‘What?’ exclaims Wakil. ‘Why? I should choose first, I’m your husband.’
‘OK, you choose first,’ answers Shakila. ‘But they are both nice,’ she says and stares ahead.
Wakil lights a cigarette. ‘I don’t like smoke,’ says Shakila. ‘I don’t like people who smoke. If you smoke I don’t like you either.’
Shakila has raised her voice and everyone hears her insult.
‘It’s difficult to stop, now that I’ve started,’ Wakil says sheepishly.
‘It smells,’ Shakila continues.
‘You should be more polite,’ says Wakil. Shakila says nothing.
‘And you must cover yourself. It is a woman’s duty to wear the burka. Do as you like but if you don’t wear the burka you’ll make me very unhappy. And do you want to make me unhappy?’ Wakil asks, threateningly.
‘But if Kabul has changed and women start wearing modern clothes, then I will too,’ says Shakila.
‘You will not wear modern clothes. Do you want to make me unhappy?’
Shakila does not answer.
Wakil takes a few passport photos out of his wallet, looks at them and gives one to Shakila. ‘This one is for you and I want you to wear it next to your heart,’ he says. Shakila keeps a straight face, and reluctantly accepts the photo.
Wakil has to leave. It is just before curfew. He asks her how much money she will need to complete her purchases. She answers. He counts, estimates, gives her some notes and replaces some in his wallet.
‘Is that enough?’
Shakila nods. They say goodbye. Wakil leaves, Shakila lies down on the red cushions. She heaves a sigh of relief and helps herself to a few pieces of mutton. She made it - she is supposed to appear cold and distant until they are married. That shows plain good manners to her family who are losing her.
‘Do you like him?’ sister Mariam asks.
‘Well, yes and no.’
‘Are you in love?’
‘Hm.’
‘What does hm mean?’
‘It means hm,’ says Shakila. ‘Neither yes nor no. He might have been younger and better looking,’ she says and turns up her nose. She looks like a disappointed child who did not get the walking, talking doll she wanted but just a rag-doll instead.
‘I’m just sad,’ she says. ‘I regret it. I’m sad because I’ll be leaving my family. What if he won’t let me visit you? What if he won’t let me work, now that it is permitted? What if he locks me up?’
The kerosene lamp on the floor sputters. The sisters are overwhelmed by sinister thoughts. One might as well contemplate them in advance.
No Admission to Heaven
When the Taliban rolled into Kabul in September 1996, sixteen decrees were broadcast on Radio Sharia. A new era had begun.1. Prohibition against female exposure. It is prohibited for drivers to pick up women not
wearing the burka, on pain of arrest. If such women are
observed out on the streets, their homes will be visited
and their husbands punished. If the women wear inciting
or attractive clothes, and they have no close male
relative with them, the driver must not let them into the
car.
2. Prohibition against music. Cassettes and music are forbidden in shops, hotels,
vehicles and rickshaws. If a music cassette is found in a
shop the owner will be imprisoned and the shop closed.
If a cassette is found in a vehicle the vehicle will be
impounded and the driver imprisoned.
3. Prohibition against shaving. Anyone who has shaved off or cut his beard will be
imprisoned until the beard has grown to the length of a
clenched fist.
4. Mandatory prayer. Prayer will be observed at fixed times in all districts.
The exact time will be announced by the Minister
for the Promotion of Virtue and the Extermination
of Sin. All transport must cease fifteen minutes
before the time of prayer. It is obligatory to go to the
mosque during the time of prayer. Any young men
seen in shops will automatically be imprisoned.
5. Prohibition against the rearing of pigeons and bird-fighting. This hobby will cease. Pigeons used for the purpose of games or fights will be killed.
6. Eradication of narcotics and the users thereof. Abusers of narcotics will be imprisoned, and
investigations will be instigated to flush out dealer and
shop. The shop will be closed and both criminals, user
and owner, will be imprisoned and punished.
7. Prohibition against kite-flying. Kite-flying has wicked consequences, such as
gambling, death amongst children and truancy.
