‘Is it a sin to learn?’ Afghan women grapple with Taliban edicts.

Even before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021, getting an education was tough for the young woman from Kandahar.

Ms. A. says she endured violence, street harassment, and “daily threats on the way from men” – never mind family poverty – “so that I could be someone in the future, and get freedom and independence.”

But nothing prepared her for what she witnessed in late December, when a phalanx of Taliban gunmen came to her university to halt her final exam, as they enforced a new decree that banned women from higher education.

“I could not believe my eyes that it could be true,” recalls Ms. A., who asked that her full name not be used, for fear of retribution. Scores of fighters with assault rifles blocked the university entrance and tore through classrooms, as if on a military operation, prompting male students to shout at them to permit the female students to enter.

“It was so scary,” says Ms. A, whose hands and one foot were badly bruised when the Taliban hit students with their guns and dispersed them with live fire. “I still remember their wild eyes and long hair; I can’t forget their horrible faces and actions.”

Video of the clash taken by a classmate shows one male student getting pulled to the ground by a black turban-wearing Talib, who kicks and beats him hard as gunshots sound.

Such violent episodes have played out in different forms at universities across the country, illustrating the collision between Afghan women’s expectations of contributing publicly through education, work, and greater freedoms, and the ultraconservative Taliban’s demands that they stay at home, be subservient to their husbands, and disengage from society.

The women’s expectations were raised during 20 years of American and Western military and donor presence, which sought to build civil society. Now, a year and a half after the Islamist Taliban swept to power, earlier Taliban promises of allowing girls and women to study at high school and university and to work outside the home have been snuffed out by one edict after another that activists say are driven by misogyny.

Yet while Afghan women say their lives have grown darker under the Taliban, they nevertheless are often still struggling to find ways to get by, and cling to their determination to get an education and to work.

Still, as Afghans cope with the toughest winter in a decade, with widespread hunger made worse by a banking and financial crisis and the cutoff of donor funds to the Taliban, there is shock at how the Taliban have prioritized their zealous shrinking of the role of women. Much United Nations and Western relief work is in limbo, for example, over a separate Taliban ruling that bans Afghan women from working for them.

Existential questions

Among many other recent and restrictive edicts, women have been banned from visiting parks and gyms.

“Is it a sin being a girl? Is it a sin to learn? Is it a sin just to exist and breathe?” asks Ms. A. Those questions, she says, have addled her and even made her suicidal, as anger grows in her family about its own sacrifices to invest in her education, which now “appear a waste of time and money.”

Her existential pondering echoes across several interviews, conducted by The Christian Science Monitor over secure messaging apps and with the promise of anonymity, with young women in three regions of Afghanistan. Two had jobs working with the U.N. or international nongovernmental organizations while also pursuing advanced studies. All of that is now on hold.

“They will marry me off and that is the end of my every dream, [but] I don’t want to stop fighting for my education. I don’t want to stay backward,” says Ms. A. Still, she acknowledges that working and applying her studies “is not possible in Afghanistan for the next several years.”

Such restrictions imposed on Afghan women have drawn widespread global rebuke.

After a late January visit to Afghanistan, for example, U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said the ban on women working for the U.N. and relief agencies was “a potential death blow” that could have “catastrophic” results.

“Afghanistan is going through a savage winter, the second under the Taliban,” Mr. Griffiths told reporters at a press conference. “Last winter, we managed to survive. I don’t know if we can do this indefinitely, not with these bans.”

Mr. Griffiths said the Taliban promised him that new guidelines would enable women to work in humanitarian operations, and the U.N. was “asked to be patient.” But even though the Taliban reportedly permit women to work in the health sector, officials in Kandahar ordered that those working in local clinics must be accompanied by a male guardian.

Housebound in Kabul

Taliban restrictions have confined Ms. S. to her family home in the capital, Kabul. She started school in 2005 and was at the top of her class every year until graduation, when she aced the national Kankor exam, chose advanced study, and later took a high-profile job.

She stopped work when the Taliban came to power, and was identified by the Taliban as someone who took part in protests to preserve women’s rights that took place shortly thereafter.

“I had an immense fear that the Taliban will arrest me, because I was leading a women-based civil society organization,” says Ms. S. “Whenever I got home, my family was worried about me.”

Disappointed but unbowed, Ms. S. “decided to get back on my feet.” She started a master’s program in business administration.

“I had promised my parents that I would study and serve my family and my country,” she says.

But when she was about to take the final exam in December, there was instead a lesson in rough Taliban enforcement.

“The teachers were trying to prevent the Taliban from entering, but they came into our class,” recalls Ms. S. “We were very scared. We said to them, ‘Please let us pass our exam.’ But they took our books from our hands. They were very disrespectful and forced us out of the university.

“All of us women were crying, and I came home crying and disappointed. I threw away all of my books. I hate pens and notebooks,” she says. “I think that all my dreams have been lost and I have wasted my efforts.”

Undesired marriages

Similar frustration is voiced in northwest Afghanistan, where Ms. N. also describes how her final exams in Mazar-e-Sharif were blocked by the Taliban – and how one commander has now complicated her life even more.

When the Monitor first spoke to Ms. N., she described living “free like a bird” before the Taliban seized power, as an activist working for women’s and children’s rights.

But then her family’s economic situation deteriorated so far, with her father unable to keep his butcher shop open under Taliban rule, that he was forced to give away her 15-year-old sister in an underage marriage early last year – partly to pay Ms. N.’s university fees. Ms. N. said she could “never forgive herself” for that outcome.

As a personal form of resistance, Ms. N. then doubled down on her medical studies. But even that option has now evaporated.

When the Taliban banned women from higher education, her university decided to conduct all exams secretly within a week – three months early.

Yet within 10 minutes of starting the exam, “Taliban fighters entered the exam room with great aggression and started beating the professors and women,” recalls Ms. N. “They beat us ceaselessly, tore our exam papers, and violently dragged us from the exam room.”

And that is not the only Taliban problem Ms. N. has to contend with. A commander once saw her enter university, took a photograph, and forced a university administrator to give up her contact details.

The Taliban commander “calls and sends me messages, warning me, ‘If you don’t marry me, I will kill you and your father,’” says Ms. N. He goes to her house in a distant village once or twice a week, pressing her father for her hand.

“We are witnessing the Taliban in our society using women like slaves,” says Ms. N. “In our village, Taliban commanders want to marry for the second or third time. If the girl is not satisfied, the Taliban force her.”

The cumulative result for Ms. N. is that renewing hope is a challenge, compounded by not enough money to pay for her father’s medical treatment – or even to pay for much food or heat in the house.

“Our only effort was to acquire knowledge to save our nation and society from this bad misery,” says Ms. N.

“By banning women from education and work, the Taliban again want to make women’s lives dark. ... If a woman is not educated, then she will raise illiterate children to society, and we will not be able to solve our problems.”

Hidayatullah Noorzai contributed to this report.