officer Abdullah Abdullah hastened to meet with the threatening clerics. (The substance of their conversation was not revealed.)
The next day, when the commission submitted its final report, it included a conciliatory demand: that both the Ulama and civil society activists "condemn concertedly and loudly those irresponsible statements under the name of civil society or spiritual society which are aimed at inciting people to turbulence and instability."
However, the media chose to headline the commission's most important conclusion: Farkhunda was innocent. It seemed a strange lede for a story of cold-blooded murder, focused as it was on the character of the victim instead of the conduct of the killers. But this was Afghanistan, where "innocent" meant only that Farkhunda definitely had not burned a Quran. What the media did not report was the Sharia experts' explication of the essential point: that even if a woman does burn a Quran, Islamic law forbids that she be killed. Someone had decided the public would do better without that information. One of the capital's most popular television stations added its own piece of counter-factual misinformation to its nightly news, reporting a stunning fabrication: that two of the 10 fact-finding commissioners believed the murder of Farkhunda was fully justified.
A few days later, Amnesty International released a major report on the failure of the Afghan government -- the previous Karzai government -- to protect women and men in public life who were defenders of women's human rights. During the past decade, such brave women -- provincial officials, television and radio announcers, policewomen, politicians, aid workers, and advocates for women -- had been assassinated, one after another, without either investigation or comment from the Karzai government. Women who survived sometimes lost husbands or children to the assassins. Many such women had been forced to flee the country, while others continued their work, moving from house to house just a step ahead of their stalkers. Most of the dead defenders of women had been murdered by the Taliban, but others had fallen to powerful warlords and ultraconservative vigilantes, both in and out of the government.
In the 50 cases Amnesty International investigated, women under threat of death had repeatedly asked for and been denied the protection the government routinely provided to men in public life. Amnesty International concluded: "This institutionalized indifference on the part of the authorities to the threats, harassment and attacks that women human rights defenders face is a result of weak state structures, particularly within the judiciary and law enforcement and security agencies. It is reinforced by an enduring culture of impunity..."