Shops selling kites will be removed.
8. Prohibition against reproduction of pictures. In vehicles, shops, houses, hotels and other places,
pictures and portraits must be removed. Proprietors
must destroy all pictures in the above-mentioned
places. Vehicles with pictures of living creatures will
be stopped.
9. Prohibition against gambling. Centres of gambling will be flushed out and the
gamblers will be imprisoned for one month.
10. Prohibition against British and American hairstyles. Men with long hair will be arrested and taken to the
Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the
Extermination of Sin to have their hair cut. The
criminal will pay the barber.
11. Prohibition against interest on loans, exchange charges and charges on transactions. The above three types of money-changing are forbidden
by Islam. If the rules are broken the criminal will be
imprisoned for a lengthy period.
12. Prohibition against the washing of clothes by river embankments. Women who break this law will be respectfully picked
up in the manner of Islam, taken to their house and
their husbands will be severely punished.
13. Prohibition against music and dancing at weddings. If this prohibition is broken the head of the family will be arrested and punished.
14. Prohibition against playing drums. The religious oligarchy will decide the appropriate
punishment for anyone caught playing drums.
15. Prohibition against tailors sewing women’s clothes or taking measurements of women. If fashion magazines are found in the shop the tailor will
be imprisoned.
16. Prohibition against witchcraft. All books dealing with the subject will be burnt and the
magicians will be imprisoned until they repent.
In addition to the above sixteen decrees, a separate appeal, aimed at Kabul’s women, was broadcast:
Women, you must not leave your homes. If you do, you must not be like those women who wore fashionable clothes and make-up and exposed themselves to every man, before Islam came to the country.
Islam is a religion of deliverance and it has decided that a certain dignity belongs to women. Women must not make it possible to attract the attention of evil people who look lustfully upon them. A woman’s responsibility is to bring up and gather her family together and attend to food and clothes. If women need to leave the house they must cover themselves up according to the law of Sharia. If women dress fashionably, wear ornamented, tight, seductive clothes to show off, they will be damned by the Islam Sharia and can never expect to go to heaven. They will be threatened, investigated and severely punished by the religious police, as will the head of the family. The religious police have a duty and responsibility to combat these social problems and will continue their efforts until this evil is uprooted.
Allahu akbar - God is great.
Billowing, Fluttering, Winding
She loses sight of her all the time. The billowing burka merges with every other billowing burka. Sky-blue everywhere. She glances at the ground. In the mud she can di
stinguish the dirty shoes from other dirty shoes. She can see the trimming on the white trousers and catch a glimpse of the edge of the purple dress worn over them. She walks round the bazaar, looking down, following the fluttering burka. A heavily pregnant burka comes panting and puffing by. She is desperately trying to keep up with the energetic pace of the two leading burkas.
The lead burka has stopped near the bed-linen counter. She feels the material and tries to gauge the colour through the grille. She bargains through the grille, whilst dark eyes can only just be seen, dimly behind the lattice. The burka haggles, arms waving in the air. The nose pokes through the folds like a beak. At last she makes up her mind, gropes for her bag and reaches out a hand with some blue banknotes. The bed-linen seller measures up white bed-linen with pale blue flowers. The material disappears into the bag under the burka.
The smell of saffron, garlic, dried pepper and fresh pakora penetrates the stiff material and mingles with sweat, breath and the smell of strong soap. The nylon material is so dense that one can smell one’s own breathing.
They float on, to the cheap Russian-made aluminium teapots. Feel, bargain, haggle, and accept. The teapot too disappears under the burka, which is now overflowing with pots and pans, rugs and brushes and is growing ever larger. Behind the first come two less determined burkas. They stop and smell, feel plastic buckles and gold-coloured bracelets, before looking for the lead burka. She has stopped by a cart brimming with bras, all jumbled together. They are white, pale yellow or pink, of a dubious cut. Some hang on a pole and wave shamelessly in the wind. The burka fingers them and measures with her hand. Both hands emerge from the folds, they check the elastic, pull the cups, and with a visual estimate she settles on a powerful corset-like contraption.
