Naveen Khan Responds to Mullah on Stoning Women

18 Apr Naveen Khan Responds to Mullah on Stoning Women

Naveen Khan, a nonresident research fellow with the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Akron, Ohio took to Homeland Security Today to respond to the recently released audio message by the emir of the Afghan Taliban movement, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. Notwithstanding efforts by other Taliban leaders to appear more ‘moderate,’ she addresses this rare message from the reclusive Kandahar-based supreme leader that has brought the “undiluted misogyny of the Islamist organization into sharp relief.”

In a new audio message, Taliban leader Mullah Haibatullah, the Ameer of the Taliban, claims to be the representative of Allah and announces the expansion of the Islamic emirate outside Afghanistan. He says, “We will stone women to death. We will flog people in public. We will do everything which is against your so-called Democracy . We don’t want to live like animals.”

The video has since been taken down, and Naveen responded to the message in a piece at Homeland Security Today:

The recently released audio message by the emir of the Afghan Taliban movement, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, has sent waves of worry across the international community. Notwithstanding efforts by other Taliban leaders to appear more ‘moderate,’ this rare message from the reclusive Kandahar-based supreme leader has brought the undiluted misogyny of the Islamist organization into sharp relief. 

Referring repeatedly to what he deems is the ‘Western democratic conception’ of women’s human rights, Mullah Akhundzada expresses the resolve to act oppositely, by stoning women to death publicly for alleged adultery, as though this were the epitome of creating a ‘pure’ Islamic system. The Mullah makes it clear that such treatment of women is part of his mission of ‘salvaging and liberating the whole of humanity, by practically implementing the Shariah.’ Clearly, for this chief cleric, oppression of women is not just inevitable for implementing what he calls ‘God’s ordinances,’ but also marks the completion of the Taliban’s mission of seizing control of Afghanistan.  

By relying entirely on the highly controversial, unreformed set of Shariah laws which forms the basis of the menace of Political Islam, Mullah Akhundzada brings Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis to life (which has been used by several far-right extremist groups in the West for campaigning against Islam). His problematic understanding of ‘women’s rights in the West as practiced by Satan’s faction’ versus ‘women’s rights in Islam as enforced by God’s party’ is characteristic of the Manichean or binary opposite view that is similarly espoused by Islamophobes. This implies that for a society to be truly ‘Islamic’, women’s rights serve as the yardstick—it is women who must receive the opposite of everything that they are entitled to in Western societies.  READ MORE>>>