Afghanistan | Girls challenge the Taliban in underground schools

(Kabul) Nafeesa has found the perfect place to hide her schoolbooks: in the kitchen, where men rarely venture, and away from the disapproving gaze of her Taliban brother.

“Boys don’t belong in the kitchen, so I put my books there,” said Nafeesa, 20, who attends an underground school in a rural village in eastern Afghanistan.

“If my brother found out, he would beat me,” she says.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghan girls and young women like Nafeesa have been deprived of any opportunity to attend school since the Taliban returned to power in Kabul a year ago.

Islamic fundamentalists imposed severe restrictions on girls and women in order to subject them to their fundamentalist conception of Islam.

They have been largely barred from government jobs and are not allowed to travel long distances without being accompanied by a close male relative.

They must cover themselves fully in public, including the face, ideally with the burqa, a full veil with a fabric grid at eye level, widely worn in the more isolated and conservative parts of the country.

Even before the return to power of the Taliban, the vast majority of Afghan women were already veiled, if only with a loose headscarf.

For the Taliban, as a general rule, women should not leave their homes unless absolutely necessary.

But arguably the most brutal deprivation was the March closure of secondary schools for girls in many areas, just after their long-announced reopening.

Despite the risks and because the thirst for learning remains intact, clandestine schools quickly sprung up across the country, often in the rooms of ordinary private homes.

AFP journalists were able to visit three of them to meet the students and teachers, whose first names have been changed to protect their safety.

Here is their story.

“We want freedom”

At 20, Nafeesa is still studying secondary school subjects, but the Afghan education system has been disrupted by decades of war in the country.

Only her mother and her older sister know that she is taking lessons. Not his brother, who fought in the mountains for years with the Taliban against the former government and foreign forces, and only returned home after the Islamists’ victory last August.

In the morning, he allows her to attend a madrassa to study the Koran, but in the afternoon, without his knowledge, she sneaks into a clandestine classroom organized by the Revolutionary Women’s Association of Afghanistan (RAWA).

“We accepted this risk, otherwise we would remain uneducated,” explains Nafeesa.

” I want to be a doctor […] We want to do something for ourselves, we want to have freedom, be useful to society and build our future, ”claims the young woman.

When AFP visited her class, Nafeesa and nine other girls were discussing freedom of expression with their teacher, sitting side by side on a mat and taking turns reading a textbook aloud.

To get to class, they often leave their homes hours earlier, taking different routes to avoid being noticed, in a region where Pashtuns are the majority ethnic group – as in the Taliban – with a conservative patriarchal tradition. .

If a Taliban fighter asks them where they are going, the girls reply that they are enrolled in a sewing workshop, and they hide their school books in shopping bags or under their abayas (loose black dresses).

Not only do they take risks, but they also sometimes make sacrifices, like Nafeesa’s sister, who dropped out of school to foil any suspicions her brother might have.

Not justified by Islam

According to religious scholars, nothing in Islam justifies banning secondary education for girls. A year after coming to power, the Taliban still insist that classes will be allowed to resume, but without giving a timetable.

The issue divided the movement. According to several sources interviewed by AFP, a radical faction that advises the supreme leader of the Taliban, Hibatullah Akhundzada, opposes all schooling for girls, or at best, wants it to be limited to religious studies and practical courses such as than cooking and sewing.

The official explanation for the end of secondary education, put forward from the beginning, is that it is a simple “technical” question, and that girls will return to colleges and high schools as soon as a program established on Islamic rules will be defined.

Today, girls still go to primary school, and so far, female students can attend university, although classes there are single-sex.

But without a high school diploma, teenage girls will not be able to pass university entrance exams. The current cohorts of female college students could be the last in the country in the near future.

“Sacrificed generation”

For researcher Abdul Bari Madani, “education is an inalienable right in Islam, for both men and women,” he told AFP. “If this ban continues, Afghanistan will return to medieval times. […] An entire generation of girls will be sacrificed,” he worries.

It was this fear of losing a generation that prompted teacher Tamkin to turn her home in Kabul into a school.

The 40-year-old was almost sacrificed herself when she was forced to drop out of school when the Taliban first came to power from 1996 to 2001 and banned all girls from school .

It took Tamkin years to train herself, as an autodidact, to become a teacher before she was deprived of her job at the Ministry of Education when the Taliban returned to power last August and returned to their home for women in public employment, with a few exceptions.

“I didn’t want these girls to be like me,” Tamkin told AFP with tears in his eyes. “They must have a better future,” she pleads.

With the support of her husband, she first transformed a storage room into a classroom. Then she sold a family cow to be able to buy school books, because most of her students come from poor families and cannot afford them.

Today, she teaches English and science to around 25 enthusiastic students.

Recently, on a rainy day in Kabul, the girls came to his class for a biology lesson.

“I just want to learn. It doesn’t matter what the place of study is like,” says Narwan, sitting with classmates of all ages, who should theoretically be in a senior high school.

Behind her, a poster hanging on the wall urges students to be kind: “The tongue has no bones, but it is so strong it can break your heart, so be careful with your words.”

It was the benevolence of his neighbors that allowed Tamkin to be able to conceal the true purpose of the school. “The Taliban repeatedly asked, ‘What is here?’ I told the neighbors to say it was a madrassa,” a religious school, explains the teacher.

Maliha, a 17-year-old student, is a firm believer in the idea that one day the Taliban will no longer be in power. “Then we will make good use of our knowledge,” she hopes.

“Not afraid of the Taliban”

On the outskirts of Kabul, in a maze of mud houses, Laila leads another underground class.

Seeing her daughter’s face after the abrupt cancellation in March of the announced reopening of secondary schools, she knew she had to do something.

“If my daughter cried, then the daughters of the other parents had to cry too,” recalls the 38-year-old teacher.

A dozen girls meet two days a week at Laila’s, which has a yard and a garden where she grows vegetables.

In the classroom, a large window overlooks the garden. Her students, whose books and notebooks are placed in blue plastic sleeves, are seated on a carpet, playful and studious. At the beginning of the course, it is the correction of homework.

“We are not afraid of the Taliban,” said Kawsar, 18. “If they say anything, we will fight but we will continue to study”, continues the young girl.

Studies are not the only objective of some Afghan girls and women, often married in abusive or restrictive relationships, and who wish to gain a little freedom.

Zahra, who attends the rural village underground school in eastern Afghanistan, married at 14 and now lives with in-laws who oppose the idea of ​​her attending classes.

She takes sleeping pills to control her anxiety and fears that her husband’s family will force her to stay at home.

“I tell them that I go to the local bazaar, and I come here”, at school, explains Zahra, for whom it is also the only way to make friends.