They walk on, and weave around with their heads in all directions to see better. Burka-women are like horses with blinkers, they can only look in one direction. Where the eye narrows the grille stops and thick material takes its place; impossible to glance sideways. The whole head must turn; another trick by the burka-inventor: a man must know what his wife is looking at.
After a bit of head rotating the other two find the lead burka in the narrow alleyways of the bazaar’s interior. She is assessing lace edging. Thick, synthetic lace, like Soviet-style curtain borders. She spends a long time on the lace. This purchase is so important that she flips the front piece over her head in order to see better and defies her future husband’s command about not being seen. It is difficult to assess lace from behind a gauze grille. Only the stall vendor sees her face. Even in Kabul’s cool mountain air it is covered in beads of sweat. Shakila rocks her head to and fro, smiles roguishly and laughs, she haggles, yes, she even flirts. Under the sky-blue one can detect her coquettish game. She has been doing it all along, and the vendor can decipher the moods of a waving, nodding, billowing burka with ease. She can flirt with her little finger, with a foot, with the movement of a hand. Shakila swathes her face in lace, which is suddenly transformed from curtain edging to lace for the veil, the remaining item for the wedding dress. Of course the white veil needs lace edging. The bargain is struck, the vendor measures, Shakila smiles and the lace disappears into the bag under the burka, which again drops to the ground, as it should. The sisters wriggle further into the bazaar, the alleyways get narrower and narrower.
There is a buzz of voices, a constant murmur. Very few vendors hawk their wares. Most of them are more occupied in gossiping with their neighbours, or lolling about on a sack of flour or a carpet mountain, keeping up with bazaar life, than bawling out their stock. Customers buy what they want, no matter what.
It is as though time has stood still in Kabul’s bazaar. The goods are the same as when Darius of Persia roamed here around 500 BC. On large carpets under the open sky or in cramped stalls the magnificent and the necessary lie side by side, turned and fingered by discerning customers. Pistachio nuts, dried apricots and green raisins are kept in large hessian sacks; small hybrid fruit of lime and lemon lie on ramshackle carts, with skin so thin the peel is eaten too. One vendor has sacks of cackling and wriggling hens; the spice merchant has chilli, paprika, curry and ginger heaped up on his barrow. The spice merchant also acts as medicine man and recommends dried herbs, roots, fruit and tea, which, with the precision of a doctor, he explains will heal all illnesses, from the simple to the more mysterious.
Fresh coriander, garlic, leather and cardamom all mingle with the smell of the drains from the river, the stinking dried-up watercourse, which divides the bazaar in two. On the bridge over the river slippers of thick sheep’s hide are on sale, cotton in bulk, material in many patterns and in all the colours of the rainbow, knives, spades and pick-axes.
Now and again one happens upon goods not known in the time of Darius. Contraband like cigarettes with exotic names such as Pleasure, Wave or Pine, and pirate-produced Coke from Pakistan. The routes used by the smugglers have not changed much throughout the centuries: over the Khyber Pass from Pakistan or over the mountains from Iran; some goods on donkeys, some on lorries, along the same trails used for the smuggling of heroin, opium and hashish. Money used is up to date; the moneychangers, in tunics and turbans, stand in a long row clutching large bundles of blue Afghani notes, 35,000 Afghani for one dollar.
One man sells a brand of vacuum cleaners called ‘National’; his neighbour sells vacuum cleaners marked ‘Nautionl’ for the same price. But both the original and the copy are selling badly. Owing to Kabul’s precarious supply of electricity most people resort to the broom.
