MAZAR-I-SHARIF,
Afghanistan — The mullahs stared silently at the screen. They shifted in their
chairs and fiddled with pencils. Koranic verses flashed above them, but the
topic was something that made everybody a little uncomfortable.
“A baby
should be breast-fed for at least 21 months,” said the instructor. “Milk is
safe inside the breast. Dust and germs can’t get inside.”
It was a
seminar on birth control, a likely subject for a nation whose fertility rate of
6 children per woman is the highest in Asia. But the audience was unusual: 10
Islamic religious leaders from this city and its suburbs, wearing turbans and
sipping tea.
The message
was simple. Babies are good, but not too many; wait two years before having
another to give your wife’s body a chance to recover. Nothing in Islam
expressly forbids
birth control. But it does emphasize procreation, and mullahs, like
leaders of other faiths, consider children to be blessings from God, and are
usually the most determined opponents of having fewer of them.
It is an attitude
that Afghanistan
can no longer afford, in the view of the employees of the nonprofit group that
runs the seminars, Marie Stopes
International. The high birthrate places a heavy weight on a society
where average per capita earnings are about $700 a year. It is also a risk to
mothers. Afghanistan is second only to Sierra Leone in maternal mortality
rates, which run as high as 8 percent in some areas.
“If we work
hard on this issue, we can rescue our country from misery,” said Rahmatuddin
Bashardost, a doctor who helps lead the mullahs’ classes.
The mullahs
were reluctant participants. Truth be told, they were paid to show up. But
surprisingly, they seemed to emerge from the session invigorated.
“This was a
useful and friendly discussion,” said Mullah Amruddin, a tall man in a dramatic
turban. “If you have too many children and you can’t control them, that’s bad
for Islam.”
Maybe they
were so receptive because a mullah led the class, using their own language —
scripture from the Koran. Or maybe it was because some attitudes are starting
to change.
Syed Wasem
Massoom, 29, a mullah and one of the trainers, said urban Afghans were looking
for ways to have fewer children. Afghanistan was changing, he said, especially
its cities, and mullahs had better be thinking about these issues.
“People kept
asking us how to have less children,” he said.
Afghan women
who work for Marie Stopes, distributing birth control door to door in the
country’s capital, have also noticed an interest. An overwhelming majority of
people are still skeptical of their motives. (Foreign spies! Christian
missionaries who want to reduce the Muslim population!) But a growing number
are open to the idea.
“Sometimes
they are kind of surprised that this kind of thing exists,” said one of the
workers, a woman named Aziza.
In 2009
alone, the sale of birth control pills nearly doubled to 11,000 in September
from 6,000 packages in January, according to Marie Stopes figures.
One woman
was so happy to have birth control pills that she hugged and kissed Aziza,
ripped open a package and swallowed a pill with a gulp of water.
“She said
she didn’t want to wait until evening,” Aziza said, laughing at the memory. The
total number of the woman’s children: 17. Three dead, 14 living.
The most
difficult families are ones headed by mullahs. Aziza and her colleagues tread
carefully in those households. Mahmouda, another worker, recalled walking into
one such house and finding the mullah’s wife washing clothes and trying to calm
a baby. She signaled silently that Mahmouda should talk in a low voice.
“ ‘If
my husband finds out, he’ll punish me,’ ” Mahmouda recalled the woman
saying. “ ‘I’m pregnant now. I really need those pills.’ ”
Taking birth
control in secret is not unusual, the women said. Even Aziza’s own husband opposes
her using it.
“He said,
‘We are Muslims and God gives us babies,’ ” she said.
She lies to
him, but with a clear conscience. “I talked to him in a good way,” she
explained. “I told him about the benefits, but he didn’t listen to me.”
Those who
oppose it sometimes get violent. Aziza recalled people running her out of a
neighborhood in Kabul after she introduced birth control there. They accused
her of being on the payroll of the Americans, taking dollars to weaken the
country.
“ ‘They
want to capture Afghanistan,’ ” she recalled that they said. “ ‘If
the Muslims are many, they won’t be able to.’ ”
In
Mazar-i-Sharif, it is one mullah at a time.
Mr. Massoom,
the mullah trainer, put it most directly. “This is an Islamic country,” he
said. “If the clerics support this, no one will oppose it.”