local Taliban authorities (N. H. Dupree 2001).
The management of local affairs was deeply reliant on local Taliban leaders, some of whom allowed a certain level of negotiation on their policies. It is in the cities where women had traditionally enjoyed a greater degree of personal autonomy that the rules imposed by the new regime appeared the harshest. As the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they closed schools and Kabul University to female students and teachers. These policies had a devastating impact on both boys’ and girls’ education as women represented an important proportion of teachers and university professors. Women’s seclusion was announced on Radio Sharia on the day Kabul fell into Taliban’s hands. During the entire length of the Taliban rule, the regime would inform the population about new rules and regulations through this same station: “Women, you should not step outside of your residence. If you go outside the house you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing cosmetics and appearing in front of every man before the coming of Islam Women should not create such opportunity to attract the attention of useless people who will not look at them with a good eye. Women have the responsibility as a teacher and coordinator for her family. Husband, brother, father have the responsibility for providing the family with the necessary life requirements (food, clothes, etc.)” (Rostami-Povey 2007, 24).
But men were not protected from the regime’s hold on their lives. The length of their beard and the appropriateness of their clothes were under the constant scrutiny of the religious police. The regime focused upon punishing them for infractions committed by their female relatives, reflecting the acceptance of male responsibility for controlling women (N. H. Dupree 2001).
In a matter of a few decades, Afghanistan had moved from a regime that in the 1920s, under the reign of King Amanullah, had imposed the wearing of European clothes in Kabul to a regime that wanted to break away from any form of Western influence and return to what it perceived as “authentic tradition.” In both cases, ideas about modernity and tradition were translated in regulations targeting individuals’ physical appearance in public spaces. This disciplining of bodies and the specific emphasis on regulating and controlling women’s appearance in public are symptomatic of the broader struggle between Kabul and its peripheries, on one hand, and the irreconcilable viewpoints of the reformist elite and the Islamists, on the other hand. Women’s bodies stood at the front line of this ideological battle. The failure of the successive governments to carry out positive development projects in the peripheries together with foreign interference in internal affairs had produced a unique form of countermodernity.
As a social, ideological, and political phenomenon the Taliban are indeed utterly modern. The origin of the Taliban movement, its military development, and its political project highlight characteristic features of globalized warfare. Their emergence on the Afghan political scene is not to be interpreted as a simple return to an authentic Afghan tradition. On the contrary, the global assemblages in which the movement was enmeshed provided the fertile ground from which tradition could be imagined and reinvented. These assemblages are partially the products of the influence of external Islamic sources on their political ideology. Educated in madrassas, the Taliban were introduced to the Deobandi school of thoughts by semi-literate Pakistani mullahs associated with Pakistan’s Jami’at-e Ulema-e Islam (JUI) political party (Rashid 2002). A lack of appreciation on the part of the mullahs of the reformist Deobandi agenda brought the schools and their curricula closer to ultraconservative Wahhabism (founded in Saudi Arabia), which claims to teach strict adherence to the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and the Four “rightly guided” Caliphs (Rashid 1999, 26). This interpretation of Islam provided the ideological framework from which the Taliban formulated their opposition first to the Communist government and later on to the mujahideen in cultural terms that were relatively efficient to rally the rural masses, especially in the Pashtun southern part of the country. Deobandi Islam had no roots in Afghanistan; however, it provided a template for reinterpreting the Pashtun code of honor, codifying it through decrees and finally unevenly implementing it at the national level when they came to power. Second, the Taliban political project is quintessentially cosmopolitan. Armed by Pakistan, supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia, and trained by transnational Islamic mercenaries, the Taliban were well equipped to win on the military front. Their political agenda aimed at creating a pure Islamic state based on sharia law, a state that would protect people from the polluting West. Ironically, the ones who called themselves “Taliban” (literally, “students in religion”) were often illiterate and therefore unable to read a line of the Koran.
Most of them had had little contact with women prior to entering the capital city. Like the young mujahideen who came to Kabul in 1992, they shared “similar ideas about upright female behaviour: ‘good’ women stay home, ‘bad’ women expose their faces” (N. H. Dupree 2001, 150). However, the policies that they implemented regarding women provoked adaptations that were far from their initial intent. As Nancy Dupree points out (2001, 160), women creatively adjusted to this political change by making their own fashion statements. Reporting on the forced veiling of women under chadari, she writes: “Burnt orange and forest green are fashionable in Jalalabad; various clear shades of blue accented by occasional canary yellow flit about Kabul; black was never usual, except among some groups in Herat. Made mostly of soft artificial silk, the veils shimmer and billow with a certain mysterious seductiveness.”
The Taliban enforced the total curtailment of women’s freedom to move, to work, and to be educated. Discrimination was officially sanctioned and pervaded every aspect of women’s lives. Girls were forbidden to attend school, even when provided at home. Women faced draconian punishment for adultery. Women were denied the freedom to work and were forbidden to leave their homes unless completely veiled under chadari and accompanied by a male relative (mahram). Such restrictions were particularly alien to women in Kabul and many were slow to comply. Confrontations between women and the religious police supervised by the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, the most powerful arm of the regime, occurred daily until, paralyzed by fear, women finally complied. Women were beaten up in the streets for wearing nail polish, white socks (the color of the Taliban flag), shiny shoes, or a chadari that was not long enough (N. H. Dupree 2001, 152).
These recent and traumatic events are strongly engrained in the psyche of urban women. In spite of their fear, many women, often with the support of male family members, started to organize underground activities and support networks. These activities helped them cope with the stress of their secluded life. By morally supporting each other and providing services for their community, women regained a sense of worth and usefulness.
Most women who conducted such activities did not view their involvement as a political act but as a survival strategy, deeply embedded in the material conditions of their everyday lives. To be able to run such activities and keep a minimum of mobility, women had to develop creative strategies. Some of them recruited and employed fake mahrams when male relatives were not available. Others mobilized other women from public spaces where women’s presence was not suspicious such as mosques and ziharat (sites of pilgrimage). During this period, the chadari became a protective device, a “mobile home” that allowed women to circulate in public spaces without being questioned or threatened. Women used their chadari to smuggle books and stationery for their schools, the same way they had smuggled weapons during the jihad.
Thanks to these informal courses secretly attended, many young women managed to continue their education and to escape from total isolation. Women demonstrated a real sense of creativity and ingenuity in the face of particularly difficult economic and social conditions. For most women, belonging to a network was a means to escape from boredom and to find moral support. By attending or running courses, women opened for themselves spaces where they could share their sorrows and exchange small services. If these everyday small acts of resistance empowered women and enhanced their self-confidence, they led them to sternly challenge broader gender hierarchies, especially in a context where maintaining social relations was and is still perceived as vital.
The Taliban regime affected different women in different ways. The relative peace the Taliban
