perfidy

Shamia Rezayee, a veejay on a newly resurgent Afghani TV network, is dead. Why? They think it's because of her job.

two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.

This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.

Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.

I just finished Asne Seirstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, in which the European journalist author lived with the family of a bookseller in Afghanistan for a few months. Although the book is eye-opening for other reasons in that it is a doorway into a culture and civilization that the Americans never see intimate details of, it is positively eye-popping for its descriptions of how women are treated. In the words of Jeffrey Lebowski, "he treats objects like women, maaan!" The bookseller's first wife, tossed over for his second wife, is reduced even further to cipher status within his household, newly subordinate to the illiterate and bubbleheaded hottie from the sticks. The bookseller's youngest daughter, an intelligent girl who learned English while in exile in Pakistan tries to find some way to teach English in a nearby school while still seeing to the every bodily need of all nineteen people in her household. She is the last one to bed at night and the first one up in the morning, and she had better make sure breakfast is waiting when everyone else stirs. Her hopes fade when she is married off- to a nice enough man, to be sure, but no married woman is going to go teach English. It's makin' babies time. Throughout the book, women are treated as chattel, as ciphers, as halfway to slaves - and this in the house of a literate, urbane and worldly patriarch with modern inclinations. Though the book is ostensibly about the bookseller and his travails, and about half the book is in fact spent discussing his troubles with the Taliban, his business, and his aspirations, Seirstad clearly finds more compelling material in the lives of the women around her. And this is probably as it should be as the book ends up pitting the struggles of one man to rescue his country from the dark ages against his struggles to maintain the dark ages in his own home.

As Hamid Karzai said on September 10, 2001 when hearing of the death of Northern Alliance leader (and last hope against the Taliban) Ahmed Shah Massoud, "what an unlucky country." (If there is a prize for bitter historical irony of the century, we have probably found our winner.) I recently finished Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 as well, and the political picture of the country that emerges is one of an ancient and noble set of tribes crippled by internecine rivalries, Islamism, greed, and the distorting effects of international meddling. The CIA and Pakistani secret service took turns acting as unwitting catspaws for each other with the effect that by the time the Taliban came roaring across the plains they were driving nice new white Toyota extended-cab pickups courtesy of Langley, VA and invading areas denuded of worth and reduced to chaos courtesy of equal parts Moscow, Langley, and Islamabad. Although Coll's history is necessarily myopic, focusing as it does on the arc of the CIA's involvement in the country, I learned a lot in the process about the texture of Afghanistan's geography and ethnography and that part of Asia in general. Did you know that the name "Hindu Kush mountains" means "Hindu Killer?" Together with Sierstad's book, the picture that emerges is of a set of borders without a country; a people with a history but no common future; and a region with boundless initiative and an eye for the main chance but no constructive ideas.

A nation that has come to rely heavily on violence as a means of resolving disputes and still can't agree whether women showing their faces in public is a hanging crime or simply unseemly has a long way to go before it can get anywhere. What is especially puzzling is why this must be the case for a civilization so old, so rich, and so centrally located on ancient trade routes.

[wik] On another note, I am working on a piece on the intersection of political violence and popular music that I hope to have up sometime soon.

[alsø wik] This serious and utterly unsnarky post has also been books #11 and #12 in The Fifty Book Challenge.