A reformed Islam could save Afghanistan

What does this mean in practical terms? The task of revolutionizing Islam in Afghanistan should begin with attention to the plight of women. Presently, half the population is absent from the public domain, veiled from head to toe, branded as inferior to men and treated as sexual objects to be kept at home.

There is no doubt, given that the society is patriarchal and highly militarized, that changing this status is a Herculean challenge.

But the enormity of the task should not prevent Afghans from undertaking it, as it is impossible to imagine a democratic and developing Afghanistan if the status of women is not confronted. It requires a frontal jihad – a political, intellectual, and spiritual struggle to liberate Muslims and Islamic societies from the addiction to force. This can only be successful when grounded in a freedom-oriented Islam, rather than Western models that seem increasingly alien to many Afghans.

It goes without saying that neither more foreign troops nor more suicide bombers can contribute to this essential transformation.

If there is any chance for the indigenous emergence of peace and stability in Afghanistan through an Islamic renaissance, the global and regional powers surrounding it should act on a principle of "negative equilibrium" in which no country can interfere in Afghanistan's affairs.

The Afghan people should also consider that a plurality of different ethnic groups with competing economic and political interests can maintain peaceful relationships only when the country becomes a federation organized around three major rights.

1. the right to participate in government;

2. the right to practice different languages, cultures, and religions; and

3. the right to peace through the absence of domination of any ethnic groups by any other.

The renaissance of Islam is above all the task of young Afghan people, who make up nearly 70 percent of the country's population. Such a renaissance is not historically alien to Afghan culture: Avicena's rationalism and Rumi's mystic philosophy are, after all, part of this tradition, much more so than the practice of suicide bombing.

Communicating this interpretation of Islam through the relative freedom of the media in Afghanistan could play a major role in popularizing democratic and humanist forms of Islam, which could in turn pave the way for the development of a democratic and independent Afghanistan that is a threat to no one, including its own people.

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr was the first elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the 1979 revolution. He has lived in exile outside Paris since 1981, when he fell out with his former ally Ayatollah Khomeini. In exile, he has continued to develop his idea of Islam as a "discourse of freedom."

© 2009 Global Viewpoint Network. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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