Word: burka
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...nearly any educated woman you speak to loathes the burka. So do many less educated ones--if you can question them where men cannot hear. The heavy cloth covering can induce panic, claustrophobia and headaches. It's a psychological hobbling of women that is akin to Chinese foot binding. It's also life threatening. Try negotiating a busy Kabul street--around donkey carts, careening buses and the Taliban roaring by in Datsun pickups--when your hearing is muffled and your vision is reduced to a narrow mesh grid...
What are Afghan women really like beneath the burka? Talk to three from Dasht-i-Qaleh, a tiny, impoverished village long held by the Northern Alliance. Though the Taliban's restrictions against women have no force here, nearly all the women wear the burka. Long-standing cultural tradition exercises its own police power. And though these women have agreed to speak to TIME correspondent Hannah Beech, they will do so only through a female interpreter. They worry that their husbands might object if they learned that a man was present at the interview. During the conversation, a man does briefly...
...streets, you would never know that these silent, shapeless forms, encased in these shrouds, have any views at all. But outside the earshot of men, the women are fierce, alive and opinionated. And when they shed their burkas, they turn out to be wearing brightly colored dresses. All three say they would prefer not to wear a burka or even a head scarf but fear they would be harassed. Zora, 28, says she has heard that when women go to Mecca on the hajj, the pilgrimage that all Muslims are enjoined to attempt at least once, they do so with...
...border to which many Afghan refugees have escaped, Masooda is a shy second-grade girl--but she is 16. She left school five years ago, on the day the Taliban entered her central Afghan town of Kota Sangi and beat her with a cane for not wearing a burka. When her family fled to Pakistan two weeks ago to escape U.S. bombing, she finally resumed lessons. "I once knew how to read, but I've forgotten everything," she says. "I'm ashamed to be so much older than everyone else...
...world, just behind war-ravaged Sierra Leone. The statistics only hint at what medical care for women is like in a nation where a male doctor is not allowed to give a thorough physical examination to a female patient. Women had to be examined wearing the full burka. Male doctors sometimes had to stand in a hallway shouting instructions to a female assistant. A doctor could be imprisoned for talking to a female patient who was not fully covered...