...University Rockville Campus Sociology of Undeveloped Country SOC 300 First Movie Evaluation OSAMA Submitted to: Dr. M. Nazer Saba Kewani 05/01/2013 The Women of Afghanistan: Culture and Educational Suppression In many parts of the world, the laws of a country are dictated by traditional customary practices and religious influence. Religion can heavily influence cultural practices, laws and in particular the extent of rights bestowed upon its citizenry. In Afghanistan religious beliefs dictate the way and the type of laws enforced upon men and women differently. Men are afforded a number of rights denied to women who include voting, driving, style of dress and education to name a few. The movie, Osama, describes how women are treated and what they go through to provide food, shelter and cloth for their family. The movie shows how the women of Afghanistan protests and try to fight for their right to work and be able to survive. Osama is a girl whose father died in war and was forced to change her identity in order to provide for her family. The movie Osama shows the obstacle a nine years old girl goes through and when she’s caught, the punishment is to either kill her or wed her to one of the oldest guy who already has three wives. In regards to education, Afghanistan legal stance has shifted over the last one hundred years. Subsequent to Afghanistan’s independence from Great Britain, King Amanullah in 1919 adopted reforms to enhance...
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...Women’s Rights in Afghanistan Afghanistan is one of the worst countries to be a woman. Girls’ schools are frequently attacked, high-profile women’s rights advocates have been targeted and killed, and violence against girls and women continues to be a major problem (“Women in Afghanistan”). More females die during pregnancies and childbirth than almost anywhere else in the world. Life is hard for women fighting for their rights in Afghanistan. The Taliban, an extremist militia, seized control first of Herat and then Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on September 27, 1996 and violently plunged Afghanistan into a brutal state of totalitarian dictatorship and gender apartheid in which women and girls were stripped of their basic human rights. Upon seizing power, the Taliban regime instituted a system of gender apartheid effectively thrusting the women into a state of virtual house arrest. Under Taliban rule, women were stripped of all human rights – their work, visibility, opportunity for education, voice, healthcare, and mobility. When they took control in 1996, the Taliban initially imposed strict commands that banished women from work force. They closed schools to girls and women and expelled women from universities. The Taliban prohibited women from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative. They also went as far as to ordering the publicly visible windows of women’s houses painted black and forced women to wear the burqa (or chadari) – which completely...
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...lives of women in Afghanistan compared to lives of Women in the UK. Issues with women and their rights have been a massive problem for many years. There are still many parts of the world where women are seen as inferior to men and suffer from violence and abuse, physically and mentally. I will be looking at differences of the lives of women in the UK and women in Afghanistan. Women in Afghanistan experience a lot of inequality due to their gender and although the rights of women in the UK are as equally important as the rights of men, some women still also experience inequality. It is reported that the women of Afghanistan rights and quality of life were ranked second to the lowest country out of 165 countries investigated. There are many factors that cause difficulties for women in Afghanistan, some being, child marriage, lack of education, few job opportunities and groups such as the Taliban. Many women struggle to be heard and have to follow what the families want them to do. In the UK women are much more included in society and there are laws that stop the exploitation of women. Education for women has always been a problem worldwide, however as society has developed, girls and women are much more entitled to an education. In the UK the literacy rate of women is 99% with all young girls being expected to attend a free full time education up to the age of 16. However it is very much different to the education of girls and women in Afghanistan. The literacy rate for women if Afghanistan...
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...Women of Afghanistan Afghanistan is a very rugged country with various ethnic, religious, and tribal groups (http://www.iiav.nl). It is also a country that is rich in culture and tradition. But very little is known about the women that live in Afghanistan. No one really knows or understands how a women’s day to day life is. In Afghanistan most women are kept hidden away in their home and they are not allowed outside. Today the only thing that people hear or know about Afghanistan is that the United States is at war with a country that has known very little peace over that last one hundred years. Afghanistan is a place where time stands still and very little changes. One of the things that has not changed or has changed very little over the last one thousand years is the everyday life of women. The Afghan people are very simple and in some remote villages they have very little comforts. In some places midwifes assist mothers in the birth of their new born babes. They also bring water inside their house in pales, and they maintain their houses clean for their husbands. Most Afghans live their lives in a very traditional and private way; they have several customs and traditions that have been passed on from one generation to the other for hundreds of years. These people do not require or ask anything from the western world or from their government. They rarely let outsiders into their culture and this has led to many misconceptions of how women are treated and how...
