How a new generation of educated girls defied the Taliban

When the Taliban reached Parveen Tokhi’s home province of Zabul in mid-August and asked to use her school as a temporary barracks, the headteacher was frightened but clear about what she had to do.

- Emma Graham-Harrison QALAT and Jordan Bryon KABUL

AFGHANISTAN

She spent the bleak years of the first Taliban government in the 1990s stuck at home like almost all Afghan women, barred from education and work. She was determined that the same shadow wouldn’t engulf another generation.

“I said: ‘ OK, you can stay there overnight, but these buildings are a girls’ school, and I have sacrificed all my life for the education of these girls.’ ” The men had to be out in time for morning classes to start as usual at Bibi Khala school the next day, she insisted, undaunted by their guns.

Then she got the contact number for senior Taliban officials and rang them directly to say there was no Islamic justification to bar girls from the classrooms and corridors where she had spent most of her life, first as a student, then for four decades as a teacher. “I said: ‘I will not close the school, even if someone kills me for this, because the girls come in hijab, and the teachers are female.’”

Southern Zabul province, where Tokhi teaches, is so deeply conservative that even under the previous government only three girls’ high schools operated, all clustered in the provincial capital, Qalat. Girls in rural areas ended their education at sixth grade, if they got one at all.