I woke up early this morning (5.30am!) thinking about the horrendous conditions some of the women in Afghanistan live with on a daily basis, some of this resulting from my recent reading about women there. They have experienced so much war, upheaval and devastation in their lives due the various wars which have been waged in Afghanistan that I really don’t know how they’ve survived. Enduring constant warfare since the 1970s, first with a civil war, then with the Soviet invasion (1979), then the Taliban (1996) and most recently with the US (Operation Enduring Freedom, October 2001), they have found their countryside pillaged and many of their young men dead.

If all of this suffering wasn’t enough, on top of it, many Afghan women have had to endure physical, verbal, emotional and sexual abuse, often at the hands of men they know. Many find themselves married off to men two or three times their age - many marrying at 14 or 15 years old. Unless women had progressive parents, many were not educated and did not work outside the home, if at all. Many of the privileges women enjoyed during the Soviet invasion were taken from them when the Taliban emerged as the leading political/religious group in the mid-90s.

While things are improving for women in Afghanistan today (i.e. women can work with the permission of their husbands or families), much abuse still continues. If you are unfamiliar with the beautiful landscape of Afghanistan, I encourage you to familiarize yourselves, dear readers, with its lush and varied past.

For example, Afghanistan had several cities on the Silk Road (Herat, Bamiyan and Kabul) and was the crossroads for many cultures and religions. Most interesting is the country’s Buddhist past. Bamiyan was known to be a Buddhist hotspot in the first millenium, up until the Islamic invasion in the 9th century. You probably are familiar with the city’s name, as this was the place where the standing statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 for being “un-Islamic”. Before Islam arrived, over 2,000 Buddhist monks lived in the caves surrounding these statues and painted numerous frescoes in them. While there is some historical evidence that Bamiyan had three giant Buddhas, only two were destroyed in 2001. According to a Wikipedia site:

“The two most prominent statues were the giant, standing Buddhas, measuring 55 and 37 metres (180 and 121 feet) high respectively, the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. They were perhaps the most famous cultural landmarks of the region and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamyan Valley.

The smaller of the two statues was built in the year AD 507. The larger one was constructed in 554. The statues are believed to have been built by the Kushans and Indo-Hephthalites (both eastern Indo-European peoples) at the heyday of their empires. The above mentioned groups were the ancestors of the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan. Physical and facial features of the Hazaras are greatly similar to those in the frescoes found in the ancient relics and caves. Furthermore, considering the historical importance of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, unsuccessful claims over the Buddha heritage have been made by all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan-tsang (Xuanzang) passed through the area around AD 630 and described Bamiyan as a flourishing Buddhist center “with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks”, and he noted that both Buddha figures were “decorated with gold and fine jewels” (Wriggins, 1995). Xuan Zang’s account is intriguing as he mentions a third, even larger, reclining statue of Buddha; although it is generally believed destroyed, some archaeological expeditions are searching for it.

A monumental sitting Buddha similar in style to those at Bamiyan still exists in the Bingling Temple caves in China’s Gansu province.”

I’d like to point out two things here: One, in 1999, the Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Omar actually issued a decree proclaiming that the statues should be protected and, as there was no longer a Buddhist community in Bamiyan, the statues were not in danger of being worshipped. However, in 2001, the Taliban decided all images were “un-Islamic” and the statues were destroyed. Two, the Wikipedia article cites that the Valley of Bamiyan and its archaeological remains were placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which is true. However, it didn’t get placed on the List until 2003, well after destruction had occurred.

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list

In fact, none of the two sites on the List for Afghanistan were placed on it until AFTER Operation Enduring Freedom began. The same is mostly true for Iraq. Of the three sites listed, only one (Hatra) was protected before the war (1985). This is the issue I focus on in my dissertation, which I hope to finish in the next few years. (Forthcoming blog on this topic…stay tuned!).

So, where can you go for information about Afghanistan? Talk to people who’ve been there (many folk are coming home from the war or NGO work there), read everything and anything you can about it, research the culture, people, history of Afghanistan yourself. Often, in larger cities, you can find excellent Afghan restaurants, which is always a good place to start!

Deb Rodriguez, author of Kabul Beauty School, had this to say about helping women in Afghanistan:

“There are many of us Westerners who want to help Afghan women, but our efforts don’t always help them in the ways that we hope they will. There are so many ties that bind these women and hold them back, and many of the ties aren’t even visible to the Western eye. It takes a long time to understand how the complexities of these women’s lives differ from the complexities of ours. Sometimes we can’t help, even when we understand these complexities. The culture is changing so much more slowly than their dreams are” (p. 259).

With this in mind, I’m including some books which help crack open the situation in Afghanistan:

Swallows of Kabul - Yasmina Khadra
The Bookseller of Kabul - Asne Seierstad
Kite Runner and One Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Kabul Beauty School - Deborah Rodriguez

My point? Expand your horizons and reach out to women across the world and in your own neighborhood who cry out for help. My hope is that through education, we can help each other effect change.