Tragedy of Taliban’s ban on female students is starting to hit home

This week was supposed to have been the culmination of a dream.

A year after my sister Brishna married in Kabul, she did something courageous. She had always loved to study and wanted to continue her higher education, so why not consider a medical degree in a country in dire need of qualified doctors? She sat an entrance exam at a private university to enter the stomatology department in the Faculty of Medical Science and was accepted.

In the first year, though, Brishna faced a major challenge. She found that she was pregnant with her first child. She considered postponing her studies in oral medicine for a year to take care of the new baby and weighed the difficult decision carefully, fearful that she wouldn’t be able to cope with so much responsibility in a conservative society.

But as we talked, awareness dawned that this wasn’t only a personal choice. If Brishna was able to study as a mother, so could others. Those who doubted women’s education would see evidence of what was possible. She would show that continuation of studies was an option for women with families.

Watching her work at this time was humbling. I remember her getting up early in the morning to study for her exams and how she read and made notes late into the night. Our wider family saw it, too, and we supported our sister and urged her on as she trained to be the first female doctor in our family.

Four years later, though, our world was turned on its head. While I escaped Afghanistan on one of the last flights out of Kabul to study at the University of Sussex as a Chevening scholar, Brishna was confronted with life under the Taliban. And with it came a new set of rules and policies drastically constraining the lives of women to the domestic sphere.

At first, it appeared that medical education might be considered an exception, especially as new laws prohibit the treatment of women by male doctors. But, with time, the rules tightened and life got harder. Travelling to study or to the hospital without her husband accompanying her became more difficult for a trainee woman doctor. Girls had been excluded from secondary education and most universities. Electricity was intermittent. As winter deepened, poverty and hunger abounded.

Yet still Brishna persevered. When the electricity failed, she studied late in the dim light of a rechargeable lamp. When I rang her at night, after my English PhD life of lecture theatres and libraries, I saw her still studying.

Then the Medical Council in Kabul announced the exam date of 17 February. She and her classmates filled out their applications and submitted all the relevant documents. Their exam confirmation paperwork arrived. And Brishna kept on studying.

And then the darkest day. The Taliban announced the exclusion of women students from even these medical exit examinations. When Brishna and her colleagues went to the gates of the university to ask for the decision to be reconsidered, they were turned away.

This decision was justified on the grounds of interpretation of Islamic teaching and of Afghan culture by the new political forces that control the country and so much of its women’s lives. And yet the irony is that many of the world’s traditions in education are Islamic in their origins. The first university in Europe was established by Muslims in AD841, in the city of Salerno in Italy. When students from these universities returned to their lands, they dressed in Muslim robes, thawb or qamees.

These are the traditions that linger in graduations around the world today. Even the mortar boards of graduates derive from the flat hats of the scholars who would rest the Koran on the “mortar” to symbolise the deep links between faith and study. The tassel at the back of the mortar board bookmarked the pages of the Koran, the robes my sister has worked so hard to wear a sign of her learning, a proof of her skill to treat others.

Across the rest of the Islamic world, women study and qualify proudly as doctors and they serve their people with skill and dignity. My sister – my hero – Dr Brishna simply wants to do the same. The patients waiting for her skills and care need her.

We hear about Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), but my sister and her peers are “Doctors Without Certificates”, the in absentia class of 2023. I have dedicated my own degree certificate to each of them. But Afghanistan and the world are waiting for the time they can rightfully put on their robes and receive recognition for the education they have so diligently struggled to make their own. 

Naimat Zafary is an Afghan Chevening scholar at the University of Sussex. He came to the UK when the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021 and has been granted residence under the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme.