ISLAMABAD/NEW YORK: The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday reiterated women’s rights are synonymous with Islamic rights and called on the Taliban government to live up to the promises they made to respect the rights of women and rescind their decision banning women from school, college, and university education.
World women day
According to Arab News, speaking at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York during a day-long “Women in Islam” conference marking World Women’s Day, international organizations officials and heads urged Western media outlets to address wrong stereotypes in their coverage of Muslim women. An Emirati official drew a direct link between religious extremism and Islamophobia.
“The common thread in everyone’s message today covered the unfortunate condition in Afghanistan, and everyone expressed their displeasure and disappointment that women and girls in Afghanistan haven’t only been deprived of their rights, but the interim government hasn’t yet lived up to its promises to allow access to education,”
Pakistan’s Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, whose country currently holds the rotating chair of the OIC, told Arab News after the conference that it was disappointing that the Taliban government uses Islam to justify its treatment of women.
He said that “all nations within the OIC are unanimous that this has nothing to with Islam, that this is alien to the concept of Islam, and the first word of the Holy Qur’an is ‘Read,’ and we continue to press the interim government to in Afghanistan to live up to their promises and grant women and girls their right to education,”
Marwan Ali Noman Aldobhany, the Yemeni deputy permanent representative to the UN, compared the actions of the Taliban government with those of the Houthi militia in Yemen, saying that both groups rejected women for their economic, political, and social rights.
He said that gender segregation is rife in schools and all other institutions under Houthi control, and there are many restrictions on women’s movement from one city to another.
Marwan said that “these militias abduct hundreds of Yemeni women and girls, throw them in secret prisons, then frame them with crimes,” “They torture them and sexually target and exploit them because of their political activity.”
He called on United Nations member states to denounce such practices, which have “no connection to Islam.”
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the United Kingdom minister of state for the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa, and United Nations at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, and the prime minister’s special representative for preventing the sexual attack in conflict, told the conference that “societies prosper, nations progress when women and girls are at the heart of progress.”
