Fourteen years ago, when I was 21, I visited Afghanistan for the first time since I was seven – the age I was when my mother fled the civil war ravaging my birth land – to make a documentary. We left because of the Taliban, a ragtag alliance of armed men fighting other militia groups for control of the leaderless nation of Afghanistan.
Civil war destroyed all corners of the land, as violent groups were armed by foreign nations for their own needs. My mum knew if we stayed, she and her two daughters would live a shadow of a life. We left everything and everyone behind – my grandmothers, my cousins – and my future as an Afghan woman.
At the time of my visit, the Taliban had been ousted by western forces and it was a new beginning. It was 2010 and I went there as a fresh-faced, curious journalist, intent on using my voice to showcase the woman fighting back and the reality of the war against the terror group.
I remember watching these women in awe, my mouth gaping as they passionately made their case for standing up to the Taliban. I followed female journalists, judges, activists and even my cousin, a lecturer at Kabul university, as they faced death threats, family excommunication and more to force progress onto Afghan culture. As part of the film, I’m seen walking around Kabul and Herat shouting about all the changes I was seeing, like many women no longer wearing a burqa (veil covering that leaves only the eyes visible). I felt so free on the streets of Afghanistan in that moment, lifted by the achievements of womenfolk, the air fizzing with possibility.
Fast forward to today and all of that joy and liberation has been snatched away. Three years ago, when the (predominantly) US and British troops that held the fragile peace in the country withdrew, the Taliban returned – and their spokesman quickly made it plain that their twisted version of Islamic law was about to be enforced once again. Quickly, girls and women were made to drop out of school and university, instead told to stay home.
Just a month in, the Taliban’s Ministry of Justice set up the degrading ‘Department for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice’. Afghans know them as puritanical morality police with brutal powers designed to make Afghanistan ‘wahabi’ (strictly orthodox Sunni Muslims) again. They can beat, berate and even imprison people for anything they see as an immoral crime. What followed was a litany of rules to punish, demean and attack women. A gender apartheid has started in my birth land – and with it all possibility has been sucked out of the air.
Women are banned from traveling in taxis alone. They’re barred from visiting parks. Beauty salons – where they might have gone just a couple years ago, to unwind, have a laugh and pamper themselves – are all outlawed. But even if they weren’t, how would a woman pay to have her nails done? Given that it’s now illegal for them to work in pretty much any role (excluding some health professions, such as midwifery). There are no female public servants, no women florists or news presenters.
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Earlier this year, the Taliban forbade women from being heard speaking in public and this week, the Taliban have made it illegal for women to hear one another at all. They cannot be heard “in a song, a hymn, or a recital” of prayer – even in private. Speaking in a press conference, minister Khalid Hanafi said, “How could [women] be allowed to sing if they aren’t even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while praying, let alone for anything else.” He added that the “new rules and will be gradually implemented, and God will be helping us in each step we take”.
According to article 13 of the law: a woman being overheard by a man would bring public shaming and could even result in flogging as a punishment.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is: it’s essentially the plot of Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale brought to life.
It’s as though the men of the Taliban government think that if a woman can be so silent, so still as to become completely invisible that the war torn, economically annihilated and political pariah country will somehow turn a corner and become a male-only utopia.
Womankind has been singled out as the root of all evil by the government of Afghanistan and it seems their solution is to rid us from all parts of society. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Before the Taliban takeover in 2021, about a third of the democratically elected parliament were women. Women were Olympians, they were wage earners and those that could travel the world did so, representing their nation fiercely and with pride. They have lost so, so much and now they’ve further lost their voices too.
Though I was forced to flee Afghanistan physically – emotionally and mentally I am still there. My heart aches for the women trapped in a brutal patriarchal system and it stops dead when I consider that just by the chance of being born there, it was almost my fate too. The Taliban are disgusted by woman like me, who are outspoken, curious and joyful.
Is there any hope? Even a flicker of possibility left for the women still in Afghanistan? On the surface, the answer is very little. But I know better than to underestimate the resolve of Afghan women. Underground schools, defiant TikToks of woman singing and those of us in far flung places are here to sound the alarm. Defiance looks different in Afghanistan; I know personally my cousins and aunts feel abandoned by the wider world, but they are still standing up to their oppressors in small undetectable ways. Their resistance is minuscule but it's there – it's the blistering silence of the rest of the world that is so hard to bear.
Nelufar Hedayat is a British-Afghan filmmaker and journalist in London, you can find her on TikTok, X and Instagram
To learn more about how you can support women in Afghanistan, visit the Malala Fund
