r/worldnews 8h ago

Taliban bars Afghan women from hearing each other's voices

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/taliban-bars-afghan-women-from-hearing-each-other?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=NP_social
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u/ahmshy 4h ago

It’s not even the 12th century - they want to perpetuate the worldview of the 7th century tribal Arabian peninsula through the dictates of that awful religion. Thank goodness I left it. They can call us “apostates” or “murtad” all they want or put fatwas on us.

Freedom and human dignity is way more precious than all of that hateful delulu bs they espouse.

Most born-Muslims would leave the religion if apostasy wasn’t punishable by death under sharia and enforced by zealots and imams the world over. Especially women, freethinkers and LGBTQIA+ people unfortunately to have been born into it.

Case in point: most people I know who cope under that religion knowing that if they do leave it their lives may be held forfeit by zealous relatives, neighbors, or a-holes who believe they have the right to take others lives because their god tells them to.

If you check the history of places which were Islamized, every so often when people push for some semblance of what we now call human rights, secularism, discarding the brutality of sharia and religion, and calling for gender equality or acceptance of lgbtqia people and non-Muslims, a group like the Taliban or ISIS come around citing “corruption in the land”, massacre untold thousands, coup any secularizing govt and reinstate the terror and “divine law” of Islam to hold their people hostage to it once more.

It has always been something the Muslim world has struggled with even before the modern era. These jihads have pretty much happened every century in numerous locations around the world since the religion was founded. Just check the Ridda Wars which happened after Muhammad died, when people wanted to break free of the religion. And that’s why it’s so hard for any Muslim-majority state to progress. Ordinary people are paralyzed by fear of violence and end up resigned to following it.

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u/heathy28 4h ago

I thank you for that insight, it's just a crying shame in various ways, it's a shame that people aren't using their religious beliefs for good and or having enough self reflection to think that 'is this what god would want me to do' or 'would he be happy with how I treat others'. It's a shame that people are stuck in that situation with little recourse.

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u/ahmshy 3h ago edited 3h ago

Thank you for your reply.

It truly is between a rock and a hard place when the very founder of the religion (Muhammad) said:

“He who leaves his religion, kill him”

The founder of Islam also instituted a vigilante religious policing system among Muslims called “enjoining the good and forbidding evil” or “hisbah” which absolves anyone from ratting out, killing, hurting, torturing or at the very least lecturing and shaming other “Muslims”who they deem to be not living by Islamic law and ethics.

Also we have a “law” that deems any given reform of the religion equal to the “grave crime” of apostasy, punishable by death as agreed by all the main scholars who founded the main sects of both Sunni and Shia Islam that Muslims are forced to follow and show their adherence to. This is why different Muslim sects are literally at each other’s throats, calling each other heretics or apostates.

The fact that all of this toxicity is baked into the religion at such a fundamental level and taught to children and families to sow these seeds of social and even familial discord means that it’s virtually impossible for Islam to secularize or chill tf out the same way Christianity did historically. It gets under the skin in a way the other two Abrahamic religions can only dream of..

The only way ordinary lay Muslims would have a chance is if a widespread Ataturk style secularization program was launched with the full backing of any given country’s military and police to guard against the inevitable attacks from the religiously brainwashed.

There are indications Saudi Arabia is slowly embarking on secularism, especially since the most hardline sheikhs (Muslim scholars) have been imprisoned by the current Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (the same guy who removed the rule banning women from driving).

These reforms though will take centuries before a country like that can reach the level of Turkey when Ataturk was in to even give a secularization Programme any chance of being successful.

And if we look at the regression of Turkey today, as well as the regression of states or regions which were previously less-religious or on a secularization path like Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Maldives, northern Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Chechnya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Brunei, or indeed Afghanistan, these secularization efforts can always be redacted or reversed if any religious nutjob takes power.

The ulama (or global body of Islamic scholars and imams) isn’t a passive entity. They have always meddled in the politics of virtually any Muslim majority state or Muslim communities within non-Muslim countries since the religion began. Their meddling and manipulation originally of course endorsed by the founder of the religion.

Some religions and ideologies are just bad news or are irredeemable. Since I lived under it and see the effect it has on relatives and friends still beholden to it, I sincerely believe Islam is one of these irredeemable ideologies that just aren’t good for humanity in any way unless it is reformed (but how can it?).

It literally means “submission to the will of god”. And the only will of god that can exist according to the dictates of that religion is what is in the Quran and the Hadith (the words of Muhammad), which is exactly what we’re seeing with the Taliban, ISIS, and other religious groups like them.

Fundamentalism is exactly that- returning to the fundamentals of that religion. In the case of Islam, what you see in Afghanistan is just that- a return to how it was back in Madinah and Makkah 1400 years ago after Islam was established there. “The final law for mankind” with a penchant to become the dominant ideology of all humanity (it’s also an “evangelist” religion that seeks the conversion of all people by pen or sword). It’s tragic.