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Originally Posted by Archaea
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I recently watched a documentary on PBS shot in Afghanistan fairly recently that focused on women. The western journalist got to live with a family, wear a burka, etc, etc.
The show centered around a woman who worked in in the medical profession but was also trying to get married (family approval is needed). There were many, many interviews with men asking about whether women should work, be seen, etc. Almost all of them said something to the effect of, you have to understand that we are Muslim and the Koran says that women should wear a burka. The journalist always pressed and asked where in the Koran it said that. To a man, they all would then admit to not having ever read it but would explain that the Mullahs had and that this is what they taught.
They then cut to a woman who is a professor at at University in Kabul who is probably in her fifties who shows the reporter pictures of she and her friends as young women wearing blouses and slacks openly. She explained that there just weren't any restrictions like this back then. The problem, she said, is that there are now several generations with no memory of what the past was like. They think it has always been this way.
This got me to thinking that maybe the real problem in that country is illiteracy. What was it that laid the groundwork for the reformation? The advent of the printing press and the rise in literacy. Suddenly people began to realize that the faith as taught them by the church was at odds with the teachings of the bible. Is literacy at least part of the solution over there? Seems to me that people wouldn't accept the sort of thing described in your article if they could learn that things had not, in fact, always been as they now are.