Women's Education and the Forces Against it

As I watched the video on SOLA, I felt a mix of guilt and gratitude. Guilt that I often take my education, security, and daily life for granted. Gratitude that I am given these things, without needing to worry about them, at least not nearly as often or as much as Shabana, or the SOLA students, or any of the girls and women from Afghanistan.

Hearing the girls’ reactions to being kicked out of school was heart-wrenching — this is not like the stay-at-home warning for covid, or the personal choice to stay home from school, this is personal, intentionally undermining, cruel. Although the Taliban may convince themselves that this ban is for the “good” of their religion under the Quran, there are clearly just as many, in fact far more, indicators that the Prophet Mohammad and other religious leaders would have encouraged the girls and women of Afghanistan to be educated, from stories of the Prophet giving the women in his household an education, to islamic history’s 70 male prisoners, who had to teach both girls and boys to be released from jail. Of course, the Taliban’s-religious-justification interpretation is only one of many, another of which narrows it down to cultural practices rather than religious. Many of the Taliban leaders come from the southern and eastern areas of Afghanistan, where certain Pashtun tribes stay, and where many of the women in the areas did not  receive an education, and often were made to stay at home and wear clothes that cover. Many of these aspects have been adopted by the Taliban and enforced, removing women’s ability to go to school, and making women stay inside, and wear hijabs or burkas. (I feel it is important to mention that despite people’s beliefs that clothing such as burkas came from the Taliban and their first Regime, they were first referenced in the 18th century, in a record by a British soldier, long before the Taliban formed. Furthermore, they have not always been forced upon people; to this day there are many women who choose on their own to wear these clothes to “preserve their self respect and honor”— and historically, they have been a sign of high class). 

Both of these interpretations have been studied by historians, and both have merit as possibly being the reason behind the Taliban’s actions.

In the Taliban, as Dr. Quimby stated, a common belief is that “a woman’s place is in a house or in a grave,” a statement that stood out to me as I listened. By treating women as just housekeepers and dead weight, it ignores so much of the potential that Shabana knows the young girls of Afghanistan carry with them. Shabana knows that many of the children she teaches have the potential to be strong, to be smart, to lead people around the world, and especially in Afghanistan.