Why does the image of barbarism in the case of the Taliban receive greater urgency and instil more palpable outrage than the scandalous happenings in Saudi Arabia, for example?
THE flogging of a young girl in Swat by the so-called good Taliban has outraged civil society in Pakistan and elsewhere. However, only last month, a 75-year-old Arab widow was reportedly handed a similar punishment by a Saudi court.
Khamisa Sawadi, a Syrian who was married to a Saudi, was sentenced to 40 lashes for ‘mingling’ with two young men who were not her immediate relatives.
The two men, including one who was Mrs Sawadi’s late husband’s nephew, were evidently bringing her bread. They were also found guilty and sentenced to prison terms and lashes.
Why do we look the other way instead of confronting our double standards? Why does the image of barbarism in the case of the Taliban receive greater urgency and instil more palpable outrage than the scandalous happenings in Saudi Arabia, for example? Talibanisation is a feared ideology and that is how it should be. But variants of Talibanisation elsewhere have failed to invoke matching collective outrage, often not even fetching an intellectual frown. Why?
Both incidents depict an ugly relic of feudalism that stalks Asia and beyond, never mind that we are in the 21st century. From the pronounced and institutionalised gender bias of Korean and Japanese societies to the brazen subjugation of women in the Islamic world across West Asia it has been an arbitrary and unequal relationship.
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