Just days after Afghanistan‘s hardline Taliban rulers introduced a law that silenced their voices, Afghan women gathered in secret to show their defiance through poems and songs recorded and shared online.
Among them was Adilah, a former law student in Kabul who organised the protest along with other women activists, many of whom she had met in the days after the Taliban stormed the capital and seized power in August 2021.
Since then, the Taliban have imposed severe restrictions on women through a succession of decrees, including bans on higher education, taking jobs, appearing in public without a full-body covering, or niqab, and travelling without a mahram – a male guardian. The new law, issued on August 21, codifies these restrictions and adds a few new ones, such as forbidding women from speaking loudly or singing in public.
“We have known for a while that they would do this; we had been warning the world that the Taliban are not to be trusted. But when I first heard about it, it was very painful,” said Adilah, whose education stopped when the Taliban seized power.
Unlike in the early days of Taliban rule, the protest against the law had to be clandestine. The group cracked down on public protests against their restrictions, forcing some women to flee the country and others to go into hiding in Afghanistan.
“We decided to have a meeting, a programme to read poems,” explained Adilah, who gathered with eight other women at a house in Kabul. “But since we were all in different places, some of us met in Kabul at a friend’s place, some others gathered in Pakistan and a few others joined in online.”
A poem was weaved together from verses brought by each woman. “Some brought poems they love, others wrote their own verses that resonated with our situation,” Adilah told The National.
She recited some of the verses in Persian, one of Afghanistan’s national languages, in which she found strength, adding that she chose a poem that speaks of defiance and freedom of speech and warns the world that women “will fight back”.
“I am a woman, I am the world. I love my freedom … If the boots are on my throat, the fist on my mouth, I swear by the light of my heart, I will not stay in this terror.”
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