Afghan men cut their beards, but women remain veiled

14 Nov, 2001 12:04 AM6 mins to read

By JUSTIN HUGGLER

TALOQAN, Afghanistan - Across parts of Afghanistan, the men are celebrating. They are queuing at the barbers' to have their Taleban regulation-length beards shaved off. Music, banned by the Taleban, is legal again, and Indian pop tunes blare in the streets.

But women are still invisible. Despite the Northern Alliance forces sweeping the country, women were are not yet tearing off their veils.

Dr Wahida (she has only one name) sat in her home yesterday evening, her features half hidden in shadow, half lit by a flickering hurricane lamp. Her face was beautiful - but usually, no one outside her family and close women friends sees it. In the streets, she is one of the faceless shapes that come and go, shrouded in a white or blue burqa, peering out at the world from the tiny lace mask at the front.

In the bazaar, Abdul Baseer was selling cassettes. When the Taleban came here just over a year ago, they pulled the tape out of all his cassettes and hanged it symbolically from the nearby trees. All he was allowed to sell were recitals of the Koran. Yesterday an old recording of Ahmad Zaheer, the great Afghan singer, echoed from Mr Baseer's stall. "Today I have drunk too much, let me dream my dream," he sang. "Put me in a river of wine." All of Afghanistan was dreaming with him.

But the women's dreams remain desperately limited. The jubilant crowd outside the stall was all men. The women hurried by in their burqas. Even in Northern Alliance territory, it is difficult even to speak to an Afghan woman - except beggars, refugees and the very old.

Try talking to a woman on the street and you are liable to be attacked by her husband. Even as Dr Wahida spoke yesterday, her husband Mohammed sat beside her. At times, he did not allow her to speak, but answered the questions for her. When he let her answer, she her replies were brief and meek. Despite the overthrow of the Taleban, Dr Wahida still lives her life confined in a tiny world: home, the hospital where she will soon return to work, and the street outside her house. If she goes into the next street, her husband Mohammed says, he will punish her.

The Northern Alliance will do nothing to liberate Dr Wahida from this. Only a few months ago, in the Northern Alliance-controlled town of Rostok, a woman was beaten to death by her husband. He was not sent to prison, he was not even arrested. He received no punishment at all. He beat her because she quarrelled with his brother's wife.

But Dr Wahida said she was delighted the Northern Alliance had arrived. "Before the Taleban came, it was good for women in Afghanistan," she said. "Now women can work and go to school again."

In the bazaar, the young Afghan teachers at the United English Language Centre were excitedly talking of starting English lessons for girls again. Boys and girls used to sit side by side in the dirt-floored classrooms, on rickety wooden benches without desks. The language school is private, but the Taleban banned girls from attending when they captured Taloqan. Education and work were made illegal for women.

Dr Wahida was one of very few women who were allowed to continue to work, because she was a doctor. Even so, the Taleban only allowed her Dr Wahida to treat women patients. After a short time, she said, she left her job at the hospital.

"Some of the Taleban used to make me come and treat their wives in the middle of the night, even after I had worked all day. I told them, 'I have four children at home, but they didn't listen'."

Women are not so repressed in all parts of Afghanistan, and in some of the more liberal cities, the burqas will be flung away now that the Taleban have gone. But, for millions of women in more traditional areas, life will not become much freer. They wore the burqa here before the Taleban came.

In fact, Dr Wahida did not grow up with the burqa. She comes from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sherif, which was one of the most liberal places in Afghanistan until the Taleban captured it. She was a star medical student there. Now she is one of Mohammed's two wives, living in one half of a divided house with her children. The other wife lives in the second half with her children. Asked what she thought of the burqa, she smiled shyly. "It is our custom," was all she said.

Mohammed, his beard freshly trimmed now that the Taleban are gone, is not a tyrant. For an Afghan, he is quite liberal. "If we lived in Mazar, I would not make her wear the burqa," he said. "But if she did not wear it here, people would say she and I are immoral. I don't want to tell her she cannot go in this street or that street but, if she went anywhere she liked, the men here would think she is immoral and take advantage of her.

"It is different in the West," he went on. "Your people are educated. Here, the men know nothing of women's rights. In a marriage, the man can do anything he likes. The woman can do nothing. In Afghanistan, we think of a woman only as something to sleep with."

Could Dr Wahida foresee a time when Afghan women will be able to live like women in the West? For once, Mohammed let her answer and she became animated. Her eyes flahed in the lamplight.

"Yes, that would be good, to go where I like and not to wear the burqa. But what would be better is for the war to end in Afghanistan, for the fighting to stop, and there to be quiet here."

- INDEPENDENT

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