Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While welcoming Afghan women's newfound freedom to throw off the burka, several readers cautioned that the celebration should not veil other limits on women's liberty. "You said, 'Nowhere in the Muslim world are women treated as equals,'" observed a California woman. "Excuse me, but nowhere in the whole wide world are women treated as equals." A Muslim Pennsylvanian challenged cultural assumptions: "The modern Western idea of feminism instructs females to be like males, while Islam encourages us to accept our sex and live as proud females." Looking at both cultures, a Canadian man felt it might be best...
...border to which many Afghan refugees have escaped, Masooda is a shy second-grade girl?but she is 16. She left school five years ago, on the day the Taliban entered her central Afghan town of Kota Sangi and beat her with a cane for not wearing a burka. When her family fled to Pakistan two weeks ago to escape U.S. bombing, she finally resumed lessons. "I once knew how to read, but I've forgotten everything," she says. "I'm ashamed to be so much older than everyone else...
...world, just behind war-ravaged Sierra Leone. The statistics only hint at what medical care for women is like in a nation where a male doctor is not allowed to give a thorough physical examination to a female patient. Women had to be examined wearing the full burka. Male doctors sometimes had to stand in a hallway shouting instructions to a female assistant. A doctor could be imprisoned for talking to a female patient who was not fully covered...
...Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani, once a foremost proponent of expanding the burka's reach across Afghanistan. More recently, Rabbani allowed to an interviewer that "wearing a head scarf is enough in the cities." But in the Northern Alliance stronghold of Faizabad, his acolytes make sure that all women are completely covered. "Rabbani is better than the Taliban," says Farahnaz Nazir, a women's rights activist in the Northern Alliance town of Khoja Bahauddin. "But he is still very conservative. He does not believe that women are equal...
...dies down, but she is grateful for this onscreen opportunity. In her "first and last" venture as an actress, she made a point that she says is often missed. "War touches the well-being of women in such a negative way. Its effects are not as visible as the burka, so we don?t see it or talk about it," she says. "War is a prison, specifically in the lives of women...