Miss Afghanistan has been liberated
uploaded 29 Nov 2004
The conclusion of Miss Earth 2004 proved that for much of the world, beauty is only skin deep. Despite the shallowness of this spectacle, a serious message was supposedly to emerge out of the swimsuit section. That serious point was made as Vida Samadzai, the representative from Afghanistan was awarded the inaugural “beauty for a cause” prize. The judges were extremely impressed with Samadzai for “symbolizing the newfound confidence, courage and spirit of today’s women” and for “representing the victory of women’s rights and various social, personal and religious struggles.” She was said to have fleed her homeland in 1996 to the land of freedom and democracy from the tyranny of the Taliban. Let us evaluate the mendacity of these claims.
To claim that liberation is somehow synonymous with shedding ones clothes in front of the world verges on the absurd. This would mean the less clothes a nation wears the freer it becomes and an entirely naked populace would be a paragon of freedom. Despite the proliferation of skin cancer and sickness as a result of the cold (tongue firmly in cheek), this whole way of thinking is bankrupt on a number of levels. The person who decides to wear near to nothing either for a beauty pageant or out and about on the street does not decide to do this simply because she believes this action to be correct based upon profound thinking, but merely because this is the standard they are told to live up to by the wider society. This means women far from becoming free have becoming nothing more than sex objects for the pleasure of the sight of men who ogle at their bodies and whether they have a mind or not doesn’t matter.
Women therefore are forced to aspire to live up to standards they cannot achieve. This is because the standards they are told to live up to are the airbrushed models without blemish that appear on the front covers of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. At the end of all of this have they achieved liberation or have we all been fooled in to believing this has been reached? If Miss Afghanistan was awarded the prize for her grit and spirit and her educational achievements why did she have to parade alongside the other contestants in the skimpiest of attire. Doesn’t this illustrate that Miss Earth/Miss World is a microcosm of the ideas that plague the world. The idea of Freedom is bankrupt not only because it is illusory, but also because it allows the strong to manipulate the weak. On the basic level it provides a justification for the American brand of freedom. This valueless paradigm suggests that every nation ought to decide how its own people live their own lives, yet this idea does not stretch outside the boundaries of America. American values have pervaded the earth and been adopted due to the pre-eminence of America on the world stage, this is the only reason why the ideas that epitomise the Miss Earth/Miss Earth pageant exist. It is not because they are correct or the world has been won over to the standards America espouses. Shouldn’t this therefore provide the world with an opportunity to objectively re-think these ideas?
It is our contention that the Islamic way of life objectively evaluated devoid of the claims of the propagandists ought to serve as the model the world can accept on the level of the thought itself. This is due to the fact that Islam has the ability to powerfully convince humankind to re-evaluate their ideas and re-position them in terms of the purpose of life. On top of this it cannot be used to serve the interests of any groups or individuals, whether they are men, women, the rich, the poor, the intelligent or the uneducated. Islam treats the human being as a human being, but recognises the fact that the Creator has created men and women with biological differences which mean they need to be treated in line with those differences, without trying to aspire to illusory calls to equality.
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“Oh mankind! Be dutiful to your Lord, Who created you from a single person (Adam), and from him created his wife (Eve), and from them both He created many men and women” [An- Nisa: 1]