Blinken’s Idiocy on the Taliban and Women

I n an observation that would be amusing were it not made under such appalling circumstances, Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that, in assembling its regime in Afghanistan, the Taliban had fallen “very short of the mark” expected by the vaunted “international community.” As the New York Times reports, he was referring specifically to the fundamentalists’ failure to include women in the new government.

I’m constrained yet again to note the sheer idiocy of such remarks from our State Department, nearly 30 years after the principles of sharia supremacism (which is the Taliban’s ideology) figured prominently in U.S. terrorism prosecutions.

The salient point here is not so much about women as it is about fundamentalist Islam’s theory of governance. But maddeningly, our government has always stood ready to turn a blind eye at the latter if it could just get a bit of window dressing on the former.

The Taliban are as literalist and unevolved as it gets, so the notion of women holding governmental positions is anathema to them. But that’s not merely because these are government positions; it’s mainly because they are outside-the-home positions. Before you’d even get to questions of governance, you’d confront the Taliban’s opposition to women’s being outside the home without the supervision of a male relative, to the perceived impropriety of women’s interacting with men to whom they are neither married nor related, and to the perceived intellectual inferiority of women that results, for example, in their testimony being valued at half that of a man’s (rooted in an ancient hadith, the provenance of which is questioned by reformist Islamic scholars and authentically moderate Muslim modernizers).

Yet sharia supremacism is not monolithic.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a sharia-supremacist organization, but it is the most influential one in modern history because it is flexible, even nuanced, about means of advancing sharia’s implementation while remaining unyielding on the crucial matter of ends — fidelity to sharia principles. As I’ve explained on other occasions (and discussed extensively in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book on the Brotherhood and its alliance with transnational progressives), the most influential scholar in this most influential organization is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

Notwithstanding his endorsement of violent jihad, Qaradawi has won plaudits from the usual suspects (such as the State Department) because of, among other things, his “moderate” views on the rights of women to vote and hold elective office.

Now, let’s put this in context.

Qaradawi is no moderate. As I related in The Grand Jihad, he has lectured approvingly on

female circumcision, sharia rules that limit female inheritance to half of a man’s share, the right of men to have multiple wives, the right of men to beat their wives, and the punishment of female rape victims. “For her to be absolved from guilt,” the sheikh has explained, “a raped woman must have shown good conduct.” If she is dressed immodestly, she is deemed to have brought the sexual assault on herself.

Qaradawi also enthusiastically urges that women must wage jihad, including as suicide bombers. All of these are logical sharia-supremacist positions. The limitations on and punishments of women are classical Islamic law. The approval of female jihadists involves the corporate defense of Islamic territories and the umma (the notional worldwide Islamic community). It would not be endorsed in all circumstances, but if there are not enough men available to wage jihad successfully, women must be pressed into service for the greater good of defeating the perceived enemies of Islam.

It is this same line of thinking that explains why Qaradawi supports women’s suffrage and women legislators, particularly in societies subject to what he sees as corrupting Western influences.

Is there more to it than that? Sure. Qaradawi has children he adores. He found it in himself to be an enthusiastic supporter of women’s education and is duly proud of the doctorates earned by three of his daughters. Nevertheless, his support for women’s scholarship and political participation is not about the women’s flourishing; it is about the umma’s defense: If Muslim women are not active in education and politics, and there are not enough Muslim men to take all these positions, the void would be filled by non-Muslims and secularists, whose corrosive Western influences would undermine the advancement of sharia governance.

Significantly, there are caveats in Qaradawi’s support for women’s participation in politics. First, he assumes that female officeholders will be “few in number”; therefore, they would pose no danger of achieving general supervision over men, which would be impermissible. More importantly, he reasons that there is no real harm in allowing women to serve in parliament because neither men nor women may make law for themselves in any event. “Legislation belongs to God,” he says, “and we only fill in the blanks.”

This is what Blinken, the State Department, the Biden administration, and Washington’s bipartisan progressive foreign-policy clerisy cannot bear to contemplate. The problem with the Taliban, and sharia supremacists generally, is their imposition of a totalitarian system that is inherently discriminatory and cruel. Whether the Muslims imposing it happen to be men or women, while of great moment to the State Department, is of little moment to sharia supremacists. The system is not open to the discretion of legislators pursuing the interests of their constituents. That is a Western concept that sharia regards as corrupting — inviting the desires of man to take precedence over the instruction of Allah.

Sharia is deemed set in stone. It is Allah’s law, divinely pronounced, so to suggest that its tenets are subject to human refinement is to commit a grave offense. The issue is not whether a few women are allowed to take positions in a sharia government. It is what a sharia government has license to do — namely, to implement sharia’s suffocating standards and enforce them relentlessly.