Facing the future: the women of Afghanistan look ahead - like flowers, wearing modern clothes and finding work - Statistical Data Included

Current Events, March 8, 2002

KABUL, Afghanistan--"It's as if a garden, once without flowers, has been reborn," said Karim, a teacher, about the streets of the Afghan capital now that the Taliban have been ousted from power.

What's in bloom? The women and girls of Afghanistan.

For the first time in six years, women are wearing brightly colored dresses instead of the head-to-toe blue burqas, which cover the entire body and have just a small mesh-covered opening over the eyes. They can wear high heels, laugh in public, and show their faces. Women are lining up outside office buildings and stores to apply for jobs, and girls are once again filling up classrooms. The Taliban forbade women and girls to do any of those things.

Karim's wife, Miriam, remembers the day she first ventured out of the house without her burqa. "At first I was a little afraid. I wasn't used to it," she said. For safety reasons, Karim accompanied his wife the first two times. Under the Taliban, a woman could be beaten for not wearing a burqa or for going out of the house unaccompanied by a male relative. The couple faced some angry looks and insults, but for Miriam there was no turning back. "I felt that from now on I was free, that I didn't have to hide myself," she said.

Miriam, who ran a secret, illegal school for girls during the Taliban rule, hated the burqa. It was heavy, hard to see out of, and demoralizing, she said. "I didn't feel like a woman; I felt like a blue truck," said Miriam. "In the streets, no one knew if I was beautiful or ugly, young or old, elegant or not. I felt like a prisoner," she said.

Not All Dare to Bare

Not all Afghan women have shed their burqas, however. Nasima Safi, of Kandahar, like many women, is afraid to give up the garment. When she learned that the Taliban had fled their spiritual stronghold, she dug out a pair of black heels and a bottle of silver nail polish she had hidden in her closet, but going out without a burqa, she felt, was still too dangerous. "Even if there is no rule, we [still] cannot show our faces. Some people will spit on us on the street," said Safi, who works at Kandahar's Mirwais Hospital. (Health care was the only field in which the Taliban permitted women to work.)

Eqlima Hammadghus, a nurse who works with Safi, thinks it will take years for her to feel safe enough to go out in Kandahar without wearing a burqa. "We are still afraid of people we don't know, since some people still support the Taliban. They might attack us or threaten to kill us," she said.

Gul Bibi, however, won't take off her burqa for another reason--tradition. "I will never take my burqa off. My grandmother wore this," she said. Bibi, 38, said she's worn a burqa since she was a young girl. "If I didn't [wear it], I would feel men were eating me with their eyes," said Bibi. Like many Afghans, Bibi believes that wearing the burqa is in accordance with the Koran's teaching that women dress modestly.

"It's a sin for them to show their faces, and it's a sin for me to look at them," said Qari Edi Mohamed, who gives the call to prayer at a large mosque in Kabul. Mullah Hamidullah, a leader of another mosque in Kabul explained it this way: "Barefaced women are like honey, and they can attract some bad people."

It's Bigger Than the Burqa

Whether or not to wear a burqa, however, is the least of women's problems in Afghanistan, said Lynn Amowitz, a professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of a study on Afghan women's health for Physicians for Human Rights. (See some of her study's results on page 4.) "Even if you take off the burqa, it doesn't get women jobs or education or save them from dying in childbirth," she said.

According to the World Health Organization, about 1,700 women die in childbirth in Afghanistan each year, compared with eight women per 100,000 births in the United States. The average life expectancy for an Afghan woman is 44 years. In the United States, the average woman's life span is about 79 years. Only an estimated 4 percent of women in Afghanistan are able to read.

The Future Looks Bright

Those numbers may soon change for the better. Two members of Afghanistan's interim government, headed by Hamid Karzai, are women. Sima Samar, a doctor who runs health centers for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, was elected to head Afghanistan's hew ministry for Women's Affairs. Suhaila Seddiqi, a surgeon and former army general at a military hospital in Kabul, is the new minister for public health.

"Priority should be given to education, primary school facilities, the economy, and reconstruction of the country," said Seddiqi.

At Samar's request, hundreds of women gathered in Kabul on February 10 to apply for 500 newly opened government jobs as teachers, civil servants, and administrators.

Most of the women showed up wearing blue burqas, but as the crowd grew larger, the smiling women pushed back their veils to greet old friends face to face.

Get Talking

Ask students: What was life like for women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule? What is a burqa? Why might some women be reluctant to remove their burqas even though the government of Afghanistan no longer mandates them?