A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not, and a woman may not in public,” actor Meryl Streep had spoken of the plight of Afghanistan’s women under the Taliban regime at the UN General Assembly in New York in September. She urged the international community to take action against the systematic leaching of the freedoms of women and girls in a country where “a squirrel has more rights” than them. In the three years since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, women have been barred from secondary and higher education, access to public parks, employment and reproductive rights. They cannot leave home unless fully covered, nor sing or speak aloud in public. The Taliban has now appended another diktat to this draconian repression — they cannot be heard praying by another woman even in passing because a woman’s voice is meant to be “awrah” (private).
The scars of such totalitarianism run wide and deep. A UN policy paper released in August estimates “that the Afghan economy will lose USD 9.6 billion, equivalent to two-thirds of today’s gross domestic product, by 2066 if the suspension of women’s access to higher education remains in place”, that there may be “correlations between the bans on women’s and girls’ education and an increase, by 2026, in early childbearing among Afghan girls by 45 per cent and risk of maternal mortality by at least 50 per cent”. But more than that, this targeting of the rights, lives and bodies of women points at a culture that seeks to corrode their resilience and existence.
The latest decree in Afghanistan is not just another transgression of the fundamental rights of an individual, it strikes at one of the last few comforts available to women in public spaces in the country — the solidarity of an amorphous sisterhood, the solace of a voice raised in prayer. And yet, from Malala Yousafzai’s defiance — her determined pursuit of education in Swat Valley became the reason for her to be shot at by the Taliban in Pakistan as she returned from an examination in 2012 — to the Iranian women’s assertions of jin jiyan azadi (women, life, liberty) in the wake of the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022 — she was arrested for an alleged breach of the Iranian government’s dress code for women — if there is anything that history has shown, it is this: That years of rage and deprivation will make themselves felt; that gender apartheids are not merely about women’s rights but about universal dignities. And that the caged bird will continue to “sing of freedom”.
