If womens boxing becomes an Olympic sport in 2012, the Afghan women’s boxing team is set to become the new feel good story, the Jamaican bobsled team if you will.
These women have a lot of heart, just to train, given restrictions on women even in post-Taliban Afghanistan:
The training is sponsored by a peace group who want to give women more self-respect, and reclaim boxing as a sport in a country scarred by conflict – making martial arts constructive and not destructive. They call it “fighting for peace”. Between training sessions the boxers sit down and discuss non-violent approaches to conflict resolution.
The NGO backing the project, Co-operation for Peace and Unity, is headed by Kanishka Nawabi. He says they are teaching women to be confident and regain self-respect in a male-dominated society. [Link]
Of course, there are some men who will be threatened for precisely that reason – they don’t women playing sports, especially not violent ones, and they definitely don’t want them to become to assertive. This is why it’s a subversive action. After all, this is what is happening to women in regular schools:
In the southern Afghan province of Helmand, the Taliban is waging war not only on foreign and Afghan troops, but on education. Of 224 schools that opened after the Taliban fell, at least 90 have been forced to close because of threats and attack — especially schools that teach girls. [Link]
and the girls from the Kabul Beauty School have been threatened with death for defaming the country (not because of their beautician work but because of the other things the book says about them).
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p>Click on the image below to go to the video newsclip. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to embed it, but the video is fun, enlightening and short.
PS- They were also on the run, it’s not like they had enough time to gather themselves let alone train women in fighting.
I was not comparing them. I was just pointing out the urge to dichotomise between religious extremists and female empowerment through this method. That it should not be seen as being on oppisite ends.
I was not comparing them. I was just pointing out the urge to dichotomise between religious extremists and female empowerment through this method. That it should not be seen as being on oppisite ends.
But you said:
The idea that the Taliban would be against women fighting because they are women is stupid. They probably would want them fighting… on their side of course.
You are most definitely comparing these women taking up a sport to women as soldiers for the Taliban. It was not at all “stupid” for anyone, looking at what empirical evidence (not what the Taliban could/would do sometime in the future) shows what the Taliban were like toward women, that the Taliban would deplore the fact that these women were taking up boxing as a sport.
I was just pointing out the urge to dichotomise between religious extremists and female empowerment through this method. When you’re talking about the religious extremism of the Taliban than to me, it makes sense to dichotomize. I’m pretty sure that any religious fundamentalism only will end up oppressing women anyways.
So I read the articles — it doesn’t say anything about the background of these women except they come from all parts of Afghanistan and are not just Pashtuns (despite my stupidity, I think that’s another reason the Taliban would more than likely hate what these women boxers)— but I wish I knew something about their socioeconomic background, their education levels. If these women didn’t have a background that was uppermiddleclass urban Afghanistan, than it’s unlikely that they would have met any women pursuing sports, at least from my understanding of what afghanistani culture was like, even pre-Taliban. This would be a pretty “progressive” thing for girls in my small town in Kerala to do. I’m always trying to encourage my aunts, who are gaining weight in India, to go to the gym and so far I’m hearing from them that it’s still pretty uncommon for women to go to the gym in Kerala – and my aunts are generally upper middle class.
I think that at least in the case of the taliban, the ‘urge’ is on pretty solid empirical grounds.