Word: burka
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...Alliance President Burhanuddin Rabbani, once a foremost proponent of expanding the burka's reach across Afghanistan. More recently, Rabbani allowed to an interviewer that "wearing a head scarf is enough in the cities." But in the Northern Alliance stronghold of Faizabad, his acolytes make sure that all women are completely covered. "Rabbani is better than the Taliban," says Farahnaz Nazir, a women's rights activist in the Northern Alliance town of Khoja Bahauddin. "But he is still very conservative. He does not believe that women are equal...
...find a new balance of genders in their society. Progress is likely to be slow, particularly outside the educated elites of Kabul. Even there it will be subject to the complex forces of coercion, family pressure and tradition. Mohammad Halim, who runs one of Kabul's best-known burka shops, says he has no plans to offer a wider variety of clothing. "It will only be in Kabul where women will take off their burkas. Elsewhere women will continue wearing them. This is a very old custom in Afghanistan." That very day, says Halim, more than a week after...
...gathering point for women from all over the city. They chat excitedly about expanding opportunities for women in the new era and are planning an even larger demonstration in the coming week. But despite the symbolic baring of their faces at the demonstration, most still arrive and leave wearing burkas. "The burka is not the main problem of women," says Parlika. "First women should find work and improve their economic situation...
...Nafas, the character she inspired--though in the film it is a sister, not a friend, she seeks to save--and the year is 1999, just before the millennium new year. In real life, Pazira only briefly penetrated Afghanistan's border. In the film, her character, shrouded in a burka and taking notes on a hidden tape recorder, is a brave, lonely figure constantly menaced by a bleak land and the day-to-day anarchy of the life she finds there...
This is most poignantly symbolized by a passage in which Nafas and her last guide, an angry, erratic older man, join an all-female party heading across the sands to a wedding. Even the man disguises himself in a burka, and the pictures of this group shrouded in costumes of many colors (Ebrahim Ghafouri's photography is the year's best) are strikingly beautiful. Yet we are also made aware of how their movements are restricted by their clothes, how they must struggle just to see and breathe. There can be no more powerful image of the sexism of theocratic...