Veiled Courage by Cheryl Benard

Author:Cheryl Benard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767913065
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2002-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

After talking to these women, the Taliban’s approach begins to make a lot more sense. Indeed, if their goal was to keep women down, then a total ban on educating them was definitely the way to go. Given even the tiniest little serving of education, just a few months in a literacy class and some friendly encouragement, these refugee women came leaping out of the starting gate like pent-up racehorses.

These are women who are dealing with multiple and massive burdens. They have lost everything they owned, including their home. Most are dealing with severe grief and the aftereffects of shock and terror. They have been in war zones, been shot at, been bombed, been terrorized by one oppressive local and national power holder after another. Now they are refugees, eking out a miserable existence in some desolate camp or slum, coughing, freezing, crowded, unwanted. But listen to the lightness of their words. Consider how quickly they have arrived at powerful, sophisticated insights, as reflected in the statement of this recently literate woman: “For most of my life, I only heard one opinion. Now I see that there can be many opinions, and if I can hear what they are, then I can consider them and ultimately form my own.”

Perhaps most amazing, consider the ease with which these women have shaken off the effects of a lifetime of demeaning messages concerning their gender, to embrace a new and quite radical vision of themselves. Obviously such thoughts preceded the confident messages of their literacy teacher and have just been waiting to receive articulation and support. It took a massive and concerted effort to keep women like these “quiet in the corner of their house,” a coordinated system of injustice and forbidden opportunities. If just a tiny crack in that system can elicit these kinds of reactions, imagine what a level playing field would do for them.

And the fundamentalists appear to be fully aware of that. After all, if a group is genuinely inferior and incapable, you don’t need a lot of threats and restrictions to keep them in their place—they’ll stay there quite naturally. A useful political rule of thumb is this: The more force that is required to maintain a certain order, the more unfair and unnatural that order is.

If I were a fundamentalist, I’d be scared of these women, too—of their intelligence, their energy and their impulse to stand by each other.

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