…or why God cares much more about what’s on your head than what’s in it.
He watched in disbelief as the guard asked the elder ahead of him to remove his turban and lay it on the table. Niaz, who had journeyed more than eight hours on rugged roads, shuddered.
”That made us so embarrassed, and it made me so sad,” he said. ”I felt dishonoured when the guard said,” he hesitated, as if even recalling the words made him upset, ” ‘undo your turban’.”
”I had wanted to see the President,” he added, ”but after that search, I thought it would have been better if I had not come.”
The turban-searching rule at President Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace has been rigorously enforced since the assassination of the head of Afghanistan’s peace process, Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was killed by a bomb hidden in the attacker’s turban. It was the third such killing in four months, leading youths in Kabul to coin the word ”Turbanator” and US soldiers to invent the new acronym TBIED, for turban-borne improvised explosive device.
The other two instances were the killing in July of Kandahar’s senior cleric as he prayed in a mosque, and a few weeks later the killing of Kandahar’s mayor.
The searches are deeply disturbing for most Afghan men, as the turban signifies one’s religious faith and is a national dress – not to mention being something of a fashion statement.
Whereas blowing up officials is just a minor peccadillo.
Tagged: Afghanistan
I see your point, but history tells us over and over again that people who deliberately set out to be gullible will be victimised as a result. Anyone silly enough to think that the Supreme Ruler of the Universe actually takes an interest in the kind of headgear they put on in the morning is announcing loudly to the world: “Here I am! Come and take advantage of me!” They can hardly complain when the world does exactly that.
In response to the “minor pecadillo” comment: the average turban-wearing Afghan has no desire to kill anyone. The insurgents here (like all insurgencies) are actually a minority portion of the population. What the insurgents have done is take advantage of the sacred nature of the turban in this culture to avoid being searched. Until the recent trend in turban borne explosives, security personnel would pat people down, but not search the turban.
The logic was simple: no one is going to desecrate something the people hold so dear as to put explosives in the turban. Well, the insurgents felt otherwise. Now, turbans are searched.
Average Afghans don’t view killing anyone as a “minor pecadillo,” and the tragedy of the issue with the turbans is that one more thing the people value is being taken from them by the insurgents.