Zarlasht Safi
Traditionally, eight of March is considered to be the focal day to celebrate gender equality, sisterhood and women empowerment worldwide. With the arrival of International Women’s Day, a stagnated gender equality progress was reported by the World Bank. Yet, this stagnation is of a very alarming level in Afghanistan. We live in the times of permacrisis and gender equality is completely overshadowed by other priorities as energy crisis, climate change and multiple wars. The term permacrisis which consists of ‘permanent’ and ‘crisis’ is more suitable for gender equality than any other crisis when it comes to the Afghan women. Afghan women and girls are deprived of their basic human rights, dreams and it seems that this struggle is permanent. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that has banned girls from attending primary and secondary education. Also, access to higher education, work and participating in public life is a luxury for women in the current authoritarian regime.
The current society is changing at an unprecedented pace toward a woman unfriendly parasitic masculine society where women merely act as reproductive machines. How is this society parasitic? One would ask. This is the case, because a woman as an individual doesn’t have an existence or identity. Just a year ago, Afghanistan had a model parliament in the region, with a majority of 40% women as members of parliament. An achievement that was replaced with the absolute number of zero with the arrival of the Taliban. Moreover, when the Taliban spokesmen were asked about the position of the mothers in Islam and participation of women in politics; they simply replied that their sons will ensure their rights in the parliament. Most often,
the word culture is used to justify this behavior, but the current regime is completely alien with the Afghan culture. For instance, one of the four important imams in the Islamic history Imam Abu Hanifa who was a persian speaking resident of the Charikar city is named after his mother. This emphasizes the respect and position that the habitants of this country have and had for their women. Even among Pashtuns, genealogical books testify that some of the more famous and powerful tribes such as the Afridi or Ghilzay are connected to the rest of the Pashtuns by maternal lineage. In the case of Ghilzay’s Bibi Matu is considered to be the mother of all Ghilzay’s and the Mati tribe in the Bitani branch is named after her. This is unique since the Ghilzay tribe is the largest Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan.
Another remarkable parasitic characteristic of the current regime is their misusage of woman as an asset, and how the political structure uses women to feed itself. If they want to pressurize the international society, they used women rights as scapegoat. A woman has no existence in their society, but women football and cricket funds were used to empower men sport. Therefore, from a feminists point of view, the participation of the national cricket team in Australia would have been wrong. The same struggle is fought in football field. A former women football national team captain, Khalida Popal started a lawsuit against FIFA, because the women football funding were delivered to Taliban without any pardon.
The solution is clear and easy. Societies can’t reach their full potential when half the population is deprived of their basic rights. An uneducated mother will deliver an uneducated son to society. A society without freedom and equality is a prison and won’t last long, because a country with an illiterate majority will create unbalances and fragile in society
