foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Epilogue 165
tian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the Palestinian-American literary critic
Edward Said, and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke out in a
joint statement against Khomeini's falWa.
A second nation that experienced radical Islamist rule was Afghanistan,
where conditions eventually became even more repressive than in Iran . As
is well known, in the 1980s, the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia
supported the Islamist mujahedeen against a Russian-installed regime,
motivated by Cold War politics. Among these mujahedeen were the Saudi
billionaire Osama bin Laden and others from what was to become the Al
Qaeda network. During the years 1992-96, after their victory over Russian
troops, various mujahedeen factions vied for power, conducting a second
civil war, while at the same time continuing to restrict the rights of women
severely. In 1996, the Taliban, a still more dogmatic Islamist faction, came
to power, again with substantial support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as
well as u.S. acquiescence. The Taliban oppressed women even more harshly
than had the mujahedeen, forbidding them to attend school, to work outside
the home, or even to walk the streets without a male relative. Courageous
underground women's groups ran clandestine schools for women and girls,
and also smuggled out video footage of the public execution of a woman
for "adultery, · which to the Taliban could mean simply talking with an
unrelated person of the opposite sex. Despite protests from most governments,
including Muslim ones, the Taliban also destroyed as "idols" the giant
Buddhist statues at Bamyan that had stood for over a thousand years.
The United States never seriously opposed the Taliban until September 11,
2001, even after AI Qaeda moved its bases there in 1996, despite the fact
that AI Qaeda was linked to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
The unbridled joy with which the population of Kabul greeted the fall of
the Taliban in late 2001 shocked many Islamists, as well as those Western
leftists and progressives who had taken a culturally relativist position toward
Afghanistan.
Sudan was the only other country to experience direct rule by militant
Islamists, but here they came to power via a series of military coups. Since independence
from Britain in 1956, the predominantly Christian and animist
South has vainly sought autonomy from the mainly Muslim North, which
has responded with terrible violence. After the 1990-91 GtilfWar, however,
a new military ruler, General Hassan al-Bashir, together with the Islamist theologian
and politician Hassan al-Turabi, sought not only to crush the South,
but also to project Sudan as a global center of radical Islamism. It was during
this period that Sudan's long civil war reached genocidal proportions,