Word: burqas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...world, and they had no choice in the matter. A President elected in times of Peace and Prosperity finds he has to preside over War and Retrenchment. A military designed to sweep a continent is hunting shadows in caves. A progressive Pakistani girl sees her classmates reach for a burqa and wonders about progress and peace. We may dread the anniversary because we don't want to go back there, but these people have never really left. Sept. 11 might as well have been yesterday. So what do we owe them--and what can we learn from them...
When a woman wearing a blue burqa showed up near the Kabul airport three days after the Taliban fled the capital last November, no one gave her a second glance. But heads turned when she marched up to the Northern Alliance soldiers guarding air force headquarters and demanded to be let in. "Go home, Auntie," said the guards, shooing her away. "Get out, go home." The petite woman didn't budge. "I am not your aunt!" she shouted, tearing off her burqa and tossing it to the ground. "I train soldiers. I am Khatol!" Hearing that name, the guards apologized...
Three summers ago, as an intern at the Feminist Majority Foundation, I cut out little squares of blue mesh fabric, the same fabric that formed the peepholes through which Afghani women wearing a burqa saw the world. I distributed these cloth emblems to Americans, to wear as tokens of remembrance for and solidarity with the women oppressed by the Taliban...
...hard to believe that women who are hidden under a burqa retain a sense of style, but they do. This year's trendy color for burqas is a pale sky blue. A few years back it was a coppery brown. The fashion center for burqas -the Paris, if you will, of Afghanistan - is Herat. Afghan women rave about the delicacy of its embroidery, the exquisite pleating which gives the burqa a shimmering, watery feel but which takes hours to iron...
...Most educated Afghan women I've spoken to loathe the burqa. It induces panic, claustrophobia and headaches. It's a psychological hobbling of women that's akin to Chinese foot binding. It's also life-threatening. Imagine trying to negotiate crossing a busy Kabul street, dodging donkey carts, careening buses and Taliban roaring by in their Datsun pickups when your vision is reduced to a narrow, mesh grid. The plus point of a burqa is that it confers invisibility on a woman. In lawless Afghanistan, that's a necessary shield...