Protests rallies are the most common form of expression of mass opinion and often of discontent regarding political, economic and social issues in modern societies. Protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria and the rest of the Middle East took to the streets in their hundreds of thousands to fight long standing dictatorships, a fight that has entered its second year.
Protestors in the US have occupied important financial districts to express their discontent with the conduct of their governments and large corporations at a time when the global economy appears to be on a knife's edge. Greek protestors have been rallying for months to fight strict austerity measures being proposed as part of a deal with the EU to bail-out the sinking Greek economy, again.
In Iran, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the rigging of election results in 2009 and to demand an end to tyranny that is the Walayat-e Faqih. In most of these cases, hundreds if not thousands have paid with their lives fighting for the emancipation and empowerment of the people, the people who have become disenchanted with the modus operandi of the state and the policies of those running the country.
In today's Afghanistan, mass rallies are relatively rare, quite vocal and every now and then, quite violent. The violent protests are usually religiously motivated and accompany chants that have long been practiced in neighboring Pakistan and Iran – none of whom are known for their practice of tolerance or peaceful politics.
In April last year gangs of rioters attacked the UN compound in Mazar-e Sharif and the cowards brutally murdered three UN staff members and their four Nepalese guards. The attacks took place after protestors gathered to condemn the planned burning of a Quran in Florida, and effectively demanded that the US amend the Bill of Rights and clamp down on the freedom of expression in the US, because some protestors in Afghanistan disagree with it.
While violent insanity is not new to Afghanistan, there are others who have rallied for causes that have concerned the welfare of the people of Afghanistan. In 2009 when the Afghan government set out to introduce the Afghan Shiite Family law, which in addition to legalizing child abuse also legalized marital rape.
Hundreds of Afghan women and civil society members poured onto the streets of Kabul to protest the law and demand that it be repealed. Rival protesters poured out of Sheikh Mohsini's Kabul madrassa in Kabul, where an even larger number of people rallied to support the imposition of the law, hurled abuse at the women activists and their supporters, and pelted them with rocks. The protests did have some impact and mild amendments were introduced into the proposed legislation.
At other times protestors have rallied to condemn the bombing of civilians by US and NATO planes or the mistreatment of Afghan refugees by authorities in Iran or to demand the prosecution of Jihadi and Communist war criminals. That said, there has been little street activism against the long line of crimes being committed by the Taliban.
However, the recent violent and fiery protests have quickly turned into riots. Earlier in the week, news broke out that American soldiers in the Bagram base had "inadvertently" placed copies of the Quran and other Islamic texts in incinerators, after they were confiscated from inmates using them communicate with one another.
No sooner had the news spread, protestors gathered around the base and began the charade of Death to X and Y. It didn't end there. The next days hundreds took to the streets in Kabul, Jalalabad, Logar, Parwan and elsewhere in Afghanistan to fight pitched street battles with the police and foreign forces as well as set fire public and private properties. The usually powerless and tactless Afghan parliament soon followed suite and some MPs, rather than calming down enraged youngsters, declared Jihad against their own government and the Americans.
Book burning is an archaic practice that should have no place in a civilized society. In Afghanistan, one has first wonder as to who it is that trains the soldiers deployed to Afghanistan regarding the complexities of the Afghan society and culture. Either there are no such trainers or they are doing an incredibly terrible job.
Should they wish to dispose-off items considered scared by Afghans, they should hand it over to the Afghans and let them deal with it. Alternatively, they could have found a mullah. There is an abundance of those in the country.
For a few bucks, they will bend over their backs. In a religiously charged society like Afghanistan, once a Holy Quran has been burned by people deemed foreigners or non-Muslims, even when it is done by mistake, it is already too late. Hordes of zealous mullahs, pseudo-Taliban and opportunist politicians will spare no time and energy to rally supporters; after all, this is exactly the kind of thing many powerful Afghans specialize in.
The hang-over of war, anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad and the pursuit of blind-faith has left Afghanistan with deep scars. At times, one is left wondering about the state of conscience of many Afghans. They wouldn't protest over the beheading of civilians, over the deaths of hundreds by Taliban IEDs, over the closure of schools for the children of their own country, over the destruction of their cities and towns, over the abuse of young boys and girls, over the self-immolation of hundreds of women escaping domestic violence, over the plight of the young Sahar Gul who had been sadistically tortured by her in-laws, over the scale of corruption that has landed them in the waste-pit of the world, over the everyday harassment of the people in public offices, over the harassment of women on the streets, over the incapacity and corruption of their elected representatives, of the huge amounts of money demanded by authorities and judges as bribe, over the fact that Afghanistan has for decades been at the furthest possible distance from anything considered civilized and so goes the long list of Afghan affairs that would cause ire anywhere else in the world. But perhaps, it's because they don't have a foreigner or a non-Muslim to blame for it, many Afghans could not care less.
Additionally, Afghans need to think and question the usefulness of such senselessness, they need to question that how many of those protestors have even read a whole book in their lives, any book at all. They need to find out how many of them and how many Afghans have ever regarded as sacred a book that they read in their own language and understood through independent inquiry.
One wonders that how many of the protestors are part of the 60% or more of the Afghan population who can neither properly read nor write and are utter illiterates. Afghans need to think that which is a greater insult to their country and their people: the fact that a Quran was burned (keep in mind that burning has been the traditional Islamic method of disposing Quran; a practice that goes back to the Caliph Usman), or that Afghanistan is one of the most illiterate, one of the most misogynist and one of the most backward countries in the world.