Women rights under the Taliban

Ahmed Rashid ’Taliban’


Within 24 hours of taking Kabul, the Taliban imposed the stricted Islamic system in place anywhere in the world. All women were banned from work, even though one quarter of Kabul’s civil service, the entire elementary school system and much of the health system were run by women. Girls’ schools and colleges were closed down affecting more than 70,000 female students and a strict dress code of head-to-toe veils for women was imposed.
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Within three months of capture of Kabul, the Taliban closed 63 schools in the city affecting 103,000 girls, 148,000 boys and 11,200 teachers, of whom 7800 were women. They shut down Kabul University sending home some 10,000 students of which 4,000 were women..

..Kandahar was always a conservative city but Herat’s female elite once spoke French as a second language and copied fashions of the Shah’s court in Tehran. Forty percent of Kabul’s women worked, both under the communist regime and the post-1992 Mujaheddin government...

The Taliban had no knowledge of Herat’s history or traditions. They arrived to drive Herati women indoors. People were banned from visiting the shrines of Sufi saints of which Herat had an abundance. The Taliban cancelled out years of efforts by the Mujaheddin commander Ismael Khan to educate the population, by shutting down all girls’ schools. Most boys schools also closed as their teachers were women. They segregated the few functioning hospitals, shut down bathhouses and banned women in the bazaar. As a result Herati women were the first to rebel against Taliban excesses. On 17 October 1996 more than 100 women protested outside the office of the Governor against closure of the city’s bathhouses. The women were beaten and then arrested by the Taliban religious police, who went from house to house warning men to keep their women indoors...

Mazar[i-Sharif], once a bustling stop on the ancient Silk Route, had regained its pre-eminence as a key staging post in the now massive smuggling trade between Pakistan, Central Asia and Iran... unlike other warlords, Dostum ran an efficient adminstration with a functioning health and educational system. Some 1,800 girls, the majority dressed in skirts and high heels, attended Balkh University in Mazar, the only operational university in the country. As a consequence he guaranteed security to tens of thousands of refugees from Kabul, who had fled the capital in several waves since 1992, seeking refuge in Mazar which they saw as the last bastion of peace. Famous Afghan singers and dancers who could no longer perform in Kabul moved to Mazar. It was also a city of pilgrimage. Thousands came every day to pray at the blue-tiled Tomb of Ali, the cousin and son-in-lw of the Prophet Mohammed and the fourth Caliph of Islam, whom Shia in particular revere... Dostum was revered for the simple fact that his city had not been touched in the past 18 years of war...
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When 2,500 heavily armed Taliban troops rolled into Mazar in the pick-ups under Mullah Abdul Razaq(the man who had ordered Najibullah’s murder), they declined to share power with Malik and offered him the insignificant post of Deputy Foreign Minister in the Kabul government. The Taliban, the majority of whom had never been in the north before, arrogantly started disarming the fierce Uzbek and Hazara troops, took over the mosques from where they declared the imposition of Sharia law, shut down schools and the university and drove women off the streets. It was a recipe for disaster in a city where a complex mix of ethnic and religious groups lives and which had remained the most open and liberal in the country. Pakistani diplomats and ISI officers flew into the city in a bid to help the Taliban renegotiate the terms of the agreement, which was already falling apart..

Bamiyan in Hazarajat
..the Hazaras were also starving simply for who they were. Since August 1997 in a bid to force them to surrender, the Taliban had closed all the roads from the south, west and east that entered their mountain fastness. There was no relief possible from the north, .. Three hundred thousand Hazaras in the province of Bamiyan were already hungry, while another 700,000 in the three neighbouring provinces of Ghor, Wardak and Ghazni were also suffering from shortages-one million people in all. For months the UN and its sister organization the World Food Programme had been holding tortorous negotiations with the Taliban to allow relief convoys through, but the Taliban had refused. The UN were even more frustrated with the fact that Pakistan had contracted to provide the Taliban with 600,000 tons of wheat, but had made no humanitarian demand on the Taliban to lift their blockade on Bamiyan. It was the first time in the past 20 years of conflict that one faction had used food as a weapon of war against another..

The sectarian enmity between the Sunni Pashtun and the Shia Hazaras went back a long way, but the Taliban had brought a new edge to the conflict for they treated all Shias as munafaqeen or hypocrites and beyond the pale of Islam. Even more irksome for the Taliban, was that Hazara women were playing a significant political, social and even military role in the region’s defence. The 80-member Central Council of the Hazara’s Hizb-e-Wahadat party had 12 women members, any of them educated professional. Women looked after UN aid programmes and Wahadat’s efforts provide basic literacy, health care and family planning. Women often fought in battle alongside their men-some had killed Taliban in Mazar in May. Female professors, who had fled Kabul had set up a university in Bamiyan, probably the poorest in the world where classrooms were constructed with mud and straw and there was not electricity or heating and few books.
’We detest the Taliban, they are against all civilisation, Afghan culture and women in particular. They have given Islam and Afghan people a bad name,’ Dr Humera Rahi, who taught Persian literacture at the university and emerged as a leading poet of the resistance, told me. Nor did the Taliban appreciate Hazara women’s style of dress. Dr Rahi and her colleagues wore skirts and high-heeled boots.

..the Taliban launched an offensive from three directions on Bamiyan, which fell on 13 September 1998 after some Hazara commanders surrendered to the Taliban. Karim Khalili and other Wahadat leaders, together with much of the population of the town, took to the hills as the first Taliban troops entered...

Most Afghans felt demoralized by the fact that the Islamic world declined to take up the task of condemning the Taliban’s extremism. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf states have never issued a single statement on the need for women’s education or human rights in Afghanistan. Nor did they ever question the Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia. Asian Muslim countries were also silent.

Surprisingly, Iran issued the toughest defence of women’s rights under Islam. ’Through their fossilized policies the Taliban stop girls from attending schools, stop women working out of their homes and all that in the name of Islam. What could be worse than committing violence, narrow-mindedness and limiting women’s rights and defaming Islam,’ said Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, as early as 1996. Iranian criticism of Taliban policies escalated dramatically after the deaths of their diplomats in Mazar in 1998.


We are told, by some who apparently smoke the finest hashish, that the Indians are the same as the Taliban in their treatment of women, with the ’liberal’ Pakis caught in the middle of course.