“I don’t know what you can do to help us, but I’m so happy that you’re taking my message for Afghan women, and all women, to the world,” she said at the end of what was an emotional and inspiring conversation for all parties involved. Four women from Team Her Circle, including this author, connected with this 20-something Afghan woman who escaped her homeland two months ago. She had to leave Afghanistan, like many Afghan citizens especially women have, because of her activities with her sporting group and on social media. What ensued was nothing short of a conversation that made our circle stronger, making us realise that we may be from very different backgrounds and nations, but the bond of womanhood and shared ideas or dreams for an equal, inclusive world, unite us.
While she chose to be anonymous to ensure the safety of her family back in Afghanistan, her voice was anything but. It resonated with the strength, hopes and fighting spirit every Afghan woman protesting against the Taliban’s disempowering diktats shows. It resonated with the resilience, determination and grit every woman around the world fighting for her basic rights and her future exhibits. Her face might be missing from this exclusive, but her voice and story that inspire, aren’t. Read on to find out her story of growing up in a country that she had to leave because those who rule now could not ensure her very basic human rights.
The Story Of A Free Afghan Woman Whose Life Changed She started her story where most of us do, with mothers. “My family, especially my mum, have always supported me. My mother always tried to ensure that I don’t have to go through the same things she did in her life,” she said. “And I’m so thankful to them that they helped me every moment to achieve everything I want. And I’m so sorry about the fact that they are in danger now, because of me. I’m so nervous about them.”
She explained how while she was growing up, every girl was supposed to go to school, even though some didn’t because of the insecurities that always come with living in a region with conflict. Her schooling, she says, taught her to be self-sufficient, independent, and made her “more powerful with knowledge day by day.” And when you grow up with that as a basic right and reality of life, the sudden change that the Taliban brought about in 2021 can be jarring and disempowering indeed.
In university, she picked up the social sciences as an area of study because even while at school, the field interested her due to the innate connection she naturally felt with gender and women’s studies. Studying how social structures and cultures are formed, she said, would give her more ideas on how to improve the conditions of women in her country and region.
It was the natural Afghan terrain she grew up in that inspired her to take up sports. “When I went to university, I decided to take it up further,” she said. She wasn’t the only Afghan woman to take up this sport though, and many other women joined the club as well. “It was so good,” she reminisced. “Day by day, we tried to get more women to join us, and we were quite successful in getting more women involved until the Taliban took back Afghanistan.”
The Story Of Her Escape
But why did she feel she had to leave? “Women playing sports was in conflict with the ideology of the Taliban. In their view, a woman cannot play a sport because it is ‘haram’,” she explained. “Because of this, when they took Afghanistan back, I felt that I was in danger of being targeted because of my sporting as well as my education in women and gender studies. I also used to work with a foreign organisation for social work and women’s welfare. Because of this, I was in danger.”
The European organisation she worked with organised a visa for her. “After that, I went to Kabul and from there, I left Afghanistan,” she said, adding that something went wrong in Kabul, which forced her to stay there for a few days, hoping against hope that she’ll be able to leave with some modicum of safety soon. From Kabul, she was evacuated to another South Asian country, where she received the visa for the European nation and finally shifted there. The entire escape took over a month, and you could tell just how harrowing it must have been by the way she looked when she recounted the entire story.
The Story Of A Woman’s Strength
Talking about the sudden shift that Afghan women had to cope with this year, she explained how the politics of one group affected everyone. “It was all so bad for every woman, not just me,” she said. “Every person even, because we made everything from scratch in Afghanistan. We saw Afghanistan improve for us day by day, and all of us got some rights there. The Taliban taking back power was very bad for everyone, but especially for women,” she explained, adding that when the sudden political shift started in 2021, they were all shocked and afraid that things might go back to the way they were in the 1990s.
“The Taliban’s ideology is in conflict with women’s rights. I don’t know why they have such problems with women,” she said. “Not just shops and beauty parlours, they shut schools! Very few high schools for women are now open. They don’t want women to go out, they have a problem with women stepping out at all. They think women must stay at home and bring babies into the world, and do household work. This is so bad for a woman’s spirit that they feel we are nothing. They took our right to education, work, to step out…everything!”
But this, she explained, is not the end and no woman, Afghan or otherwise, should think of it as such. “The women of Afghanistan are today stronger than the women of 1996. We have been active in politics, in economy, in education and even sports. We learned to move on from the past. So of course we will protest now to prove that we are not the women from 1996. Every day, we are fighting for our rights. We will tell the Taliban that we are not the same, and we want our rights. We are strong and we will get our basic rights. We don’t want anything more than just our basic human rights.”
We asked her to send a message to all Afghan women protesting against the Taliban right now in Afghanistan, and she gave us a message in her native language. Roughly translated, the message was this:
“Be strong while fighting for our rights. We mustn’t let the Taliban take every right we have won in the past. We must fight every moment, every second to stop the Taliban from doing this.”
The Story Of A Refugee With Hope
Starting afresh is never easy, but it has to be quite an obstacle when you are a refugee in another country. “We are now at zero. We must start from zero. Language, education, work, everything has to be started again because we are new here,” she explained. But for a woman whose favourite movie is Mona Lisa Smile, a fresh start in life may be difficult, but not impossible. “When I was in university, I watched that movie and learned a lot about the changes in life. It was a source of powerful motivation for me, and still is,” she adds.
When asked what her life right now looks like, she explained that it involves a lot of moving around and staying in small spaces. “We are four women in one small room, but I’m so happy for them and to have them,” she says, adding that they had all escaped Afghanistan together. Their collective worry is for friends and family who haven’t made the escape from Afghanistan. “Saving them is my first priority,” she adds. “I want to continue my education because it’s only through that that I can work for women’s rights in Afghanistan, and improve my country again.” But that’s not all, because she hopes and dreams for more.
“One day, I will be able to perform my sport for Afghanistan again. For now, it is impossible, but we want to continue our training here, learn more about the sport and join others in the same field to get stronger. Maybe the politics of Afghanistan will change, and one day we can go back to Afghanistan and continue there.” Apart from this, she also wants to learn more languages and self-defence. “I have been looking for self-defence courses since childhood but I couldn’t do it in Afghanistan. But here, I want to learn this first,” she adds.
In parting, she gave us a message to convey to all women everywhere: “I’d like to tell every woman around the world that don’t let the politics of a few like the Taliban dictate what we want or do in life. Support every woman who is fighting for her rights and wants to be a part of the world.”
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