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...Self Immolation: A Rampant Social Phenomenon Among Afghan Women Self-immolation, which means to “deliberately set oneself on fire” (KhushKadamOva 75), is traditionally considered a rare and agonizingly painful method of suicide. Self-destruction of this nature most often occurs in young women living in Islamic countries like Iran, Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, India, and, more recently, Afghanistan, where the number of self-immolated female deaths has risen substantially since the first cases were documented in the mid-1990s (Raj, Gomez, and Silverman 2201). Unfortunately, this disturbing behavior seems to have developed into a horrific trend; according to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), there were 106 reported cases in 2006, and 184 in 2007 (KhushKadamOva 76). However, perhaps more concerning than the epidemic itself are the underlying, direct, and perpetuating causes for the phenomenon: the widespread practice of child marriage, the culture’s generally misogynistic and violent treatment of women, and the government’s tendency to ignore these issues. War in Afghanistan has seriously crippled the country’s social structure, and the resultant lack of human security has prompted many Afghan families to forcibly marry their underage daughters into others. On the other hand, some families push their young girls into matrimony in order to repay debts or settle familial disputes (“Life”), but even worse are the alarmingly frequent instances in which parents arrange...
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...used its control over Afghanistan to enforce strict and unfair rules on the women and made harsh punishments if these rules were broken.(BS-1)The book, Under the Persimmon Tree correctly portrays that being a woman in Afghanistan has a lot more disadvantages than the men of Afghanistan who have more advantages.(BS-2)The author of Under the Persimmon Tree, Suzanne Fisher Staples uses the fact that the men of Afghanistan had more advantages than the women in Afghanistan, to develop and create conflicts and it also helps us to hear a voice that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear.(BS-3)From this book and the research that was done about the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women, helps us to hear the voices...
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...written in English by Afghan writer. Hosseini's works reflect a wide range of important current events and contemporary issues about ethnic tension, women, family ties, Afghan immigrant, political and social transformation of Afghanistan from 1970s to 2013. Certainly, the war of Afghanistan are encompassing in all three novels. Hosseini had received many awards for his work, all of his novels became bestsellers and the first two novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns had been adapted into movies. In this thesis, I will analyze the abuse of power in Khaled Hosseini's novels. The first novel is The Kite Runner (2003). This novel presents a story of strained family relationships between a father and a son, and between two brothers. How they deal with the guilt and forgiveness. The novel sets the interpersonal drama of the characters against the backdrop of Afghanistan, sketching the political and economical toll of the instability of various regimes in Afghanistan from the end of monarchy to the Soviet –backed government of the 1980s to the fundamentalist Taliban government of the 1990s.it also includes the events of September 11,2011. The second novel is A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) traces socio- political and cultural history of Afghanistan, and illustrates excesses and abuse of government and family itself against women. Through Feminist viewpoint, the novel provides problems of struggle of Afghan female in a patriarchal male dominated society to find their identity...
