The Taliban have announced they will reopen schools and universities to women. A success for more social participation? Not really, argues Mina Jawad. She finds their decision rather rejects women´s complex realities in Afghanistan.
Sotooda Forotan stands on a pedestal in the citadel of the city of Herat in Western Afghanistan. In front of her are two microphones and the white flag of the Taliban emirate in miniature. The 15-year-old is supposed to recite a poem for the Prophet's birthday. Instead, she looks at the crowd and addresses her words at the Taliban directly. “Herat is the city of education and culture. As a daughter of this city, I ask: Why are the gates to the schools for girls closed?”.
Sotooda is one of over three million female students in Afghanistan. As of August 2021, schools and universities remain closed for women. Not only due to the turmoil of the disintegrating Afghan republic, but also because the closures were a “welcome gift” from the sprawling Taliban emirate – and indefinitely vacations, at least for girls. As Sotooda delivers her speech, October is already drawing to a close. Boys, meanwhile, were allowed back on the school benches as early as September.
At the end of January 2022, the Taliban announced that schools would be reopened for girls starting from March 21st, 2022. The opening of state universities to women and men occurred across the board during February 2022. In a moderate tone, with smiles and in Oxford English, the Taliban declared that the rule of law, human and women's rights would be implemented ‘within the framework of Sharia and Afghan values’. They post YouTube videos and seek out camera crews, propagating their policies. In the 1990s the Taliban shunned away from cameras. Have they suddenly become open to criticism or even moderate?
Hardly. This decision rather exemplifies their proficiency for strategic timing. After all, March 21st marks not only the beginning of spring in Afghanistan, but also the traditional start of the new academic and calendar year. The New Year’s gift of spring follows the welcome gift from August. The same calculation is behind the recent house searches in Kabul and Pol-e Khomri. While the world focuses on the horror in Ukraine, the Taliban are doing house searches, continuing to eliminate opponents and further enforcing their brutal policies.
Internal and external attrition
The Taliban´s decision to open schools was implemented with a deceitful strategy: stalling for months. The Taliban simply left the population and the international community in uncertainty as to whether and how schools would be opened again. For the girls and women in the country, this meant a grueling wait and trepidation, enabling the Taliban to open schools with far more repressive conditions. The waiting game was a negotiation tactic.
A change in the curricula was announced. The teaching of ‘Islamic and Afghan values’ was enforced. Also, girls and boys should be stricter spatially and temporally separated. Even before the Taliban came to power, joint instructions from the third grade onward were a rare occurrence. Allowing children to be only taught by the same gender, makes it virtually impossible for girls to have universal access to education. Especially since men dominate the teaching-staff there can be no parity in teaching subjects. This is in-line with a report, stating that girls will no longer be allowed to be taught technical subjects, such as civics and singing.
The Taliban announced a ‘reform’ of the curricula for universities. However, the Minister of Higher Education, Abdul Baqi Haqqani, has so far failed to provide a more detailed explanation of what this reform entails. The new chancellor of Kabul University, Ashraf Ghairat, has indicated that from now on there will be less theory and more practice, reflecting the Taliban's mind-set. In the lecture halls of Afghan universities, curtains are to be installed, preventing any visual contact between the two sexes. Art students already fear a change in textbooks. Their concerns remain unheard due to of the self-censorship of Afghan media.
Playing the game of uncertainty is the Taliban´s strategy for strengthening their position at global conferences on their international recognition. By refusing to allow schools and universities to be opened rapidly, the Taliban succeeded in preparing and shaping them according to their own ideals. Girls and women having access to education, can easily be sold to the international public as a fulfillment of human rights and a success. The fact that this is a semblance of more equitable educational opportunities in the country is a mirage. Fatally hidden from sight is that the Taliban succeed in pushing women and girls into prescribed life-plans and dependencies, especially through educational institutions.
Education is not everything
By focusing on education as a benchmark, the opportunities for girls and women in Afghanistan remain unseen in other areas of their daily and work life. For example, female journalists at state-run media outlets, such as Shabnam Khan Dawran, were fired when the Taliban took power. They are still actively prevented from working, even at private-run media outlets. Women working in the civil service have also lost their jobs in recent months, for example, the former prosecutor Moshtari Danesh. She was particularly active in cases involving women with disabilities. Alia Azizi is another example. The former prison director has now been missing for months. Lastly, the Ministry of Women's Affairs was abolished and instead transformed into an inquisition responsible for ‘the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice.’
What opportunities remain for women to participate in the public and professional life, besides the educational sector? Appointing the physician Malalay Faizi as the director of a maternity hospital in Kabul speaks volumes: being mentally and spatially close to childbirth in her professional life only further cements old gender roles. This renewed mirage of supposed participation does not mean success. On the contrary, it is an obvious expression of a policy of tokenism – a pretextual measure, in which only symbolic efforts are made to put marginalized people on an equal footing but nothing changes structurally. Such women fit perfectly into the Taliban´s new public relations´ stunt.
Rural versus urban
An important component of Taliban policy is the transfer of prevailing conditions from the rural provinces to the urban centers. This patriarchal revolt against the urban population opposes the complexity of women's realities and aims at standardizing them. To protect the rural population from the ‘blasphemous’ cities, the Taliban reactivated the law restricting the radius of movement from their first rule: from 45 miles onwards, women must be accompanied by a close male relative. The justification for this decision is that without male relatives women would be exposed to harassment by men – including the recommendation to wear full-face veils. This is not pragmatism, but the institutionalization of misogyny, perpetrating the ideology of victim reversal.
Women from the urban middle class are particularly affected by this policy. Social climbers and intellectuals have good relations with activists in the diaspora. These are the women who, in the Taliban’s´ narrative, stand for the vice and decadence of urban space. Women who, since the takeover of power, have had the privilege of being partially evacuated. Women, who have been socialized in the microcosm of urban centers while most of the population lives in the countryside.
These women and girls, like Sotooda Forotan, are the ones who lead the protests against the Taliban. Ever since their takeover these women and girls have taken to the streets chanting ‘bread, work, freedom’. Of course, they are in favor of opening schools to girls. But this is not where the struggle ends. Afghan women have individual desires, hopes, and diverse life plans – not recognizing this complexity, robs them of their humanity.
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