I Am Farkhunda

"Nothing has shocked us like this."
"I have never seen this kind of brutality, even at the hands of the Taliban."
"Afghan people around the world want to say to the Afghan government that there has to be the rule of law. We have families back home. We don't want our nieces and sisters to be in this kind of situation."
"If this kind of condition continues I am afraid people will support the Taliban out of fear of anarchism."
Najia Haneefi, Ottawa protest

Sidra Naseem (left) Anikah Ahmad (centre) and Zorah Safi (right) are among dozens of members of the Afghan community attending a candlelight vigil on March 26 outside the Afghan Embassy in Ottawa for Farkhunda, an Afghan woman wrongly accused of burning pages of the Quran and killed by a mob in Kabul.   Photo: Graeme Murphy

The young Afghan woman of whom Najia Haneefi spoke was named Farkhunda. She was a scholar of Islam at age 28, and taught other women about Islam at a local mosque. At that mosque she had witnessed clerics preying on women, extracting money from them for religious favours, and she castigated a cleric for doing just that, for taking money from poor women on the pretense that doing so would be of benefit to the women and their families.

Her intervention and accusation obviously did not endear her to the man she had confronted, who likely resented her in any event, for presuming to teach women about Islam, when he was there to do the same thing; she without taking money from the women, he intent on doing just that. So he then did what is a common enough occurrence; accused her of having desecrated a Koran. His accusations reaching the ears of men at the mosque, the reaction was swift and deadly.

The young woman was dragged from her car, she was beaten mercilessly by men wielding bats, she was stoned, she was set on fire, and finally lynched by a mob of screeching men. Her battered, bleeding and burned body was thrown into the Kabul River. The mob had undertaken justice, for Islam decrees that someone who defiles a Koran, who insults the Prophet Mohammad, who defies or insults Islam must face capital punishment.

^{Afghan men gather around the body of Farkhunda (AP)}

The horribly primitive, brutal attack took place in daylight hours outside the Shah-e-Doshamshira shrine before a teeming crowd of people. Some of those present recorded the attack on their mobile phones, posting photographs and video on the Internet. And a dozen policemen were present, ostensibly to ensure public order, and not one of them made a move to prevent the atrocity. And nor did any of the men make an effort to stop the others from their brutal slaughter of a young woman.

Sacrilege, after all, has its deterrent pricetag. And blasphemy laws criminalize anything deemed offensive to Islam. Defacing the Koran is an unforgivable, capital offence. Just as mobs assemble to decry Western impudence at any imagined insult to Islam or the Prophet Mohammad, violence inevitably follows. Portraying Mohammad represents the absolute pinnacle of insult to Islam and will not be countenanced. Death is the punishment.

A picture of Farkhunda, an Afghan woman who was beaten to death and set alight on fire on Thursday, is seen during her funeral ceremony Photo: Reuters

In Kabul, liberal social activists and women's rights advocates have responded, demanding that those who took part in the slaughter of Farkhunda themselves pay the price for their barbaric murder. As for the punishment of those who stood by and did nothing to rescue a woman from the murderously psychotic mass rampage, what punishment for them?

"We are here [Ottawa protesters in front of the Afghan Embassy] to support for the freedom of Afghan women. For something like this to happen in the 21st Century is horrendous", said Narges Ghaffari, host of a Persian language radio program in Canada's capital. Protesters held up signs reading "Afghan Women Victims of Gender Apartheid", and "Humanity Before Religion", and another reading simply "I am Farkhunda".