Related Research Articles
Afghans or Afghan people are nationals or citizens of Afghanistan, or people with ancestry from there. Afghanistan is made up of various ethnicities, of which Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks are the largest. The two main languages spoken by Afghans are Pashto and Dari, and many Afghans are bilingual in speaking fluent Pashto and Dari.
The Soviet–Afghan War was a protracted armed conflict fought in the Soviet-controlled Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) from 1979 to 1989. The war was a major conflict of the Cold War as it saw extensive fighting between the DRA, the Soviet Union and allied paramilitary groups against the Afghan mujahideen and their allied foreign fighters. While the mujahideen were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of their support came from Pakistan, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. The involvement of the foreign powers made the war a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside. The conflict led to the deaths of between 562,000 and 2,000,000 Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Approximately 6.5% to 11.5% of Afghanistan's erstwhile population of 13.5 million people is estimated to have been killed over the course of the conflict. The Soviet–Afghan War caused grave destruction throughout Afghanistan and has also been cited by scholars as a significant factor that contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, formally ending the Cold War.
Meena Keshwar Kamal, commonly known as Meena, was an Afghan revolutionary political activist, feminist, women's rights activist and founder of Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who was assassinated in 1987.
Islam in Afghanistan began to be practiced after the Arab Islamic conquest of Afghanistan from the 7th to the 10th centuries, with the last holdouts to conversion submitting in the late 19th century. It was generally accepted by local communities as a replacement of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism, local tribes began converting to the new religion. Islam is the official state religion of Afghanistan, with approximately 99.7% of the Afghan population being Muslim. Roughly 90% practice Sunni Islam, while around 10% are Shias. Most Shias belong to the Twelver branch and only a smaller number follow Ismailism.
Lillias Anna Hamilton was a British medical doctor and writer. She was born at Tomabil Station, New South Wales to Hugh Hamilton and his wife Margaret Clunes. After attending school in Ayr and then Cheltenham Ladies' College, she trained first as a nurse, in Liverpool, before going on to study medicine in Scotland, qualifying as a Doctor of Medicine in 1890.
Sima Samar is an Afghan woman and human rights advocate, activist and medical doctor within national and international forums, who served as Minister of Women's Affairs of Afghanistan from December 2001 to 2003. She is the former Chairperson of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and, from 2005 to 2009, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan. In 2012, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "her longstanding and courageous dedication to human rights, especially the rights of women, in one of the most complex and dangerous regions in the world."
Shukria Barakzai is an Afghan politician, journalist and a prominent Muslim feminist. She was the Ambassador of Afghanistan to Norway. She is a recipient of the International Editor of the Year Award.
Anahita Ratebzad was an Afghan socialist and Marxist-Leninist politician and a member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and the Revolutionary Council under the leadership of Babrak Karmal. One of the first women elected to the Afghan parliament, Ratebzad was deputy head of state from 1980 to 1986.
Bacha posh an Afghan tradition in which some families without sons will pick a daughter to live and behave as a boy. This enables the child to behave more freely: attending school, escorting her sisters in public, and working.
Roya Mahboob is an Afghan businesswoman and entrepreneur. She founded and serves as CEO of the Afghan Citadel Software Company, a full-service software development company based in Herat, Afghanistan. She has received attention for being among the first IT female CEOs in Afghanistan, where it is still relatively rare for women to work outside the home. On 18 April 2013, Roya Mahboob was named to TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2013 for her work in building internet classrooms in high schools in Afghanistan and for Women's Annex, a multilingual blog and video site hosted by Film Annex. This was the 10th anniversary of the TIME special edition. The Women's Annex platform give the women of Afghanistan and Central Asia a platform to tell their stories to the world. The TIME magazine introduction to Roya Mahboob was written by Sheryl Sandberg who is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead". U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Roya Mahboob and other Afghan women entrepreneurs at the International Center for Women's Economic Development at the American University of Afghanistan. She is also known for her work with online film distribution platform and Web Television Network Film Annex on the Afghan Development Project. She is a current advisor at the Forbes School of Business & Technology.
No Burqas Behind Bars is a 2012 Swedish feature-length documentary film made by Maryam Ebrahimi and Nima Sarvestani on life in a women's prison in Afghanistan.
Naila Kabeer is an Indian-born British Bangladeshi social economist, research fellow, writer and Professor at the London School of Economics. She was also president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) from 2018 to 2019. She is on the editorial committee of journals such as Feminist Economist, Development and Change, Gender and Development, Third World Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. She works primarily on poverty, gender and social policy issues. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection, focused on South and South East Asia.
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.
Mohammad Akram Osman was an Afghan short-story writer, novelist and intellectual. He was born in Herat, Afghanistan. He has his PhD from the faculty of Law and political science at Tehran University. He has worked, for years, as narrator and writer of several social – cultural programs in Afghanistan's Radio and Television. He has been head of the Art and Literature Department at Radio Afghanistan for some period.
Sahraa Karimi is an Afghan film director and teacher currently based in Italy, who was notably the first female chairperson of the Afghan Film Organization. She has directed 30 short films, 3 documentary films and one fiction film Hava, Maryam, Ayesha which had the world premier at the 76th Venice Film Festival. Prior to the fall of Kabul to the hands of the Taliban, she was the first and the only woman to be directing Afghanistan's film entity.
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian author and noted feminist academic. Her work has been described as focusing on "the intersection between gender and sexuality, culture and politics".
Laleh Osmany is a women's rights activist from Afghanistan, who founded the social media #WhereIsMyName campaign which opposes the tradition that women's names were not used publicly in Afghanistan. For her work she was recognised on the BBC's 100 Women Awards in 2020.
Farahnaz Forotan is an Afghan journalist and women's rights activist. She moved to Iran together with her family during the Mujahideen regime. Farahnaz returned to Afghanistan in 2001, but took refuge in France in 2020 after being included on a Taliban hit list.
Women in the Soviet–Afghan War were active in a variety of roles.
References
- ↑ Bezhan, Faridullah (September–October 2008). "Obedient and resistant: Afghanistani women in Maryam Mahboob's short stories". Women's Studies International Forum . 31 (5): 373–382. doi:10.1080/13504630.2014.936374. S2CID 144647510.
- 1 2 Bezhan, Faridullah (2014). "Exile, gender and identity: the short stories of Afghanistani author Maryam Mahboob". Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. 20 (2–3): 239–256. doi:10.1080/13504630.2014.936374. S2CID 144647510.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
  | This article about an Afghan writer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |