WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES – When the Taliban barred women from work and education during their previous stint in power in the 1990s, the country had no way to cope. Two decades later, Afghanistan’s experience with Taliban oppression of women is different. The implications are varied and deep; the country has never in its history has had as many young educated women demanding jobs nor has it had millions of girls adamant for school.
Most important of all, perhaps, society has never been as supportive of women’s rights and their participation in public life. And, that is what is proving to be an insurmountable obstacle for the regime who assumed it could easily justify its bans on the pretexts of orthodox Islam and conservative cultural norms. Nowhere across a country of 40 million poor people have communities stood up in defense of Taliban policies.
Women everyday find new ways to counter what the legal experts believe amount to ‘gender apartheid’. From online classrooms to underground protests, women’s voices and power grow parallel to the regime’s resolute grip on power.
Women everyday find new ways to counter what the legal experts believe amount to ‘gender apartheid’
Quraysh Malikzadah is one of those defiant women. She is an enamel artist in Herat, a western city with centuries of cultural and artistic heritage. Ms. Malikzadah runs a workshop for girls who are not allowed by the Taliban to attend schools.
For the 18 girls who attend the workshop, the ancient artistry is one of the last escapes from the pain of being imprisoned in their homes, stripped of their rights and agency, unable to get an education or a job. Hanifa Sarvari, one of the apprentices, was a third-year student of Fine Arts at Herat University, one year shy of graduating with a degree, when the Taliban stormed the city. Life never returned to normal after that for her. But the enamel workshop helps ease the mental pressure and emotional toll.
Enameling, also known as mina-kari or mina-sazi, is an art with thousands of years of history in Afghanistan. In the heat of kiln, coloured glasses are fused to a metal base, creating objects of meticulous beauty. In today’s Herat, the almost disappearing art is mostly done on copper, but it can also be done on gold, silver, and pottery.
Herat, where glass work is popular, once was the epicenter of Islamic art and architecture. Legacies of the likes of Kamaluddin Behzad lives on to this day in the tiled walls of the city’s grand mosque.
Herat, where glass work is popular, once was the epicenter of Islamic art and architecture.
Perhaps overwhelmed by the Taliban’s dogmatic zeal and its persistent erasure of women from public life, what many forget is that the golden era of Islamic civilization in Herat was made possible under the auspices of a woman, the Timurid queen Gawhar Shad Begum, who harvested her power in the patronage of art.
Quraysh Malikzadah spent five years in Iran to learn enamelling. She has spent another three years in Herat practicing the trade. Her students come from all backgrounds and age groups. And that shows the breadth of the Taliban’s oppression, equally disenfranchising girls as young as teenagers and women with voices and characters as formed as college seniors.
Ms. Malikzadah is neither alone nor an exception. Initiatives such as hers are ubiquitous across Afghanistan, trying to deny the Taliban a full victory. In the northeastern city of Takhar, Golsum Samadi Qarluq and her husband put their little savings together to assemble a carpet-weaving workshop.
More than 30 women work at Ai Khanoum, Ms. Qarluq’s workshop, to make a living as the regime tries to deny them every last avenue of subsistence survival in the midst of a country-wide economic and humanitarian crisis.
Some of the women who come to weave carpet, one knot at a time, are university graduates. The weaving bench or the enamelling workshop is not a school classroom or a college lecture hall. But it is the closest thing a young woman can get in today’s Afghanistan. Tamana, another apprentice, was in ninth grade in 2021 when the Taliban showed up to rule again over Herat. Their rule closed the school doors to Tamana. The workshop, however, gives her the little joy she needs to hold on to her last threads of hope and forget her pain of not being able to go to school.
