Last updated Women wearing the burqa in northern Afghanistan
The Golden Needle Sewing School was an underground school for women in Herat, Afghanistan, during the First Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Because women were not allowed to be educated under the strict interpretation of Islamic law introduced by the Taliban,[1] women writers belonging to the Herat Literary Circle set up a group called the Sewing Circles of Herat, which founded the Golden Needle Sewing School in or around 1996.[2]
Women would visit the school three times a week, ostensibly to sew, but would instead hear lectures given by professors of literature from Herat University. Children playing outside would alert the group if the religious police approached, giving them time to hide their books and pick up sewing equipment. Herat may have been the most oppressed area under the Taliban, according to Christina Lamb, author of The Sewing Circles of Herat, because it was a cultured city and mostly Shi'a, both of which the Taliban opposed.[2] She told Radio Free Europe:
They would arrive in their burqas with their bags full of material and scissors. Underneath they would have notebooks and pens. And once they got inside, instead of learning to sew, they would actually be talking about Shakespeare and James Joyce, Dostoyevsky and their own writing. It was a tremendous risk they were taking. If they had been caught, they would have been, at the very least, imprisoned and tortured. Maybe hanged.[2]
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. It is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying 652,864 square kilometers (252,072 sq mi) of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. Kabul is the country's capital and largest city. According to the World Population review, as of 2023, Afghanistan's population is 43 million. The National Statistics Information Authority of Afghanistan estimated the population to be 32.9 million as of 2020.
The history of Afghanistan, preceding the establishment of the Emirate of Afghanistan in 1823 is shared with that of neighbouring Iran, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The Sadozai monarchy ruled the Afghan Durrani Empire, considered the founding state of modern Afghanistan.
Herāt is an oasis city and the third-largest city in Afghanistan. In 2020, it had an estimated population of 574,276, and serves as the capital of Herat Province, situated south of the Paropamisus Mountains in the fertile valley of the Hari River in the western part of the country. An ancient civilization on the Silk Road between West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, it serves as a regional hub in the country's west.
Kandahar is a city in Afghanistan, located in the south of the country on the Arghandab River, at an elevation of 1,010 m (3,310 ft). It is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul, with a population of about 614,118. It is the capital of Kandahar Province and the centre of the larger cultural region called Loy Kandahar.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a women's organization based in Kabul, Afghanistan, that promotes women's rights and secular democracy. It was founded in 1977 by Meena Keshwar Kamal, an Afghan student activist who was assassinated in February 1987 for her political activities. The group, which supports non-violent strategies, had its initial office in Kabul, Afghanistan, but then moved to Pakistan in the early 1980s.
The Taliban, which also refers to itself by its state name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is an Afghan political and militant movement with an ideology comprising elements of Pashtun nationalism and the Deobandi movement of Islamic fundamentalism. It ruled approximately 75% of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, before it was overthrown by an American invasion after the September 11th attacks carried out by the Taliban's ally al-Qaeda. The Taliban recaptured Kabul in August 2021 following the departure of coalition forces, after 20 years of Taliban insurgency, and now controls the entire country. The Taliban government is not recognized by any country and has been internationally condemned for restricting human rights, including women's rights to work and have an education.
The treatment of women by the Taliban refers to actions and policies by two distinct Taliban regimes in Afghanistan which are either specific or highly commented upon, mostly due to discrimination, since they first took control in 1996. During their first rule of Afghanistan, the Taliban were notorious internationally for their misogyny and violence against women. In 1996, women were mandated to wear the burqa at all times in public. In a systematic segregation sometimes referred to as gender apartheid, women were not allowed to work, nor were they allowed to be educated after the age of eight. Women seeking an education were forced to attend underground schools, where they and their teachers risked execution if caught. They were not allowed to be treated by male doctors unless accompanied by a male chaperone, which led to illnesses remaining untreated. They faced public flogging and execution for violations of the Taliban's laws.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, also referred to as the First Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, was a totalitarian Islamic state led by the Taliban that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At its peak, the Taliban government controlled approximately 90% of the country, while remaining regions in the northeast were held by the Northern Alliance, which maintained broad international recognition as a continuation of the Islamic State of Afghanistan.
