The Whole World Is Watching
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The organizer of Freedom House’s press briefing with Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s ministers of women’s affairs, Sameena Nazir Ford, shared her thoughts on women’s issues in those countries in an interview with The New York Sun yesterday.
The liberation of women in Afghanistan and Iraq is “critical” to the spread of women’s freedom in the Middle East, Ms. Nazir Ford said.
“The whole world is looking at what is going to happen in these two countries,” the scholar said, adding that the struggles of women there had significant symbolic value.
In Ms. Nazir Ford’s view, the greatest challenges facing Afghan women are obtaining adequate health care and obtaining adequate education. In Afghanistan, she said, women have not had access to educational services since the 1980s. Under the Taliban, the education of women past primary school was prohibited. The country also lacks women-specific health services, Ms. Nazir Ford said, including gynecologists. The average Afghan woman has five to seven children, Ms. Nazir Ford said, and maternal mortality rates are very high. Most Afghan women, she said, have never heard of mammograms.
For Iraqi women, Ms. Nazir Ford said, the biggest challenges are providing for their security and ensuring that Islam’s sharia law is not abused in the Iraqi Constitution.
While extremists often interpret and implement sharia to women’s detriment, Ms. Nazir Ford – who is a Pakistani-American Muslim – said the Islamic law can also be interpreted to protect women and their freedoms. Having more women, instead of extremist male clerics, doing the interpreting, she said, will be key to the preservation of women’s rights in the Iraqi constitution.
Similarly important will be ensuring that the constitution is not derived entirely from Islamic law. In Afghanistan’s constitution, for example, the interpretation of sharia works to women’s benefit, Ms. Nazir Ford said, adding that sharia’s principles are combined with international human-rights law and tempered by international standards of democracy.
Ms. Nazir Ford is the senior research coordinator for Freedom House’s Survey of Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa, which will be released in May.
