With Gaza in ruins, the war in Ukraine at a critical juncture and millions of Africans facing starvation, global attention has understandably shifted away from the plight of Afghan girls denied their right to an education. Yet, amid the prevailing gloom over the state of the world’s most troubled regions, the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary education could be facing its biggest internal challenge yet.
Nowhere is the fight for the rights of girls and women more urgent than in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 has led to egregious human rights violations, including the exclusion of girls from secondary education. Now, after yet another Afghan school year has begun without girls beyond sixth grade, a rift within the regime offers hope that the ban might be reversed in the near future.
Despite the Taliban’s efforts to project unity, tensions among its leadership ranks surfaced last month when former Afghan deputy minister of foreign affairs Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai was forced to flee to Dubai. He was reportedly facing arrest for criticizing the ban on girls’ education and the conduct of Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, the regime’s supreme leader. With the interior and defense ministers also rumored to support easing the education ban, Akhundzada has deployed soldiers to Kabul airport to prevent other Cabinet members from seeking asylum abroad.
Illustration: Mountain People
At the root of the Taliban’s leadership crisis is a series of failed efforts to overturn Afghanistan’s anti-women policies. Immediately after reclaiming power three-and-a-half years ago, Akhundzada and his Kandahar-based hard-line faction reneged on the Taliban’s promises that girls would be allowed to attend secondary school and that women would be permitted to work “within the framework of Islam.” As late as the start of the 2022 school year, the Taliban was still assuring the public that girls would be allowed to resume their education, only to reverse course within hours, citing the need for an “appropriate Islamic environment.”
A wave of increasingly repressive edicts targeting Afghan girls and women soon followed. Women were barred from almost all forms of employment, excluded from almost all public spaces and prohibited from traveling anywhere without a male chaperone. The Taliban’s draconian dress code required women to wear burqas covering them from head to toe.
By last year, these restrictions had become even more extreme. Women — already banned from speaking in public — were now prohibited from praying aloud or reciting the Koran, even in the presence of other women.
For a while, dissent within the Taliban remained muted. Then, at a graduation ceremony in Afghanistan’s southeastern Khost Province last month, Stanikzai openly condemned the regime’s policies.
“The restrictions imposed on women are the personal wish of some Taliban elders and are un-Islamic,” he said.
The regime was being “unjust to 20 million people. There is no justification for this — not now or in the future,” he added.
Citing religious justifications for girls’ education, Stanikzai told the audience: “During the time of the Prophet Mohammed, the doors of knowledge were open for both men and women. There were such remarkable women that if I were to elaborate on their contributions, it would take considerable time.”
Stanikzai’s remarks followed similar criticism from Afghan Minister of Interior Affairs Sirajuddin Haqqani, who — in one of the first public breaches of Taliban unity — also denounced the ban on girls’ education and the regime’s refusal to engage with the international community on women’s rights. Then-Afghan refugee minister Khalil Rahman Haqqani had also been pushing for girls and women to attend secondary schools and universities at the time of his death in a suicide attack in Kabul in December last year.
Against this backdrop, Afghanistan is grappling with deepening economic and humanitarian crises that have pushed more than 25 million people — more than half the population — into poverty. The exclusion of women and girls from the workforce has exacerbated these economic challenges, fueling the growing rebellion against Akhundzada’s extremist policies.
The apparent split within the Taliban comes at an opportune time. UN human rights officials are considering classifying gender apartheid — defined as “inhumane acts committed within the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic discrimination, oppression, and domination by one group over another or others, based on gender, and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime” — as a crime against humanity. Such a move would represent a milestone in the fight against the systemic oppression of women in Afghanistan and beyond.
Meanwhile, Afghan girls — many of whom were already in school when the Taliban returned to power — continue to fight for their education, defying the regime’s restrictions to pursue their dreams of becoming doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs. At great risk to themselves and their families, some attend underground schools, join local homeschooling initiatives or seek remote-learning opportunities. A few have even managed to leave the country to study abroad.
Although the bravery of Afghan girls is undeniable, their efforts alone would not be enough to close the gap between the number of girls entitled to an education under international law and those who actually receive one. With the Taliban in disarray, the international community — especially Muslim-majority countries — must capitalize on internal divisions to pressure the regime to reverse the ban on girls’ education.
Nowhere in the Koran or Islamic teachings is there any justification for denying girls the right to attend school. Now, there is a real chance that even the Taliban might finally heed this lesson.
Gordon Brown, former British prime minister, is UN Special Envoy for Global Education and chair of Education Cannot Wait.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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