Maulana Fazlullah and Karen Larson
There are separations, wide separations between peoples living in different parts of the world today. What great distance, for example, separates Maulana Fazlullah in the Swat Valley, a picturesque region in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and Karmel Larson, a suburban Mom living in a no less picturesque region in Provo, Utah.
Both Fazlullah and Larson are deeply troubled by what they see as the miseducation of today's youth resulting from their being subject to an ubiquitous media that is overly dominated by images of sex and violence.
Fazlullah directs all his energies against schools for girls, education being for him not a positive and freeing influence on their otherwise closed lives, but an open door to all that is bad in modern life.
At the outset of his crusade, in 2006, Fazlullah decreed that women should remain within the four walls of their homes and refrain from attending school. During his nightly radio broadcasts he routinely announced the names of female students who had stopped attending school and promised them a high place in paradise.
"Girls' education," he said, in one of his many radio sermons which can be heard within a 40-kilometer radius of his base of operations, "leads to obscenity and vulgarity in the society. Schools for girls are a conspiracy of the United States and other 'infidel' nations to deviate our younger generations from the right path of Islam."
Karmel Larson takes aim, not at our public schools, but at the sex and violence that children are exposed to daily on television, seeing today's children as "a generation of children for whom the road to success is paved with drugs, violence and sex."
She reminds us that "on MTV every 38 seconds, children watching these programs are exposed to sexually charged images, explicit language, violence, drug use or sales, or other illegal activity. As a mother of four children, I feel a need to take action and invite others to do so as well … because our children are watching!"
In both situations, in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and in Provo, Utah, the underlying problems that Fazlullah and Larson are confronting may not be so very different. It's kids growing up, and how little while they are growing up we can protect them from the noxious influence of the life around them, and in particular an untrammeled media.
But it seems to me that in both situations their solutions are the wrong ones. Or at least that neither solution will ever have the result intended. Eliminating schools for girls will do little or nothing to strengthen to path of young girls to Islam. On the contrary, it may even take them further from that religion.
And in Larson's case as long as sex and violence are big sellers voluntary controls to limit the amount of one or both on MTV and cable television will have little or no effect. In any case that's sort of what has been happening for a long time now. Preaching restraint, while admirable, does very little or nothing to change the sex and violence content of our popular media.
How would American suburban Moms respond if they were told that their girls would have either to accept not attending school and while in public wearing the veil, or be in possession of a freedom of choice and movement that would constantly expose them to sex and violence, on television, on the internet, and in their contacts with sexually precocious and bullying peers in their schools?
It's probably a good thing they don't have that choice. For if they did we might find in our own country that the differences among us would rapidly leave the discussion and argumentative stages and go on become the kind of violent clashes among different peoples that we see in so many regions of the world today.
It's a fact, however, that we probably won't change the content of our media, but continue to live with it as harmful as it is, go on muddling through as we raise our children. But we will continue to help our children, our girls, get safely through a minefield of poisonous influences while they are growing up. We will not adopt Fazlullah's solution and keep our girls out of school, nor probably we will adopt a program of media censorship. And somehow we will progress.
