Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  ‘Many things worked. The banks. The mail delivery. Offices. Safe transportation all over the country,’ Afghan writer Qais Akbar Omar recalled in The Fort of Nine Towers. While the Taliban had taken four years to return electricity to some parts of Kandahar, they restored Kabul’s supply almost immediately. Because they were no longer attacking Kabul, more food was for sale at much lower prices. A bazaar opened on Jadi Maiwand. Having abandoned carpet dealing after members of the mujahideen stole his stock, Omar’s father began visiting villages again to buy old rugs, then sold them to foreign dealers who had resumed visiting. Omar himself began weaving for an international market during what he dubbed this ‘strange peace’.

  Women were subject to much greater constraints than they had experienced before the unveiling in 1959. The Taliban barred them from all paid employment, though then made exceptions for doctors, nurses, widows and stewardesses working for Ariana Airlines. The Taliban stipulated that male doctors could only treat women wearing chadaris and without touching them. They excluded girls from schools and, after closing the university altogether, reopened it only to men. They excluded women from public baths across the country, sparking a public protest by women in Herat because these baths were vital hygiene for the poor. They maintained their dress codes, but with another exception for Ariana’s stewardesses.

  Other new laws subjected men and boys to unprecedented controls. Men had to grow beards at least a fist in length. They had to keep their hair short, with their foreheads free of hair so their skin would touch their mats when they knelt forward in prayer. They had to shave the hair under their arms and their pubic hair. They had to wear unfastened turbans with the tail loose, and the turbans of university students and professors, and then all government employees, had to be black. Those boys able to go to school—and most could not because of the Taliban’s dismissal of women teachers—had to wear a turban and a tunic that reached to the knees.

  A few women ignored the new dress code with impunity. The most notable were the Siddiqi sisters: Suhaila, Afghanistan’s first woman general, who had run Kabul’s 400-bed army hospital, and Sadiqi, who had run Kabul’s Polytechnic. Both persisted in going out in headscarves. Suhaila also deplored the Taliban’s treatment of women in interviews with foreign journalists. But the Taliban punished many other women for failing to wear the chadari or for exposing any of their skin while wearing one.

  Enforcement was the province of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a Saudi institution established in Mecca in 1926. When Ismael Khan brought it to Herat in 1992, its many prohibitions included banning pigeon lofts on the roofs of houses and flying kites from rooftops, in case men spied into their neighbours’ courtyards to see unveiled women. The Taliban’s ministry grew to have vast power, which saw its officials—usually known as the religious police—defy Mullah Omar by whipping and beating those whom they regarded as law-breakers, without first taking them before a judge. In December 1996, according to the ministry’s own figures, its officials beat 225 women for incorrect dress; in February 1997 another sixty; that May another 110.

  The number of men punished was higher because men spent more time in public. Most of their breaches involved hair too long and beards too short. The Taliban initially aspired to imprison all men with trimmed beards until they grew ‘bushy’, but that would have clogged the jails. Instead, they dismissed some government employees for these infringements but usually lashed violators: 570 in March 1997, and 700 that July. They forced 120 men to have haircuts that December and punished 500 more in May 1998, while a blitz in 1999 saw thirty-nine barbers jailed for up to ten days.

  The religious police had less capacity when compliance was not readily visible: beneath clothes, where many men failed to shave, and within people’s homes, where some women established schools for girls and other women operated beauty parlours. A Taliban edict that windows of dwellings be frosted or painted black made enforcement even harder. For all their reputation for zealotry, the Taliban succumbed, one aid worker observed, to ‘implementation fatigue’. As they modified or reversed some edicts, they paid the salaries of some women who had lost their jobs and let Suhaila Siddiqi, who had run the military hospital, start a women’s clinic there where forty women resumed their medical training. Some of the Taliban turned a blind eye to covert girls schools; some actively supported them.

