Teaching Resistance in Kabul

In her burka, Suraya takes to the streets

Suraya #4

Suraya continued her fight for women even as the political circumstances made it more difficult for her. When the Russians first took over in Afghanistan they released all the political prisoners and for a short time Suraya was free to continue her work, but in 1988, the Russians left Afghanistan. By 1992, the Mujarhadeen, warlords from the north of Afghanistan, were ruling the country. On the first day of the Mujarhadeen rule, they revoked the freedoms that were available to women under the Russians.

Although women were not yet required to wear burkas in the streets, Suraya decided to return to wearing her burka because she believed that it helped her to continue her work and allowed her to travel. Women mostly stayed at home. In the streets, where rape, kidnapping, and killing of women were commonplace, the burka sometimes protected them.
In the mid-1995s, the Taliban replaced the Mujarhadeen. The western powers and Afghanistan’s neighbors initially supported these strict Muslims. The Taliban forbade all women to be out on the street without their burkas.

In a moment of danger, Suraya decided that she would have to change her name and become someone else. She told no one about this, and her family thought that she had been killed. She chose a foreign name. When the Taliban heard about a woman by the name Parlika organizing other women and asked about this woman, they were told she was not an Afghani woman.

Suraya laughed as she remembered walking in the street, completely covered in her burka, when a man stopped and asked if she knew a woman with the name Parlika. He said that he had a letter and some amount of money for this woman from out of the country. Suraya told him that she didn’t know this woman, but she thought that she must be a foreigner because her name was not an Afghani name.

Suraya had to allow her family to believe that she had been killed in order to protect herself and them. Her choice of anonymity ran up against her strong family ties. Suraya said that at the time, she could think of no other way to continue her work. She stopped telling her story for a brief moment and then, as she had done for many years, she put her attention back on her underground work with women.

Before the Taliban, the women had gone to the cemetery daily to remember their relatives. The Taliban allowed the women to go to the cemetery only on Wednesdays. Suraya and her group of women decided to use this time to find ways to organize women to help each other.
At the cemetery, they created a ritual of hope. Suraya began by bringing eleven walnuts, giving one nut to each of eleven women she met there. She said that the nut would bring them good fortune, and if they accepted the nut, they were asked to agree to come to the cemetery for seven weeks. They were asked to bring eleven nuts each time to give to eleven other women. Every week more and more women came to the cemetery. The Taliban tried to get the women to go away, but they kept coming.

The women formed groups around each eleven nuts, bringing food to share with one another. They began to talk about their dreams for the future and to tell stories about what was happening in their families. Their conversations changed over time, and they spoke with each other about what to do if they were raped or forced into marriage.

Stories poured out—somebody had been raped, someone had been tortured. Under their burkas, no one’s face was seen and no one’s name was spoken, providing the women with the anonymity they needed in order to speak freely. Someone would start, ‘I know of a woman who…’ and a terrible story would follow, and then someone else would tell another story.

The women’s secret protest expanded to Thursdays, when some of the women got together at one woman’s house to make a special dessert. These women would carry the dessert and the stories house-to-house.
Some of the worst stories were the forced marriages of very young girls, fourteen years old. Before the Mujarhadeen, a woman could meet the man she was arranged to marry. Arranged marriages usually went well because similar people were brought together, such as educated women and men who were introduced at the request of their parents. Under the Taliban, arranged marriages became horrible. Women were forbidden education, and young girls were often taken far away from their families by old men who treated them like slaves.

Suraya said, “With all the stories, we raised the consciousness of the women and their expectations and their hopes, but the stories of rapes were almost unbearable. After rape, many of the women committed suicide. Sometimes there would be gang rapes. Men would just break into a house and rape all the women in the house. We were told about a girl aged fourteen, who was raped by seven men until she died. When women are raped, if they are not killed in the rape, they are sometimes shot by family members. When they aren’t killed, they are kicked out of the community. They become nothing in the eyes of others. These women need someone to treat their wounds and to help them to identify the people who are guilty. They are not the guilty ones.”

During this Taliban period, girls’ schools were closed. With four other women, Suraya created a core of teachers for an underground school. Despite the risks, these women had to do something to educate girls or there would be an entire generation of uneducated Afghani women. Each of the first group of women went to talk to three or four other women and encouraged them to form a group of teachers. Each small group supported one another in becoming teachers for five to seven students.

The underground groups organized all over Kabul. Sometimes these groups did more than educate girls, helping women leave the country or escape from forced marriages. The brothers and father of a woman would choose a husband for her and then there would be a month before the marriage. The group would prepare the woman to escape the night before the wedding using their own money to help her get away. If she were caught, her own family would kill her, so how she escaped was very important.

Suraya searched for money to pay for the teachers and other needs of the women’s project. Women got money from their husbands if they were sympathetic, and women who had money gave money. The women also developed a business weaving rugs that supported the effort. Some of the money they collected went to families whose houses had been burned when the Taliban suspected them of illegal political activities. For security reasons, most of the women did not know the others’ names.

The women’s burkas served as effective disguises as they moved from city to city. They started more underground schools and enlisted others in the movement. Although the Taliban tried to find and stop them, word spread and more and more people helped.