Canadians advocating for the rights of Afghan women and girls are asking the world to lend an ear to their voices and a helping hand to those being stripped of their rights.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan three years ago, it has imposed strict rules on the public lives of women. Last month, the Taliban issued a manifesto adding further powers to the Ministry of Virtue and Vice that ban women from singing and reading outside their homes.
Activists in Afghanistan and around the world have since posted images of themselves singing in defiance. In one video, a woman wearing a burqa performs a revolutionary tune. “You made me a prisoner in my home for the crime of being a woman,” she sings.
The Calgary-based non-profit Right to Learn Afghanistan, formerly known as Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, says the Taliban’s crackdown reinforces the need for the world to speak out.
“This is gradual death,” Right to Learn Afghanistan senior director Murwarid Ziayee says. “The women are alive, but it is just breathing, there is nothing beyond that.”
Ziayee says Afghan women fear the international community has turned its back on them, and they feel left alone in their fight for freedom and basic rights, from education to employment.
But the voices of women, now risking Taliban retribution by posting online in protest, do echo in the hearts of some who fled Afghanistan for Canada.
“Everyone calls me Madame Aref,” says Makai Aref, who was once a mathematics and physics teacher at a high school for girls in Kabul. She eventually took on the role of principal.
Aref founded the Afghan Women’s Centre of Montreal (AWCM) after she immigrated to Canada in 2000. Her goal was to break the isolation of women from her homeland who have arrived in a new city.
At first, she held gatherings over tea, and over the years the AWCM became a full-fledged non-profit organization which aims to empowers socially integrated immigrant women.
These days, it also offers support to women here reeling from the plight of women back home.
AWCM executive director Victoria Jahesh says immigrant women in Canada are watching, and trying to understand, the events unfolding in Afghanistan. She says no book or religious text says girls don’t have a right to education.
“Girls and women don’t have the right to go to a park,” Jahesh says. “It is kind of like a prison, they don’t know what to do.”
Afghan women tailors work with a sewing machine in the Afghan Women Business Hub in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 2, 2024. Half of Afghanistan’s population now finds itself locked out of the freedom to work at a time when the country’s economy is worse than ever, with few jobs available to women in the country. (AP Photo/Siddiqullah Alizai)
Jahesh says before the Taliban takeover in 2021, women and girls could get higher education, including master’s degrees or a PhD, but all that has been taken away.
“We have been chatting with many women and girls in Afghanistan and they say, ‘Well, my education was in accounting or in administration, but now I have to go back to school to be trained as a midwife, that is the only possibility that I have for work now.'”
And Jahesh says the international community must ponder what can be done to help.
After the Taliban regained power, Aref decided to use her creative spirit to help those struggling financially and emotionally. She used her connections back home and found a teacher, as well as space for small groups of children outside Kabul to continue going to school. She has set up and supports three schools for girls and an orphan centre.
More than 120 Afghan girls in three schools follow lessons in limited subjects, such as mathematics, languages and religion.
“In one space, they are in a living room sitting down on a floor and they are studying,” Aref says.
That has opened a small window to the world, but advocates are urging the international community to stand firmly in solidarity with Afghan women.