[Everyone knows that a young woman named Farkhunda was attacked outside the shrine after being falsely accused of burning a Koran, then dragged along the river road by a frenzied mob that bludgeoned and stoned her to death, ran her over with a car and set her body on fire. The white obelisk, unveiled on the first anniversary of her killing, marks the spot where she died.]
By Pamela Constable
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Afghan activists and
artists stand around a monument to Farkhunda Malikzada
in Kabul in March 2016.
Malikzada died on March 19, 2015, after being
beaten with sticks and
rocks, thrown from a roof, run over with a car,
set on fire and then
dumped in a river, as police looked on, after
she was falsely accused
of burning a Koran.
(SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images
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KABUL
— From the steps of the old,
blue-domed shrine, if you look past the families feeding pigeons on the plaza
below and the lines of clogged traffic beyond, you can glimpse the stark, white
stone monument two blocks away, rising from a platform next to the street.
If you approach it, following the
garbage-strewn banks of the Kabul River on one side and a row of small shops on
the other, you feel a prickle of horror. The railings around the monument are
hung with posters of women’s faces — disfigured, half-blind, burned.
People flow past the site, carrying shopping
bags, tugging at children, heading somewhere in the city. Some pause to look at
the posters, or read the inscription etched in the stone, although most hurry
by. On the riverbank below, drug addicts huddle, lost in another world.
But everyone knows what happened here two
years ago, in the shadow of the historic Shah-do Shamshira mosque and the adjacent
shrine of an ancient Mogul king.
Everyone knows that a young woman named
Farkhunda was attacked outside the shrine after being falsely accused of
burning a Koran, then dragged along the river road by a frenzied mob that
bludgeoned and stoned her to death, ran her over with a car and set her body on
fire. The white obelisk, unveiled on the first anniversary of her killing,
marks the spot where she died.
“It was a terrible, savage thing,” said
Naquibullah, a tailor whose workshop is across the street. On the afternoon of
March 19, 2015, he was bent over his sewing machine when he heard shouting and
commotion and poked his head out the door. “I saw them throwing stones. . . .
I couldn’t bear to watch.”
The killing of Farkhunda Malikzada, 27,
captured on cellphones and shown repeatedly on TV, horrified the nation and the
world. It also embarrassed officials of the Western-backed government, which
has attempted to promote women’s rights in the conservative, tribal Muslim
society, where women and girls are often killed with impunity in the name of
protecting family honor.
Nearly 50 men were tried in connection with
the attack, including police officers accused of failing to stop the
assailants. Four men were sentenced to death, but those sentences were later
commuted, and most of the lengthy prison terms given to eight others were
reduced. The incident also energized the struggling Afghan women’s movement,
which staged protests outside the shrine. But over time, the momentum
dissipated.
Last week, as Afghans celebrated the Persian
spring festival known as Nowruz, families dressed up and visited shrines across
the city. Outside Shah-do Shamshira, they bought corn and took pictures of
their children feeding the pigeons. Some climbed the steps to the shrine, took
off their shoes and went inside to pray or meditate.
The tall white monument stood almost
unnoticed. A few women paused briefly to look up. Some wore burqas that hid
their eyes; others remained silent while their husbands discussed the case. One
woman, a government worker wearing a flowered headscarf, stopped long enough to
touch the pedestal and murmur a prayer.
“She was a good girl. She did not deserve
this,” the woman said firmly before she hurried away.
But the most disturbing aspect of Malikzada’s
murder was how many Afghans — preachers, police officials, young urban men
wearing jeans and carrying cellphones — were ready to think that she did.
Her attackers were driven by religious rage,
converging on the shrine as word spread that its custodian had accused her of
burning a Koran. This was blasphemy — an unpardonable sin and a capital crime
in a tribal society steeped in Sunni Islam and deeply conflicted about Western
influence.
Even in a busy capital with a veneer of
modernity, hundreds of youths rushed to join the vengeful fury. Video footage
showed a crowd stomping and pummeling a body on the sidewalk, while others
filmed the scene on their phones. There were exultant shouts of “Allahu akbar!”
Afghans are easily roused to defend their
faith, whether they wear long beards or razor haircuts. Thirty years ago, they
went to war against the Soviet army in the name of Islam. In the past decade,
as Western military and cultural influence spread, so did local resentment and
suspicion. In 2012, protests erupted over reports that Korans had been
incinerated at a U.S. military base.
There was a startling anti-Western element to
Malikzada’s murder, too. As they beat and kicked her, some attackers shouted
that she was working with foreigners. By the next day, imams and government
officials were denouncing her as having colluded with infidels.
A photo that circulated widely on social
media, taken during the attack, showed a woman with wild, disheveled black
hair, her face streaming blood, gesturing in defiance at her attackers. It was
easy to see how she could be viewed as a blasphemous witch.
It later emerged, though, that Malikzada was
studying theology and teaching children to recite the Koran. The incident at
the shrine started when she confronted its custodian for selling religious
charms, which she felt was un-Islamic, and he shouted that she had burned a
Koran. After a police investigation found the charge was false and the
custodian was arrested, public opinion quickly changed and women’s groups and
political activists staged protests.
“In my village some people said she deserved
what happened for desecrating our religion, but later they regretted it,” said
an engineer named Abdul Aziz, 30, who stopped by the monument Thursday. A
visitor from a northern province, he said he had learned about the incident on
Facebook. “What they did was wrong, whether to a Muslim or a non-Muslim,” he
concluded.
A little while later an elderly man, hunched
over and carrying a sack, stopped in front of the monument and gazed at it for
several minutes. An educated man who had seen better times, he spoke with an
air of sad wisdom.
“It was so shameful,” he said. Even if
Malikzada had committed blasphemy, he said, she should not have been “dragged
down the street and burned.”
“Did we not have a government? Did we not
have courts?” he demanded. “There is no justice in this country, no rule of law.
So people take it into their own hands.”
As the afternoon sun waned, drug addicts were
still crouched on the riverbank beneath the monument. In the plaza down the
street, people were still scattering corn to the pigeons. On the shrine steps,
a young woman named Zarifa, wearing a fashionable but modest black robe, was
talking on a cellphone through her face covering.
She nodded when asked whether she knew what
had happened to Malikzada.
“Yes, it was totally wrong. It was against
our religion and our culture,” she said. Then she turned away and went back to
her conversation.
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