“I was four or five years old, playing outside without a scarf. A Taliban Commander recognized me and told me ‘come here’…and he slapped me very hard asking ‘why are you not wearing a scarf? If next time I see you without a scarf, I will show you what it is’.”

 

Born in 1993 under the first phase of Taliban rule, this was Nilofar Ayoubi’s first conscious experience of the brutal impact the Taliban would have on every aspect of the lives of girls in Afghanistan. It is seared in her memory. Even now as a successful entrepreneur, journalist and mother of three, her voice breaks a little as she recalls running inside to her father, her face smarting, tears running down her reddened cheek. Her father, a teacher dedicated to promoting equal rights for all, was so enraged he told his wife to cut off their daughter’s hair and dress her as a boy, so that she might experience the childish freedoms which had been stripped from the girls of Afghanistan by its new rulers. And so it was. 

 

Nilofar lived as her brother did, enjoying all the everyday things other girls living under the regime were denied. She took karate classes, attended school, rode bicycles and played contact sports until she reached puberty, when biology would no longer be able to trick the Taliban. It was during this time that the seeds of rebellion, planted by her father would take root. 

 

“That’s where my activism [really] started!”, she smiles. When Nilofar had her first period aged thirteen, there was no excitement at this rite of passage toward womanhood. Instead, she was terrified that the active sports and physical pursuits she had been enjoying in her life as a boy, had broken her hymen. She knew nothing at all of periods, only that her mother’s generation placed huge importance on the preservation of an in-tact hymen for their daughters. Nilofar confided in a schoolfriend who explained the menstrual cycle to Nilofar and showed her how to create a makeshift sanitary pad out of a piece of cloth. 

 

Angry that she had not been told any of this by her mother, conscious that all the younger girls in her school would likely find themselves in the same predicament, Nilofar decided to take direct action and talk to the other girls about what to expect, why women menstruate and how to handle their periods. 

 

“I remember getting in trouble so many times, the teachers would fight with me and call my mother and my father [saying] ‘you haven’t taught your daughter manners!’ and my father would say ‘Oh, I have taught her everything that she needs to know.’ My father was always there to have my back.”

 

The Taliban were defeated in 2001 girls like Nilofar began again to mobilize. Nilofar started a girls-only group called ‘Girls of the North’, which aimed to talk openly about all the things older generations of Afghan women considered to be taboo subjects. “I gathered girls like me, rebellious girls from school…we started educating each and every [one] about the things that mothers were ashamed to talk [about] with their daughters.”

 

Then came the second insurgency. In 2021, the people of Afghanistan were addressed by the new dictators with only two hours’ notice to leave their homeland if they did not want to live under the Taliban. This was terrifying for all, but particularly for ‘known rebels’ such as Nilofar and her family. Nilofar says, 

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Nilofar emphasizes that the women and girls of Afghanistan ask for very meagre human rights, such as education and the right to work and thereby gain financial independence. 

 

“They want only ten per cent of the rights that European women have. To be able to walk on the street without being killed, to sit in a restaurant and have a cup of coffee, they want to drive…The most important thing for Afghan women is to have rights on their children – to have their names on their children’s’ birth certificates, which was [previously] forbidden in Afghanistan…After two years of activism, we’d just got this law passed that the mothers would be mentioned in the children’s ID and now it’s all gone.”

 

It was around this time that Nilofar and a group of like-minded, resilient Afghan women collaborated to establish the Women’s Political Participation Network (WPPN). The group is open to all Afghan women regardless of religious affiliation, socio economic background and sexual orientation. The main focus for WPPN was to lobby for the inclusion of women in discussions and decision-making around peace talks in Afghanistan. Today, the scope for WPPN is wider, encompassing general work toward basic but equal human rights for all girls in the region.