‘When we reached the main street, the Taliban opened fire to disperse us. It felt as if it was raining bullets on us…’
-Sana, Protestor
Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, women have been at the forefront of a lively civic resistance against the militant group that is deeply invested in religious fundamentalism and patriarchy. These protests have caught the attention of the world. As a woman from Afghanistan, I often get asked the question: "Why have women not mobilized this strongly before?"
In my view and in the words of Marnia Lazreg, women's organizing and resistance was an absolutely ‘rational response to an otherwise irrational historical situation.’ However, to understand ‘the internal dynamics of women’s acts, agency and resistance’, I listened to women in Afghanistan themselves by conducting interviews in January with those who have been at the frontline of protests in Kabul, Herat, Panjshir and Nimroz. All have previously had important roles and positions in the government and civil society organizations, and currently are deprived of their right to work. They are also members or founders of various groups such as Junbesh Zanan Muqtader (The Movement of Powerful Women of Afghanistan), and Junbesh Tagheer (Change Movement), Junbesh Zanan Khudjosh (Self-directed/Autonomous Women’s Movement) that work as a mechanism for women’s empowerment, mobilization and organization.
A few days after the Taliban takeover many protests took place across Afghanistan. The first reported women’s protest in Kabul occurred on August 17. Women asked “for their rights, the right to work, the right for education and the right to political participation.” These protests were followed by a Taliban representative’s promise to protect women’s rights. Nevertheless, according to Human Rights Watch, “every day brings further evidence that they are implementing a massive rollback of women’s rights.”
Following the fall of Kabul, the Taliban whitewashed the pictures of women across its neighborhoods. It was supposed to send a message that the removal from public view would not be limited only to their images. In September 2021 the Taliban issued a decree that ordered female employees to stay at home and effectively banned secondary education for girls. In the same month, the Women's Affairs Ministry was abolished. The Taliban’s Ministry of Education made gender segregation and wearing the niqab mandatory for universities. In November, the Taliban banned women from appearing on TV shows and in movies. Most recently, in December, women were barred from traveling without a male chaperone. For over six months, women in Afghanistan have protested each and every restriction, despite being assaulted, tear gassed, beaten and whipped. In doing so, they have violated the September ban on impromptu protests.
The ban on impromptu protests was used as a form of social control to silence women and restrain women’s organizing. Masuda, one of the co-organizers of the protests in Herat, a former employee of the Directorate of Women’s Affairs in Nimroz said: “The Taliban are scared of our (Afghan women’s) voices." The Taliban’s detention of protestors attests to this fact. They detained 40 female protestors in September from Mazar-Sharif, many of whom were tortured and executed, and only a few of whom were released. The Taliban detained four other protestors including Tamana Paryani, Mursal Ayar, Zahra Mohammadi and Parwana Ibrahimkhel from Kabul later in January. While denying involvement at first, the Taliban released them on February 12. Many other have been detained. According to Masuda, the Taliban detained a woman and the only man who had protested in the second protest in Nimroz in September, torturing and filming them as they pledged to never question the Islamic Emirate again. Khatera, a former gender representative at the Ministry of Education, said she had participated in 11 protests so far. At one of the protests, she was tear gassed and beaten by the Taliban and as a result had had a miscarriage. The incident seemed to have affected her relationship with her husband deeply. This did not stop her, though, she still continued protesting. She said:
Both home and outside are now bitter for me [… ] Despite this I continue fighting. If it wasn’t for our protests, some countries would have already recognized the Taliban government. In one of the protests a Talib confronted me and told me: you have made us darbadar (bedraggled), no government recognizes us because of your protests.
While the return of the Taliban has restricted the public spaces for women, they no longer have a safe space at home either, with the patriarchy flourishing under Taliban rule. The crumbling economy and rising unemployment mean many men are also confined at home, putting women in a position of double deprivation. It is clear from what women say that the Taliban are extremely fearful of women's voices as they challenge them and undermine their ‘legitimacy.’ Women’s autonomous movements have had an important role in bringing women’s issues to the mainstream agendas of international organizations and institutions such as the United Nations and European Parliament. Sana, a former civil society activist and entrepreneur stated:
After the impromptu ban on protests, we were told with approval we could organize our protests. Nevertheless, despite having permission, our protests are countered with violence and we are told we are not allowed to protest when we go to the protest venue. In contrast, the protests organized by the groups affiliated to the Taliban run smoothly.
Despite the horrifying circumstances, women are not only maintaining agency and autonomy, they are creating counter-spaces for survival and resistance in the midst of hopelessness and uncertainty. In the words of Shalhoub-Kevorkian, they are challenging ‘the doctrine of “no safe haven”’, and hence no space.
The literature describes counter-spaces as a process through ‘which groups reclaim spaces within dominant structures.’ Feminist counter-spaces are constructed to articulate resistant politics. The creation of counter-spaces, though, isn’t an unfamiliar notion for the women of Afghanistan, like women in other conflict zones. Women in Belgrade during the civil war resisted violence by storytelling, while Palestinian women create new venues for resistance as their houses are ravaged by Israeli occupation. Afghanistan’s women resisted the Taliban during their first rule in various ways. One of these women was my maternal grandmother, who risked her life to deliver aid to remote regions of Faryab. Many other women organized secret schools in their basements. Under the current regime, women are risking their lives by running underground schools, as girls are barred from attending secondary school. According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘women’s ways of healing, helping and resisting are not based on hegemonic logic, but rather are multiple and complex.’ After the impromptu ban on protests, women of Afghanistan employed alternative methods as a means to resist the Taliban. Zahra, a former military commander, stated that: ‘We changed the ways in which we resisted after the ban on impromptu protests and carried out our protests at home, held our banners and chanted our slogans by posting videos on social media.’ Masuda on the other hand stated that:
Women in Nimroz can’t protest the Taliban publicly since it is a small city and one gets easily recognized. So we protest them by taking an active role in collecting evidence and documenting their war crimes. We stay connected with women in other provinces and report what they experience to media organizations. We also protest them by writing, we recently wrote a letter to the United Nations.
Similar stories are shared by other women in smaller provinces.
Another example of women’s resistance was the Yalda Night (winter solstice) celebration, in which they read poetry and displayed the traditional attire of different ethnic groups in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban’s enforcement of a female dress code. Women also used sign language to tell the world not to recognize the Taliban in a protest on December 28 that went viral on social media.
