Afghan girls laugh together on the bus. They take private classes together in the wake of the Taliban’s decision to withhold their formal education. Three years later, girls are still banned from going to school. Their voices, silenced even in Western spaces like American classrooms and Congressional floors, have always been necessary to the culture and development of the societies they occupy.
The Taliban’s new morality laws, put into effect last month, devalue the autonomy of more than 50% of the nation. These laws, according to UN Women, include “Requirements for women to cover their entire bodies and faces, and it forbids women’s voices in public. Women are also prohibited from interacting with non-Muslims, using public transport alone and looking at men to whom they are not related by blood or marriage.”
Yogita Limaye of the BBC defies this law while interviewing a seventeen-year-old girl attending English classes, an activist arrested by the Taliban for protesting and teachers running schools out of rebellion. Limaye writes that they have taken to social media, singing as a demonstration against the Taliban.
When the Taliban took those voices away last month, it sent the Western world into a spiral. The U.N. Human Rights Commissioner responded to the news by saying “I shudder to think what is next for the women and girls of Afghanistan. This repressive control over half the population in the country is unparalleled in today’s world.”
But is it?
The West has always been silencing women in Islamic societies, and these new laws are giving us reason to do it more. The conversations around countries like Afghanistan center on Islamophobia and the white-savior ideology of “liberating” these women from their religion. When a Muslim woman wants to wear a hijab to school or a basketball game, her beliefs are criticized and invalidated. She is ostracized from the rest of the West. This reverberates to Congress and the United Nations, who fail to listen to these women’s wants, needs and desires for their countries of origin.
Amira Jarmakani writes about how the West, post-9/11, weaponizes important Muslim religious practices such as the veil against women in Islamic societies. She writes that the veil creates a delicate balance of invisibility and hypervisibility. In short, white feminists see these women but don’t hear them.
When the Taliban passes edicts that stop women from going to school, force them to cover every inch of their body and now prevent them from speaking in public altogether, it reverberates around the world. The Taliban are silencing women in Afghanistan but Muslim women are paying the price for it everywhere. The West sees the impact this has on women, such as rising suicide rates. Yet it fails to give Arab women around the world space and support to discuss feminism in the Islamic world in relation to religion, culture and society.
What is needed now more than ever is ears. We must listen to Afghan women in homes, secret classrooms and on the streets of Kabul. We must respect the autonomy of their minds and bodies and uplift their voices in our own communities. Stopping the silence starts here, with us.