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...Afghanistan Afghanistan is located between the southern and the central part of Asia. The country holds about 32 million people. The capital in Afghanistan is Kabul. There are a lot of different languages spoken in Afghanistan. This is due to the diversity of ethnicities in Afghanistan. Dari is the official language in Afghanistan although more people speak Pashtun. The country is currently facing a war which started in 1978 during the cold war. The war originated when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took action against the communism in Afghanistan. This revolution is referred to as the Saur Revolution. The war in Afghanistan blossomed because of different ideologies in the Countries and large groups were dissatisfied by how the country was ruled. Afghanistan was an independent country before the war but the Soviets saw an opportunity to invade the country. They invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and assigned a new leader in the Country. This lasted about 10 years before the Soviet decided to leave the country. Afghanistan is a Democratic country now but there are a lot of rebels in the country that belong to the Taliban groups. Their goal is to diminish the democracy in Afghanistan. Life in Afghanistan has been known to be hard, especially as a woman. Afghanistan have made progress with women’s rights but the conditions are still bad. Close to 60% of all women get married within the age of 16. The amount of women dying because of childbirth is pretty common in Afghanistan...
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...Afghanistan Afghanistan is located between the southern and the central part of Asia. The country holds about 32 million people. The capital in Afghanistan is Kabul. There are a lot of different languages spoken in Afghanistan. This is due to the diversity of ethnicities in Afghanistan. Dari is the official language in Afghanistan although more people speak Pashtun. The country is currently facing a war which started in 1978 during the cold war. The war originated when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took action against the communism in Afghanistan. This revolution is referred to as the Saur Revolution. The war in Afghanistan blossomed because of different ideologies in the Countries and large groups were dissatisfied by how the country was ruled. Afghanistan was an independent country before the war but the Soviets saw an opportunity to invade the country. They invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and assigned a new leader in the Country. This lasted about 10 years before the Soviet decided to leave the country. Afghanistan is a Democratic country now but there are a lot of rebels in the country that belong to the Taliban groups. Their goal is to diminish the democracy in Afghanistan. Life in Afghanistan has been known to be hard, especially as a woman. Afghanistan have made progress with women’s rights but the conditions are still bad. Close to 60% of all women get married within the age of 16. The amount of women dying because of childbirth is pretty common in Afghanistan...
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...It is no secret that females in developing countries are often unable to receive a proper education. With a lack of education comes unexpected risks, including reduced health, a decline in family income, and even a higher risk of trafficking and exploitation ("Girls' and Women's Education - Expertise - International - World Education, Inc."). For many women in underdeveloped countries such as Arab and Afghanistan, attempting to achieve an education could put their lives at risk. Two women, Laura Boushnak, and Shabana Basij-Rasikh discuss this issue in two different TED talk videos. In the first, Basij-Rasikh discusses how Afghan women should be able to earn a proper education, and tells the story of how her father fought for her to have that....
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...Brian Smith 12/6/13 Professor Books Afghanistan Afghanistan is arguably the most eye-opening, controversial country we have covered this year in our class. According to Roozbeh Shirazi’s Schooling in Afghanistan, Afghanistan can be described as “an amalgam of ethnicities, languages, and cultures resulting from the rise and fall of various historic empires”. Tamim Ansary goes on to describe the country as a “laboratory”. “So many currents have flowed through this territory from so many places over so many centuries.” (Ansary 2) Ansary then goes on to say that Afghanistan is “rife with contradictions”. It is those three words that strike me the most when Afghanistan is described: “rife with contradictions”. How can a country that is compared to a laboratory be so contradictory with itself? Let us look no further than the modern history of Afghanistan to find the answers. When looking at the modern history of Afghanistan, one cannot help but to start in 1878 when the British forces left Abdur Rahman Khan in charge as the Emir of Kabul. Khan’s goal was to “break down the feudal and tribal system and substitute one grand community under one law and one rule”. (Norton 48) Resistance was shown by the local chieftains and clan leaders. There was some participation in a succession of national councils, called loya jirga, in order to legitimize royal claims for ceremonial leadership. Later on in 1953, Prince Mohammed Daoud Khan...
