Sayed Pervez Kambaksh & religious tradition treatment

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh –the Afghan student imprisoned for distributing women’s right literature in Afghanistan – telling us about his brutal experience in prison where threat of being killed exists coupled with the likelihood of been sexually abused to break him. Those experiences neither been admitted by young men nor imagined or acknowledged by westerners.

I can identify with Pervese through similar experience. During Saddam’s regime my brother and I were imprisoned for three months. In the first night we were put in a cell occupied by a young man with severe mental disorder who was not allowed to leave his cell so his urine and faeces were all over the cell. On that night we heard one guard telling the other about us and how they were instructed to break the spirit of the two young engineers by putting them in the same cell as the man with mental disorder. Few nights later we were transferred with other young educated prisoners where we all fed with poisoned food which left us with severe stomach pain.

In cultures dominated by rigid traditions or by religious or political dogma you find young spirits present the most dangerous and threatening elements to figures in authority, and if the opportunity arises then those culture allow men in power to break or even annihilate young spirits.