The history of the Jews in Afghanistan goes back at least 2,500 years. Ancient Iranian tradition suggests that Jews settled in Balkh, an erstwhile Zoroastrian and Buddhist stronghold, shortly after the collapse of the Kingdom of Judah in 587 BCE. In more recent times, the community has been reduced to complete extinction due to emigration, primarily to Israel. At the time of the large-scale 2021 Taliban offensive, only two Jews were still residing in the country: Zablon Simintov and his distant cousin Tova Moradi. When the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was re-established by the Taliban in August 2021, both Simintov and Moradi made aliyah on 7 September 2021 and 29 October 2021, respectively, leaving Afghanistan completely empty of Jews. Today, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan Jewish community resides in Israel, with a small group of a few hundred living in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Nadia Anjuman was a poet from Afghanistan.
Gender segregation in Islamic law, custom, law and traditions refers to the practices and requirements in Islamic countries and communities for the separation of men and boys from women and girls in social and other settings. In terms of actual practice, the degree of adherence to these rules depends on local laws and cultural norms. In some Muslim-majority countries, men and women who are unrelated may be forbidden to interact closely or participate in the same social spaces. In other Muslim countries, these practices may be partly or completely unobserved. These rules are generally more relaxed in the media and in business settings, and more strictly observed in religious or formal settings.
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Relations between Afghanistan and modern Iran were officially established in 1935 during Kingdom's Zahir Shah's reign and the Pahlavi dynasty's Reza Shah Pahlavi, though ties between the two countries have existed for millennia. As a result, many Afghans speak Persian, as Dari is one of the official languages of Afghanistan, and many in Afghanistan also celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
Sex segregation refers to the physical and spatial separation of humans by sex in public or private places. In public places, women are forced to wear the burqa at all times, because, according to one Taliban spokesman, "the face of a woman is a source of corruption" for men not related to them (Non-Mahram).
Women's rights in Afghanistan are severely restricted by the Taliban. In 2023, the United Nations termed Afghanistan as the world's most repressive country for women. Since the US troops withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban gradually imposed restrictions on women's freedom of movement, education, and employment. Women are banned from studying in secondary schools and universities, making Afghanistan the only country to prohibit females from studying beyond the sixth grade. Women are not allowed in parks, gyms, or beauty salons. They are forbidden from going outside for a walk or exercise, from speaking or showing any part of their face or body outside the home, or even from singing or reading from within their own homes if they could be heard by strangers outside. In extreme cases, women have reportedly been subjected to gang-rape and torture in Taliban prisons.
The Taliban, which also refers to itself by its state name, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, is an Afghan militant movement, that governs Afghanistan, with an ideology comprising elements of Pashtun nationalism and the Deobandi movement of Islamic fundamentalism.
Fauzia Gailani was elected to represent Herat Province in Afghanistan's Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of its National Legislature, in 2005. She won almost 16,885 votes, more than any other candidate in Herat.
Homeira Qaderi born in 1980 is an Afghan writer, advocate for women's rights, and professor of Persian literature, currently serving as a Robert G. James Scholar Fellow at Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Research, Harvard University.
The politics of Afghanistan' are based on a totalitarian emirate within the Islamic theocracy in which the Taliban Movement holds a monopoly on power. Dissent is not permitted, and politics are mostly limited to internal Taliban policy debates and power struggles. As the government is provisional, there is no constitution or other basis for the rule of law. The structure is autocratic, with all power concentrated in the hands of the supreme leader and his clerical advisors. According to the V-Dem Democracy indices Afghanistan was as of 2023 the 4th least electoral democratic country in the world.
Mujib-ur-Rahman Ansari was an Afghan mullah and cleric who operated in the city of Herat. An ally of the Taliban, Ansari was considered to be a Salafist and Wahhabist preacher, and was a staunch opponent of the American-backed Afghan government. In the late 2010s, Ansari seized control of a district of Herat, where he established extrajudicial sharia courts and checkpoints operated by his armed enforcers. A Taliban official described Ansari as being Afghanistan's most popular religious scholar in 2022.
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