‘What will she grow up to be?’ Afghan backlash grows over Taliban’s ban on higher education for women

DUBAI: Zaram received precious little formal education while growing up in Afghanistan’s rural southern province of Kandahar, but always hoped his children would someday benefit from the freedoms and opportunities long denied to him.
So when he learned in mid-December that the country’s Taliban rulers had outlawed higher education for women, depriving his daughter of the right to study, he was devastated. “I wanted to be able to provide for my girl to have a better life than we are living,” Zaram, who did not give his real name fearing reprisals, told Arab News. “It will be impossible without her having an education. I cannot teach her myself as I barely went to school myself.”
The Taliban announced it was barring women and girls from colleges and universities with immediate effect on Dec. 20.
“You all are informed to immediately implement the mentioned order of suspending education of females until further notice,” Neda Mohammad Nadeem, the minister for higher education, said in a statement. The following day, a crowd of Afghan women marched defiantly through the streets of Kabul, protesting against the new decree, chanting: “Either for everyone or for no one. One for all, all for one.” Women were filmed weeping and consoling each other outside one campus. The Taliban announced it was barring women and girls from colleges and universities with immediate effect on Dec. 20. (AFP)
Following the US military’s chaotic withdrawal from the country and the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in August 2021, many Afghans had hoped the ultra-conservative group would be more lenient than it had been during its previous stint in power between 1996 and 2001.
Those hopes were quickly dashed, however, as freedoms enjoyed over the preceding 20 years under the US-backed Afghan government were steadily eroded at the command of the group’s Kandahar-based leader, Hibatullah Akhundzadan.
Just a month after returning to power, the regime imposed gender-segregated university entrances and classrooms and imposed hijabs as part of a compulsory dress code. Then, on March 23 this year, when girls’ secondary schools were scheduled to reopen, the Taliban abruptly rescinded the directive, barring tens of thousands of teenage girls from education. Primary school-aged girls, at least for now, are still permitted to receive schooling up until the sixth grade.
In May, the Taliban ordered women to fully cover themselves, including their faces, in public, to remain at home, and to only travel between cities with a male escort. In November, a new directive banned women from entering parks, funfairs, gyms and public baths.
On Saturday, the Taliban banned women from working in non-governmental organizations, leading many foreign humanitarian aid agencies to announce they were withdrawing from the crisis-wracked country.
Now, nearly all women and girls over the age of 12 are barred from educational institutions in Afghanistan. According to UNICEF, around 850,000 Afghan girls have stopped attending school. Nearly all women and girls over the age of 12 are barred from educational institutions in Afghanistan. (AFP) Afghanistan is now the only country in the world to ban women and girls from attending schools and universities.
The rules do not seem to apply to the Taliban elite, however. According to the Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN), an independent, non-profit policy research group based in Kabul, senior Taliban officials have their daughters enrolled at schools in Qatar and Pakistan.
The two daughters of Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban government’s spokesman, are reportedly attending school in Doha, while the regime’s health minister, Qalandar Ibad, reportedly has a daughter who graduated from medical school.
One Qatar-based Taliban official told AAN that “since everyone in the neighborhood was going to school, our children demanded that they go to school too. I enrolled my three sons and two daughters.”
“It is absolutely hypocritical,” a foreign humanitarian aid worker based in Afghanistan, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arab News. “But the Taliban leaders do not follow a global logic of what’s right and wrong, they follow their own internal logic. It is the driving force behind their decision making. They do not feel the need to justify anything to anyone.