Something Different: Afghan Women Want American Back

"Afghan Women Protest American Kidnapping"

About 500 or 600 women, quite a few wearing burqas, got together in Kandahar. That's a southern Afghani province, and a rather conservative one. The women want American teacher Cyd Mizell back. Mizell and her driver, Abdul Hadi, were kidnapped Saturday.

Those Afghan women want the kidnappers found: and want the Afghan government to be quite clear about that point. They also urged the kidnappers to let Mizell go.

Even though Cyd Mizell was wearing a burqa when she was snatched, I can see why Islamic hardliners might want her out of the way. Not only was she teaching English at Kandahar University and giving embroidery lessons at a girls' school: She was finding ways to export the embroidery.

That embroidery export could have given women an opportunity to start small businesses, built around Afghan embroidery. Women? Making money? Running businesses? That's the sort of thing that many Muslims seem to see as very un-Islamic. That, and women being able to read and write.

The Taliban in Afghanistan isn't saying whether any of their men were in on the snatch. I don't blame them: Grabbing Mizell seems to be having the same sort of success, maintaining the Islamic status quo, as Al Qaeda's serial beheadings in Iraq.

Related posts, on Islam, Christianity, Religion, Culture and the War on Terror.