Nafeesa has found the perfect place to hide her schoolbooks: in the kitchen, where men rarely venture, and away from the disapproving gaze of her Taliban brother.
“Children don’t belong in the kitchen, so I leave my books there,” said Nafeesa, 20, who attends an underground school in a rural village in eastern Afghanistan. “If my brother found out, he would hit me,” she says.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghan girls and young women like Nafeesa have been deprived of any opportunity to attend school since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul. It was a year ago on August 15, 2021.
Severe restrictions are placed on women
Islamic fundamentalists imposed severe restrictions on girls and women to subdue them to their fundamentalist conception of Islam. They have been largely barred from government jobs and are not allowed to travel long distances without being accompanied by a close male relative.
They should be completely covered in public, including their faces, ideally with the burqa, a full eye-level mesh veil widely used in the more isolated and conservative parts of the country.
Even before the return to power of the Taliban, the vast majority of Afghan women were already veiled, if only with a loose headscarf. For the Taliban, as a general rule, women should not leave their homes unless absolutely necessary.
Underground schools across the country
But possibly the most brutal deprivation was the March closure of girls’ secondary schools in many areas, just after their long-announced reopening.
Despite the risks and because the thirst for learning remains intact, underground schools quickly sprung up across the country, often in the rooms of ordinary private homes.
AFP journalists were able to visit three of them to meet the students and teachers, whose names have been changed to protect their safety.
“We want freedom”
At 20, Nafeesa is still studying high school subjects, but the Afghan education system has been affected by decades of war in the country.
Only his mother and older sister know that he is taking classes. Not his brother, who fought in the mountains for years with the Taliban against the previous government and foreign forces, only returning home after the Islamists’ victory last August.
In the morning, he allows her to attend a madrasah to study the Koran, but in the afternoon, without his knowledge, she sneaks into a clandestine classroom organized by the Revolutionary Women’s Association of Afghanistan (RAWA).
“We accept this risk, otherwise we would remain uneducated,” explains Nafeesa. “I want to be a doctor (…) We want to do something for ourselves, we want to have freedom, be useful to society and build our future,” proclaims the young woman.
When AFP visited her class, Nafeesa and nine other girls were discussing free speech with their teacher, sitting next to each other on a rug and taking turns reading a textbook out loud.
To get to class, they usually leave their homes hours before, taking different routes so as not to be noticed, in a region where the Pashtuns are the majority ethnic group -as in the Taliban- with a conservative patriarchal tradition.
Asked by a Taliban fighter where they are going, the girls reply that they are enrolled in a sewing workshop and hide their schoolbooks in shopping bags or under their abayas (loose black dresses).
Not only do they take risks, but sometimes they also make sacrifices, like Nafeesa’s sister, who dropped out of school to thwart any suspicion her brother might have.
A cessation of classes not justified by Islam
According to religious scholars, nothing in Islam justifies banning secondary education for girls. A year after coming to power, the Taliban continue to insist that classes be allowed to resume, but without giving a timetable.
The issue divided the movement. According to various sources, a hardline faction advising Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada is opposed to all girls receiving an education or, at best, wants it to be limited to religious studies and practical lessons such as cooking and cooking. to sew.
The official explanation for the end of secondary education, raised from the beginning, is that it is a simple “technical” matter, and that girls will return to colleges and secondary schools as soon as a program established on Islamic rules is defined. .
Today, girls still attend primary school, and until now, female students can attend university, although classes there are single-sex. But without a high school diploma, teenage girls won’t be able to pass college entrance exams. The current cohorts of female college students could be the last in the country in the near future.
Towards “a generation of sacrificed girls”?
For researcher Abdul Bari Madani, “education is an inalienable right in Islam, for both men and women.”
“If this ban continues, Afghanistan will return to medieval times (…) An entire generation of girls will be sacrificed,” he worries.
It was this fear of losing a generation that led teacher Tamkin to turn her house in Kabul into a school. The 40-year-old almost sacrificed herself when she was forced to drop out of school when the Taliban first came to power between 1996 and 2001 and banned all girls from attending school.
It took years for Tamkin to train, self-taught, to become a teacher before she was stripped of her job at the Education Ministry when the Taliban returned to power last August and returned home to women in public employment, with a few exceptions.
“I didn’t want these girls to be like me,” explains Tamkin with tears in her eyes. “They must have a better future,” she pleads.
With the encouragement of her husband, she first transformed a storage room into a classroom. She then sold a family cow to be able to buy school books, because most of her students come from poor families and cannot afford them. Today, she teaches English and science to around 25 enthusiastic students.
“I just want to learn”
On a rainy day in Kabul recently, the girls went to their class for a biology lesson.
“I just want to learn. It doesn’t matter what the place of study is like,” says Narwan, sitting with classmates of all ages, who theoretically should be in a senior high school.
Behind her, a poster on the wall encourages students to be kind: “The tongue has no bones, but it is so strong that it can break your heart, so be careful with your words.” It was the benevolence of his neighbors that allowed Tamkin to conceal the true purpose of the school.
“The Taliban repeatedly asked ‘What’s going on here?’ I told the neighbors to say that it was a madrasah”, a religious school, explains the teacher.
Maliha, a 17-year-old student, is a firm believer in the idea that one day the Taliban will no longer be in power. “So we will make good use of our knowledge,” she hopes.
“We are not afraid of the Taliban”
On the outskirts of Kabul, in a maze of adobe houses, Laila leads another underground class. Seeing her daughter’s face after the abrupt cancellation in March of the announced reopening of high schools, she knew she had to do something.
“If my daughter cried, the daughters of the other parents had to cry too,” recalls the 38-year-old teacher.
A dozen girls meet two days a week at Laila’s, which has a patio and garden where she grows vegetables.
In the classroom, a large window overlooks the garden. His students, whose books and notebooks are placed in blue plastic sleeves, are sitting on a rug, playful and studious. At the beginning of the course, it is the correction of homework.
“We are not afraid of the Taliban,” said Kawsar, 18. “If they say something, we will fight but we will continue studying,” continues the young woman.
Take courses to gain freedom
Studies are not the only goal for some Afghan girls and women, often married in abusive or restrictive relationships, who want to gain a little freedom.
Zahra, who attends an underground school in a rural village in eastern Afghanistan, was married at 14 and now lives with in-laws who oppose the idea of her attending classes. She takes sleeping pills to control her anxiety and she fears that her husband’s family will force her to stay home.
“I tell them I go to the local bazaar, and I come here” at school, explains Zahra, for whom it is also the only way to make friends.
Source: BFM TV