The shoes walk on in the dust. All around are brown sandals, dirty shoes, black shoes, worn shoes, once a pair of nice shoes and pink plastic shoes with bows. Some are even white, a colour forbidden by the Taliban, as their flag was white. The Taliban forbade shoes with solid heels; the sound of women walking could distract men. But times have changed and if it were possible to click-clack in the mud the whole bazaar would resound with an arousing cacophony of click-clack. Now and again one catches a glimpse of painted toenails under the burka, yet another little sign of freedom. The Taliban forbade nail-varnish and introduced an import embargo. A few unlucky women had the tip of a finger or a toe cut off because they had committed an offence against the legal system. The liberation of women during the first spring following the fall of the Taliban has on the whole restricted itself to the shoe and nail-varnish level, and has not yet reached further than the muddy edge of women’s burkas.
Not that they haven’t tried. Since the fall of the Taliban several women’s associations have been formed. Some of them were even active during the Taliban reign, for instance organising schooling for girls, teaching women about hygiene and running literacy courses. The great heroine from the Taliban time is Karzai’s health minister, Souhaila Sedique, Afghanistan’s only female general. She kept up the instruction of medicine for women and managed to reopen the women’s section at the hospital where she worked after the Taliban had closed it. She was one of very few women under the Taliban who refused to wear the burka. In her own words: ‘When the religious police came with their canes and raised their arms to hit me, I raised mine to hit them back. Then they lowered their arms and let me go.’
But even Souhaila seldom went out while the Taliban ruled. She was driven to the hospital every morning, wrapped up in a big shawl, and driven back every evening. ‘Afghan women have lost their confidence,’ she said bitterly after the Taliban fell.
A women’s organisation tried to organise a demonstration just one week after the Taliban fled. They gathered in Mikrorayon, in pumps and slippers, to march on the town. Most of them had tossed the burka recklessly over their shoulders, but the authorities stopped the demonstration, arguing that they could not guarantee the women’s safety. Each time they tried to gather they were stopped.
Now the girls’ schools have reopened and young women flock to the universities; some have even got their old jobs back. A weekly magazine is published, by and for women, and Hamid Karzai never lets an opportunity pass
without talking about the rights of women.
Several women were prominent during the legislative assembly Loya Jirga in June 2002. The most outspoken were made fun of by the turbaned men in the assembly, but they never gave up. One of them demanded a female Minister of Defence, to great booing. ‘France has that,’ she maintained.
But for the masses very little has changed. In the families, tradition is all - the men decide. Only a small number of Kabul women renounced the burka during the first spring after the fall of the Taliban, and very few of them know that their ancestors, Afghan women in the last century, were strangers to the burka. The burka had been used for centuries but not by large numbers of the population. It was reintroduced during the reign of Habibullah, from 1901 to 1919. He decreed that the two hundred women in his harem should wear them, so as not to entice other men with their pretty faces when they were outside the palace doors. Their veils were of silk with intricate embroidery and Habibullah’s princesses wore burkas embroidered with gold thread. The burka became a garment of the upper classes, shielding women from the eyes of the masses. During the fifties the use of the burka was widespread, but only amongst the rich.
The concealment of women had its opponents. In 1959 the prime minister, Prince Daoud, shocked the population when he and his wife appeared on the national day, she without a burka. He had persuaded his brother to make his wife do the same, and he asked ministers to throw away their wives’ burkas. Already the next day, in Kabul’s streets, women were walking around in long coats, dark glasses and a little hat; women who had previously tramped around completely covered up. As the use of the burka had started amongst the upper classes, so they were the first to throw them off. The garment was now a status symbol amongst the poor, and many maids and servant girls took over the silk burkas of their employers. Initially it was only the ruling Pashtoon who covered their women, but now other ethnic groups took on the custom. But Prince Daoud wanted to rid the country of the burka completely. In 1961 a law was passed which forbade the use of the burka by civil servants. They were encouraged to dress in western clothes. It took many years for the law to be implemented but in the 1970s there was hardly a teacher or secretary in Kabul who did not wear a skirt and blouse; the men wore suits. However, the underdressed women risked being shot in the legs or having acid sprayed in their faces by fundamentalists. When the civil war broke out and Islamic law took over, more and more women covered up. When the Taliban arrived all female faces disappeared from Kabul’s streets.