Where are the protests in solidarity with women in Afghanistan?

Woke western activists struggle to criticism Islamic regimes

Photo by Majid Korang beheshti on Unsplash

For women and girls in Afghanistan, life gets more unbearable by the day. This week it has been announced that women are forbidden from praying loudly or reciting the Quran in front of other women. In August, so-called ‘vice and virtue laws’ prohibited women from speaking or showing their faces in public. They must not be heard singing, or reading aloud, even from inside their homes. They are forbidden from looking directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage. These new restrictions come on top of existing laws that blocked girls from attending secondary school; banned women from almost every form of paid employment; prevented women from walking in public parks, traveling without a male chaperone, attending gyms or beauty salons. A strict dress code means women are covered from head to foot in thick cloth, with only a meshed slit to see through. Earlier this year, the Taliban announced the return of flogging and stoning to death as a punishment for women found guilty of adultery.

Fawzia Koofi, the first woman vice-president of the Afghan parliament who fled to the west and is now an Afghan human rights activist based in London, has said: ‘When they say women cannot speak in public as they regard women’s voices as a form of intimacy it is incredibly frightening yet the whole world acts like this is normal. There have been very few reactions or comments to what is happening and the Taliban are emboldened by this indifference.’ She is right. Much of the world has, it seems, turned a blind eye to the treatment of Afghan women.

Western activists cannot claim ignorance. Ok, so the suffering of Afghan women and girls rarely makes front page news. There are few dramatic televised images or TikTok accounts relaying images of shrouded, silent women, trapped at home; Tiktok was banned in Afghanistan in 2022 after it was deemed responsible for ‘misleading youth’. But press coverage does exist. Everyone knows what is happening. It’s just that the plight of women in Afghanistan fails to generate much outrage.

For over a year now campaigners have taken to the streets of cities around the world to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian campaigners have organised camps at universities and disrupted public lectures. The keffiyeh is a popular fashion item, Palestinian flags fly from lamposts in British towns, ‘Free Gaza’ is scrawled on the sides of buildings and emblazoned on T-shirts. But there are no flags, scarfs, camps, demonstrations, T-shirts or graffiti demanding liberation for the women and girls in Afghanistan.

The same silence greets news from Iran. This week, one incredibly brave female student stripped to her underwear and defiantly sat outside a university building in Tehran. She was protesting having earlier been physically attacked by campus security guards for not wearing a headscarf. About 10 security guards were filmed forcibly bundling the young woman into a vehicle. This is far from an isolated incident. In 2022, a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died after being detained by Iran’s so-called ‘morality police’. She had been arrested for allegedly having hair visible from underneath her headscarf. Iranian women face systemic discrimination and risk violent repression every time they leave home. 

Yet none of this rouses western activists to demonstrate even a tiny proportion of the outrage they daily enact over events in Gaza. How do we explain the difference? It’s not ignorance. And it is not that one is simply ‘worse’ than the other. The repression of women in Afghanistan and Iran pre-dates the latest conflict in the Middle East. When Mahsa Amini was murdered, there was no ‘worse’ to preoccupy protesters. 

There’s something else at play. It seems to me that the plight of women in Afghanistan and Iran fails to garner the attention of western activists for exactly the same reason that Israel does grab their interest. The woke world view assumes the existence of crude hierarchies of privilege and oppression. For all ‘intersectionality’ is supposed to offer nuance and allow for the ‘multiple oppression’ experienced by, for example, black women, it cannot move beyond the assumed ‘privilege’ of apparently ‘hyper-white’ Jews and the assumed Islamophobia experienced by muslims. According to this understanding, Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, fits readily into the category of ‘oppressor’. Gazans, by contrast, are perpetually enshrined as victims. Even when Hamas terrorists filmed themselves brutally murdering, raping and kidnapping Israeli citizens, western liberals were prepared to make excuses. 

In this context, we can forget nuance. Afghan and Iranian women are, it seems, perceived as muslims first and women second. Their Islamic nations must be protected from criticism even at the cost of overlooking the sex-based violence and oppressionmeted out to female citizens. Unfortunately for Afghan women imprisoned in their own homes, woke westerners find it easy to get outraged by the actions of Jews and seemingly impossible to criticise the oppression practiced by Islamic regimes.