Word: herat
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...second-grade girls reciting a new lesson out loud. Six years ago, that sound could have gotten her executed. The Taliban had outlawed education for girls, but a few brave teachers taught them in secret. Sarwary, now the principal of Karokh District Girls High School in Afghanistan's Herat province, recalls gathering students furtively in her home and imparting lessons in whispers for fear that her neighbors might report her to the Taliban...
Karokh District Girls High School is one of the most successful in Herat. And in terms of girls' education, Herat is the most successful province in Afghanistan. Even so, conditions are far from ideal. Sarwary's tiny school doesn't have enough classrooms: second-graders huddle in a ragged tent in the courtyard, where a torn strip of khaki canvas hangs between rusting metal struts, blocking many of the girls' view of the blackboard. The fierce desert wind howls through the holes and threatens to tear the class's one textbook from the students' hands as they pass it around...
...payoff that is especially important to Afghanistan: educated women are a strong bulwark against the extremism that still plagues Afghanistan, underscored by the Jan. 14 bombing of a luxury hotel in Kabul, which killed eight. "Education is the factory that turns animals into human beings," says Ghulam Hazrat Tanha, Herat's director of education. "If women are educated, that means their children will be too. If the people of the world want to solve the hard problems in Afghanistan--kidnapping, beheadings, crime and even al-Qaeda--they should invest in [our] education...
...usually do when I get to a new city, I casually asked around where I could go and couldn't go. Forget Kandahar, I was told. Even heavy armor is vulnerable to the new improvised explosive devices showing up in Afghanistan. Which means that you can't drive to Herat. Nor can you set foot in another dozen Afghan provinces...
...than we thought,” Lu said over the weekend. “Again and again, girih tiles provide logical explanations for complicated designs.” Prominent buildings throughout the Islamic world feature such configurations, ranging from mosques in Isfahan, Iran, and Bursa, Turkey to shrines in Herat, Afghanistan and Agra, India. Lu said he detected the decagonal ornamentation on a 16th century Islamic building in Uzbekistan while he was in the region surveying a space center in Turkmenistan. Lu added that he confirmed his observations with the help of the Harvard’s collection of Islamic...