Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
Читать онлайн книгу.
were well equipped to win on the military front. Their political agenda aimed at creating a pure Islamic state based on sharia law, a state that would protect people from the polluting West. Ironically, the ones who called themselves “Taliban” (literally, “students in religion”) were often illiterate and therefore unable to read a line of the Koran.
Most of them had had little contact with women prior to entering the capital city. Like the young mujahideen who came to Kabul in 1992, they shared “similar ideas about upright female behaviour: ‘good’ women stay home, ‘bad’ women expose their faces” (N. H. Dupree 2001, 150). However, the policies that they implemented regarding women provoked adaptations that were far from their initial intent. As Nancy Dupree points out (2001, 160), women creatively adjusted to this political change by making their own fashion statements. Reporting on the forced veiling of women under chadari, she writes: “Burnt orange and forest green are fashionable in Jalalabad; various clear shades of blue accented by occasional canary yellow flit about Kabul; black was never usual, except among some groups in Herat. Made mostly of soft artificial silk, the veils shimmer and billow with a certain mysterious seductiveness.”
The Taliban enforced the total curtailment of women’s freedom to move, to work, and to be educated. Discrimination was officially sanctioned and pervaded every aspect of women’s lives. Girls were forbidden to attend school, even when provided at home. Women faced draconian punishment for adultery. Women were denied the freedom to work and were forbidden to leave their homes unless completely veiled under chadari and accompanied by a male relative (mahram). Such restrictions were particularly alien to women in Kabul and many were slow to comply. Confrontations between women and the religious police supervised by the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, the most powerful arm of the regime, occurred daily until, paralyzed by fear, women finally complied. Women were beaten up in the streets for wearing nail polish, white socks (the color of the Taliban flag), shiny shoes, or a chadari that was not long enough (N. H. Dupree 2001, 152).
These recent and traumatic events are strongly engrained in the psyche of urban women. In spite of their fear, many women, often with the support of male family members, started to organize underground activities and support networks. These activities helped them cope with the stress of their secluded life. By morally supporting each other and providing services for their community, women regained a sense of worth and usefulness.
Most women who conducted such activities did not view their involvement as a political act but as a survival strategy, deeply embedded in the material conditions of their everyday lives. To be able to run such activities and keep a minimum of mobility, women had to develop creative strategies. Some of them recruited and employed fake mahrams when male relatives were not available. Others mobilized other women from public spaces where women’s presence was not suspicious such as mosques and ziharat (sites of pilgrimage). During this period, the chadari became a protective device, a “mobile home” that allowed women to circulate in public spaces without being questioned or threatened. Women used their chadari to smuggle books and stationery for their schools, the same way they had smuggled weapons during the jihad.
Thanks to these informal courses secretly attended, many young women managed to continue their education and to escape from total isolation. Women demonstrated a real sense of creativity and ingenuity in the face of particularly difficult economic and social conditions. For most women, belonging to a network was a means to escape from boredom and to find moral support. By attending or running courses, women opened for themselves spaces where they could share their sorrows and exchange small services. If these everyday small acts of resistance empowered women and enhanced their self-confidence, they led them to sternly challenge broader gender hierarchies, especially in a context where maintaining social relations was and is still perceived as vital.
The Taliban regime affected different women in different ways. The relative peace the Taliban brought in rural areas provided women with a sense of safety they had not been able to enjoy during the civil war. The stability they recovered during this period allowed them to participate in the local economy. In cities, however, the brutality with which the Taliban implemented their policies remains a traumatic experience for most women.
Conclusion
The addition of a veil over Queen Soraya in the portrait gallery of the Ministry of Information and Culture just after the collapse of the Taliban while at the same moment images of women lifting their veils in the streets of Kabul were broadcast on Western TV channels as symbols of “women’s liberation” underlines the complex and contested position of women in the reconstruction period. Their bodies, at times veiled and hidden, at others displayed and unveiled, are sites of political struggles over national identity. From the 1920s onward, the “woman question” has been manipulated to serve political purposes and to assert opposite views of civilization. The archive pictures that illustrate this chapter should not be taken at face value: their purpose was less to document everyday life in Afghanistan than to promote an image of progress and development for external audiences. The display of images of women taking part in public life, wearing Western clothes, and working side by side with men was meant to portray Afghanistan as contemporary to “modern and civilized” nations.
A closer look at the history of women in Afghanistan demonstrates how, in addition to gender, other sets of variables such as class and the urban/rural divide have to be taken into account in order to understand the variety of women’s experiences. Women in the countryside benefited neither from the expanding public services nor from the dynamic cultural and intellectual movements and events that made the period prior to the Soviet occupation exhilarating for urban women. The revolutionary changes and relatively liberal social values and norms experienced by educated middle- and upper class women in the 1960s and 1970s stood in stark contrast to the tribal and traditional values shaping the life of the majority of Afghan women at the time.
The plight of Afghan women under the Taliban rule was widely publicized in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. However, the political context in which the Taliban movement emerged was hardly mentioned. Their gender discriminatory policies, which resulted in the social exclusion of women, were mostly explained by misidentified expressions of local “culture.” But the Taliban did not arise out of thin air. The emergence of religious fundamentalism in the region has been the result of broader geopolitical developments that involved the interference of foreign countries such as the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War period.
Finally, the history of Afghanistan shows that reforms aimed at changing the status of women raised hopes and fears, expectations and resistance in the social arena. From the reign of Amanullah to the Taliban regime, the contested rights of women became a primary symbol of the new order. All efforts by reformist kings from the early twentieth century onward were doomed due to their incapacity to incorporate the rural peripheries into their programs and to envision indigenous paths for social transformation. When the Communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women’s rights under a secular framework and through coercion, acute civil strife ensued.
The Islamist movements that have regained power in the region since the 1980s have focused on the disciplining of women’s bodies because they represent a political site of difference and resistance to the homogenizing and egalitarian forces of Western modernity (Göle 1996). By promoting the return to strict Islamic clothing, these movements attempt to reassert a collective identity. Far from being a return to greater religiosity and ritual practice, these movements have focused, like the modernists before them, on lifestyles and attitudes in public because they signal shared societal values and moral norms.
CHAPTER 2
National Women’s Machinery: Coaching Lives in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs
Four years after my first journey, in winter 2007, I landed in Kabul for the second time. Renovations had somewhat improved the appearance of the small airport trapped between snowy mountaintops. Customs officers