I am thinking about Farkhunda. You may have read about her six years ago and felt outrage at the Afghan men who killed her. All that represents Farkhunda now is a forlorn clenched fist emerging from a block of stone, silently aimed at the sky near the place where she was publicly tortured and murdered in 2015, a popular shrine in Kabul where pigeons circle and hawkers and beggars approach crowds of pilgrims. Her “sin” was burning pages of the Qur’an, a fake accusation aimed at her by the vendor of charms whom she had criticised.
Farkhunda’s fate should also tell us that brutal corporal punishment meted out by the mob on religious grounds, especially to a woman, is not just the domain of the Taliban. More disturbingly, it should also tell us that even in the “new Afghanistan” there remained a troubling undercurrent of misogyny in some quarters of society. On that day, Afghan security forces stood by and watched as people tried to rip the young woman apart. I suspect the frustration of decades of being told to grudgingly accept women’s rights in public was unleashed on one small crumpled body.
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Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.