by WALEED ALY 

Late last month, the Iranian government cancelled the publishing license of the country's leading women's magazine. For 16 years, Zanan ran a reformist agenda focusing on women's rights, while strategically avoiding any direct discussion of Iranian politics. Even this, it seems, was too much. Iranian authorities reportedly deemed it a "threat to the psychological security of the society" because of its portrayal of Iranian women's lives.

Only days later emerged the nauseating plight of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, sentenced to death by a religious court in Afghanistan for downloading a women's rights document. Certainly, this is the more extreme of the two incidents. But the obvious contrast in degree masks an intimate connection between them. Indeed, they are part of the same story; one that unifies two of the contemporary Muslim world's most frequent failures: censorship and gender justice. Accordingly, neither event can surprise us. They are quintessential.

The blight of censorship will be familiar, being the most common resort of dysfunctional and authoritarian polities. Several bloggers have been arrested and jailed in recent years in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, and last month, Saudi Arabia. Free speech is scarcely flourishing in the region, and dubious charges of blasphemy are readily deployed. Ask British teacher Gillian Gibbons.

But it is the politics of misogyny that has been finding violent and frequent expression of late. As Britain formally handed Basra back to the Iraqi control in December, militias were embarking on a campaign of killing women who dared to leave their homes to work, or whom they deemed to be insufficiently covered. A month earlier, the Saudi regime defended a court's decision to sentence a 19-year-old woman to 200 lashes and six months' imprisonment after she was gang-raped, blaming her for being alone with an unrelated man. That was an inflated sentence. The original sentence was increased as punishment for the fact that she had invited media scrutiny of the case. The court initiated disciplinary proceedings against her lawyer for talking to the press.

As it happened, the Saudi government, confronted by intense international pressure, intervened to pardon the woman. It's a familiar story that has been rewritten in Afghanistan. We can be thankful that the Karzai government - also in the face of international protest including most recently from Condi Rice - has withdrawn its initial support for Kambaksh's death sentence. But the discomfiting facts remains that misogynist belligerence is so often the first instinct.

Of course, this does not occur in a political vacuum. In the case of Muslim polities, it most frequently speaks of an assertion of political identity, especially so in a post-colonial or post-revolutionary environment. Here exists a strong imperative to demonstrate one's authenticity, one's disconnection from the despised predecessor. Often, this demands proof that one is not bowed to Western masters, which in turn encourages the unthinking assertion of that which is most antithetical to Western sensibilities is best.

In few areas is this more disturbingly demonstrable than in the case of women's rights. This, after all, has been a dominant source of Western criticism of the Muslim world. It is hardly surprising then, that Muslim political reformist movements have often sought to demonstrate their religious credentials primarily by making women suffer.

Soon after coming to power in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and punished unveiled women by public flogging. Nearly 30 years later, in April 2007, with inflation estimated to reach 24 per cent, unemployment soaring and poverty increasing, Iranian police commenced a hijab blitz, arresting hundreds of women deemed to be wearing loose headscarves and tight overcoats. Dozens of shops selling such clothing were shut down. Taxi agencies received circulars warning them not to take passengers dressed inappropriately.

Upon seizing control in Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq's utopian fantasy of building a model Muslim society descended similarly. Swiftly relegated were dreams of an interest-free Islamic economy. Ignored were the Islamic imperatives of diluting the most oppressive tribal norms. Instead, Islamicisation was reduced to patriarchal populism: women's testimony became legally worth only half that of a man, and women were pressured to stay home and cover up.

The pattern discloses itself repeatedly. The Saudi regime's closeness with the United States has always compromised its domestic authority, and the Bush administration's global "war on terror" has only increased the strain. So it is eased with a familiar identity politics: the assertion of a dubious brand of religious conservatism - akin to a form of nationalism - that falls disproportionately upon women.

Today, Hamid Karzai faces a similar predicament. His Western friends are unpopular among his people and he is decried in Afghanistan as their puppet. He finds himself increasingly desperate to build alliances with the most conservative, misogynist elements of Afghan politics. A religio-nationalist response becomes more or less inevitable: embrace the flag, expel foreign experts, criticize the Western military contribution, and reject the candidacy of Lord Ashdown for UN "super envoy".

Now back to Afghanistan. Kambaksh merely walked into this storm of identity politics. His focus on women's rights made him an easy and archetypal target. That the Karzai government so swiftly upheld his sentence is more repugnant than it is incomprehensible, just as its subsequent retreat is more pragmatic than inspiring and it is Muslim identity politics that navigates such terrain with cheerless regularity.
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WALEED ALY is is an Australian lawyer and former executive member of the Islamic Council of Victoria. He is also a lecturer at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash Univeristy. His first book, People Like Us (Picador), was published in 2007.