Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Taliban banned women from working "we were so sad, so angry," she remembers. But after a few months stuck at home, Shahnaz, 43, began reading to keep herself occupied; law books, mostly, and a history of Afghanistan. When the Taliban forced all women to wear the burka, that long all-encompassing cloak that hides women's bodies, faces and identities, Shahnaz bought the cheapest she could find, figuring that the law would not last. Though she had always made do with a simple headscarf in deference to Islamic modesty, as a kid she had played dress ups in her mother...
...surprising, then, at least to western sensibilities, that four months after the overthrow of the ideologues Shahnaz still wears the burka whenever she leaves the house. Westerners expected the end of the Taliban to be followed immediately by the shedding and shredding of what we saw as one of their most visible symbol of oppression. And in the first few days after the Taliban's ouster we rejoiced in the pictures of Afghan women peeling off their burkas to feel the sun on their faces. But Shahnaz says we got it all wrong. The burka itself is not oppressive; what...
...burka, or more correctly the chadari, has long been traditional wear for Afghan women in the countryside and in conservative cities like Kandahar. In 1919, the first Afghani king encouraged women to shed the head to toe garb by revealing the face of his wife in public. Many women in the more liberal cities obliged and by the 1980s less than half the women in Kabul, the capital, wore the burka. Under the Taliban, women had little choice: wear the robe in public or face a vicious beating. But Afghan women say this was more inconvenience than hardship. "Under...
...locate her again. In January he returned to the refugee camp, and this time someone recognized Gula's picture and took her to meet McCurry. She now lives in Afghanistan with her husband and their three children. For the past decade, she has covered her face with a burka. When she lifted the garment for McCurry, he felt certain she was the girl from his photograph, a suspicion confirmed by technology that compared the irises in the 1984 picture to those in one taken in January. She will appear on the April cover of National Geographic...
Onstage he's as manic as ever, sweating by the pint as his body bounds around, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire humor synapses of his brain. His jokes run from nonsensical (wet-burka competitions and "Enron Hubbard, head of the Church of Profitology") to predictable ("We used to pay for powder in little white envelopes"). Comedians who play closer to the edge, like Chris Rock or Andy Dick, make his style seem quaint. But Robin Williams' improv is still an amazing high-wire act. "It's a risk if it doesn't work," he told TIME last...