I salute the Afghan women rejecting the new Taliban veils

I can scarcely believe my own eyes. On a new website, several irrepressible Afghan females, young and old, have put up pictures of themselves in colourful, traditional clothes worn in bygone years; when their countryfolk loved and revelled in glamour, beauty, artistry, songs, music and sensuality.

The images show the wearers in bold, rainbow-hued attire made of fabulous fabrics like velvet and raw silk, some adorned with gold embroidery and mirrorwork. Their blushing, lovely faces are beatific and strong, their perfectly made up eyes gaze directly at the camera, daring the viewer to look back. The teenage daughter of a Kabuli friend in London tells me the photographs make her ‘fly with happiness to the stars’. Me too. Then I feel an Arctic chill blow through the bones. Are these sassy ladies going to be hunted down? Killed? In their first reign of terror, some Taliban guerrillas threw acid on the faces of females they deemed dangerously attractive. I got to know some of them through a charity.

Like countless other Muslim activists, I am against all forms of veiling. We disagree vehemently with fellow Muslim women who say they are making a choice to cover themselves. How can you choose to don garments which symbolise male domination and ownership in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia? In the early centuries, when Islam was spreading, few women covered up.

I have written a book on the subject titled Refusing the Veil. It contains historical details and argues that veils predate Islam. My objections intensified in the 1990s after the Taliban pushed post-puberty females into blue chadors, their eyes behind netting looking out like prisoners behind bars. Religion was used to justify the inhumanity. The Taliban, Isis and other cults are like other revolutionaries through history, misogynist bandits.

The women in these latest pictures don’t just represent Muslim women in Afghanistan. They stand for millions of us worldwide. They are saying: ‘We love clothes, jewellery, make up, ourselves. This is our God-given beauty’. They make me laugh and cry.

The same old Taliban codes are back again. Women are being banished from the public space, their individual personalities and styles obliterated to turn them into walking shrouds. They promised they would be different and more open-minded this time. That was PR. I fear they will be even more tyrannical now because thousands of females in the urban areas got educated and liberated, linked up with the whole world on social media, entered the professions, business and politics, learnt that being a God-fearing Muslim didn’t mean forsaking life and all that it offered.

In 2016, Jessica Fulford-Dobson, a prize-winning photographer, published a wonderful photo book titled Skate Girls of Kabul. I have the book. The portraits again show bright-faced, brightly dressed, totally happy young girls on the way to skate classes, or skating around. They will be women now. Some will have achieved successes, perhaps become professional sportswomen, teachers and scientists, and will now have to prepare for a lightless, cheerless existence. Their suffering is unimaginable. I remember being told fables by my mum about caged birds which never recovered after they broke free and were recaptured.

Before hardliners funded by Saudi Arabia captured our faith, we had joy, we had fun, we could enjoy earthly pleasures without being judged and punished by religious fanatics. Islam tells us to live fully and well.

I have an entire wardrobe of bright and beautiful traditional silk clothes, all still smelling of perfumes. They belonged to my mother, a devout Muslim. The Afghan culture was once vibrant and joyous, its people at once rooted and creative. I used to teach English to foreign students before I became a journalist. Fezi, one of my students, gave me henna to put on my hands and two intricately embroidered dresses to wear when I was pregnant with my son in 1977. They were gifts from her mother in Kabul who sent a message: ‘A child comes from God to you and you must rejoice and look beautiful every month it is growing inside you’.

Westerners had ephemeral fashion, Paris, Milan and London. Easterners made and wore clothes that had heritage and longevity. That picture on the #DoNotTouchMyClothes social media campaign of the lovely woman carrying a pot on her head, the child with the woven cap, his mother adorned in the colours of a peacock, could have been taken in 1900, 1950, 2010. But not in 2021, when a black shroud has been thrown over all manifestations of femininity across that blighted land. A curse on those responsible for this death in life. And much respect for the women defying them.