Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...streets of Kabul, you can see something these days that has not been glimpsed there for almost five years--women's faces. Now that the Taliban has fled the city, a few brave women have shed the burka--the head-to-toe garment, to Western eyes a kind of body bag for the living, made mandatory by the defeated religious leadership. Men sometimes look in astonishment at these faces, as if they were comets or solar eclipses. So do other women. From the moment in 1996 that the Taliban took power, it sought to make women not just obedient...
...hated religious police brought women freedom overnight. Afghan society is tribal and conservative. Except for a small minority of educated professionals in Kabul, women have long been relegated to a subservient role. In rural areas of northern Afghanistan that are under the control of the Northern Alliance, the burka is still universal, though no law requires it. Even in Kabul, where Western-style skirts were not uncommon before the Taliban, many women say the burka is the least of their concerns. Dr. Rahima Zafar Staniczai, head of the Rabia Balkhi hospital for women, remembers how Taliban religious police would beat...
...westerners, the most visible symbol of the Taliban's oppressive regime was the order that placed all women under the burka. Its long-standing place in Afghan culture is complicated. Many rural women, especially, claim to wear it willingly, at least when they speak in the presence of their husbands. There is even high fashion in burka wear. In Kabul, women allow a bit of lace trimming to show at the edge. The best burkas, from the Afghan city of Herat, have exquisite pleating that imparts a shimmering, watery feel but takes hours to iron...
...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...