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...President George W. Bush President George Walker Bush felt the need to invade Afghanistan after a series of events that led to the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. He felt that the people responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Americans should be brought to justice, however, this was made difficult by the lack of co-operation by the Afghanistan government. The Taliban, who ran the majority of the country, thought the accused (Osama bin Laden) was innocent and would not hand him over to the American authorities without sufficient evidence. Bush decided it was necessary to bring this man to America so he may be punished for his crimes, so he placed orders for American troops to enter Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. The Taliban had little or no experience in running a government and it seemed as though they didn’t see this as a priority when they took power in 1996. They demonstrated extreme single-mindedness as they focused on the achievement of law and order under their interpretation of the Sharia law. Their only aim was to create the world’s purest Islamic state; we could see this through the way the Afghan people were treated, the strict laws imposed on women and the way “corrupting influences” (television, music and films) were banned. While the Taliban was governing Afghanistan, many laws were created that controlled all aspects of women’s public and private lives and severely restricted their freedom. Their access...
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... | |Raising children |Many children are introduced to violence, abuse, exploriation, and negect in Afghanistan. For more than 30 years of| | |war, many of them have been killed (Swanson & Swanson, 2011). Hundreds of children are used as suicide bombers, and| | |are put in harms way daily. According to Swanson & Swanson (2011), “Conflict and political violence force millions | | |of children and their families to flee their homes and as a result displaced families spend years in situations of | | |uncertainty and insecurity” (para. 3). | |Role of genders |Discrimination is common among girls and women. Throughout early childhood, about 70 percent of school-age girls, | | |do not attend school, while 94 percent of girls are not even registered births (Swanson & Swanson, 2011). The men | | |are the soliders. They are taught at a young age how to kill. “in the minds of Afghan men, are already believed to | | |be potentially (or likely) promiscuous” (Afghanistan, n.d). | |Marriage |Marriage in Afganiston has a deep-rooted process. Men and women do not have many opportunites to meet eachother. |...
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...evident throughout the novel. By examining the corrupted values, abuse, and discrimination visible in the society of Afghanistan, it becomes apparent how evil humankind can be. Hosseini portrays the struggles of two young Afghan women, Laila and Mariam, in war riddled Afghanistan. Both women are years apart by age, but are forced to marry an older man, Rasheed, who they do not know. The women learn to co-exist as they endure Rasheed's mental and physical abuse. The women in Afghanistan have to face arranged or forced marriages, poor education and restrictions brought on by the Taliban. The lack of respect and freedom of Afghan women compels them to fight for their rights to halt the inequalities they face in society. Corrupted values are detrimental to society by the fact that it takes away one’s freedom and a chance to live. Marriage is the voluntary union of two people, who choose to be together and nobody else for the rest of their lives. In the case of Afghan women, they deal with forced under-age marriages. Freedom is a basic fundamental right that every person deserves to have. The opportunities to speak, believe, and pursue happiness without any restriction defines freedom of a person. Some Afghan women have been wed off at a very early age, some at the age of thirteen to men much older than them. Although the legal age for marriage in Afghanistan is sixteen for females and eighteen for males, many people, particularly in rural...
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...Intercultural communication - Afghanistan Section 1: group’s identity, history and cultural traditions (500 words) Culture For thousands of years in Afghanistan the country has been invaded, civil wars and terrorist activities. The country has been overturned destroying much of the countries culture and tradition. The culture and way of life in Afghanistan has changed over the years leaving it with no other way to define it. There are many more differences than there are similarities throughout the country. Nearly all of the people are Muslim and this is probably the greatest similarity amongst them. Loyalty within the local tribes is a major issue, but even this is not true among all of the people. Today less than a quarter of the Afghanis are urbanized and over three quarters make a living in agriculture. The way of life is still reliant on the land and on community. For many of these farmers life revolves around the sunlight, weather, seasons, and also religion, which holds an important place in the lives of most people. The weekly and daily schedule is often dictated by the above mentioned items and there is little discretionary income to take time off of work, to travel, or to spend money on items they want. Although farmers grow a huge number of crops, one of the easiest to grow in the country is opium, which is easy to sell and makes good money on relative terms. This has led to some outside groups to fight this industry, but for many people this is a traditional crop...
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