Afghan women’s rights advocates inaugurated a library in Kabul to give refuge to the women who are becoming increasingly cut off from education and society under the Taliban regime.
The Islamist Taliban have maintained this regulation since taking over Afghanistan a year ago, even if some women in urban areas choose to disregard it. They also require women to cover their faces and not leave the house without a male relative. After the Taliban broke their commitment to open secondary schools for girls in March, they are still largely shuttered.
According to Zhulia Parsi, one of the library’s founders, we opened the library with two purposes: first, for those girls who cannot attend school, and second, for those women who lost their jobs and have nothing to do. An inquiry for comment from Reuters was not immediately answered by a Taliban spokesman.
The library has more than 1,000 books, including fiction and non-fiction works on science, politics, and the economy. Most of the volumes were gifts from authors, poets, and professors to the Afghan women’s rights organization Crystal Bayat Foundation, which assisted in establishing the library.
In addition to helping to construct the library in a rented shop in a mall with several stores catering to women, several women’s activists who have participated in protests recently also contributed. The Taliban abandoned their vow to offer high schools for girls in March. Due to the expanding restrictions and Afghanistan’s economic crisis, thousands of women have been forced out of labor and the majority of teenage girls no longer have access to education, according to foreign aid agencies.
According to the Taliban, women’s rights are respected by their understanding of Islamic law, and since March, they have been attempting to find a method to establish girls’ high schools. Western governments are speaking out more against the Taliban’s growing exclusion of women from public life.
Many Afghan women have appealed to Taliban officials to respect their rights and voiced their frustration. Mahjoba Habibi, a supporter of women’s rights, remarked during the library’s opening that they can’t eradicate us from society; if they eradicate us from one field, we will continue from another field.
Women and girls have essentially been excluded from Afghani public life in the year after the Taliban assumed control of the country. The Taliban invaded Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, and seized power. The Taliban originally made hollow claims that women would be free to ‘enjoy their rights under Sharia law,’ including the right to work and pursue an education, but as time went on, women and girls started to vanish from the public sphere.
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