  Many Kabulis were happy to see the Taliban end the mujahideen’s rule. A girl, who had been playing with two friends on a street hit by a mujahideen shell, declared: ‘I hate the mujahideen for doing this to me—they took away my leg and, with that, my freedom. They took away my friends, who didn’t deserve to die.’ The comparison was more complex for a young woman who escaped the mujahideen’s violence and enjoyed having a job. ‘Under the mujahideen, women had the power to speak…we could work’, but if men ‘wanted us, they could just drive up in a car and take us. Now, with our chadaris, no one knows what we look like, and we feel safe…[but] women are not getting an education, and we don’t know if we can ever resume our lives again.’

  This complexity was largely ignored in the West, where the Taliban became notorious as the world’s worst oppressors of women, prompting the European Union to suspend forty per cent of its humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. At a rally in Washington DC on International Women’s Day in 1997, participants wore chadaris ‘to symbolise the enslavement of Afghan women and condemn the rule of tyranny in Afghanistan’. When the American group Feminist Majority launched a ‘Campaign to stop Gender Apartheid’ in Afghanistan, its emblem was a swatch of mesh based on the eyegrill of the chadari, intended to represent ‘the obstructed view of the world for an entire nation of women who were once free’.

  RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, boosted this campaign by sending representatives to the United States. After an initial visit in 2000, when American feminist Katha Pollitt interviewed RAWA members for the New York Times and wrote about them in The Nation, playwright Eve Ensler put RAWA at the centre of a gala performance of her Vagina Monologues, which had become an international hit. Before an audience of 18,000 at Madison Square Gardens early in 2001, a figure in a chadari appeared on the stage, dark except for spotlights. When Oprah Winfrey lifted off the chadari, she revealed Zoya, a member of RAWA, who spoke about the Taliban’s oppression.

  French fashion magazine Elle and Afghanistan Libre, a Parisian group founded by Afghan refugee Chékéba Hachemi, followed in the spring of 2001 by helping three Afghan women, known only by pseudonyms, to escape. After arriving in Europe, Latifa, Homa and Diba gave press conferences and met politicians in Paris and Brussels, with dress again pivotal. All three appeared in blue chadaris, not only to hide their identities so their families in Kabul would not be in jeopardy but also to symbolise the plight of Afghan women. Latifa told journalists that, when the Taliban bashed a woman wearing white shoes, they declared: ‘white is the colour of the Taliban flag and the white had to be covered by the red of her blood’.

  The image of women under the Taliban as look-alikes in blue chadaris ignored regional variations within Afghanistan, such as the popularity of orange and green chadaris in Jalalabad and turquoise ones in Herat. It overlooked how women from wealthier families in Kabul turned chadaris into vehicles for displays of their status, as they had in the 1950s. It paid no regard to how women’s dress became another domain where the Taliban’s enforcement of their laws slackened. In Kabul, some women responded by wearing short chadaris, revealing tailored dresses, black stockings and high heels or bare ankles and platform shoes. In Kandahar, some wore tight, even ‘figure-hugging’ hijab, though that prompted the Taliban to order women not to display ‘their curves’.

  Another mistake of westerners was to treat the cities as typical, when rural women were largely unaffected by the Taliban’s laws or did not regard them as an imposition. Nancy Dupree explained that most women lived ‘in secure kin-related settings where they move about with considerable freedom�
� and ‘through motherhood, the creativity of handiwork and efficient household management…achieve status and a sense of personal fulfilment’. Dupree suggested that only a ‘small number of Western oriented, assertive working women’ and their daughters from Kabul’s middle and upper-middle classes bore ‘the full brunt of Taliban ire’. The Taliban’s version of this argument was that resistance to its edicts came from ‘only one per cent of Afghan women tied to a communist style of liberation’.

  The situation of religious minorities was at least as complex. Afghanistan’s Hindus and Sikhs had been targeted by the mujahideen because of their religion and their relative wealth, prompting many to flee. The Taliban’s rule initially benefitted the few remaining Hindus and Sikhs, but in 1998 the Taliban ordered Hindu men in Kandahar to wear yellow badges and in 1999 they ordered all Hindus to identify their houses with two-metre-long yellow cloths. This colour-coding was a revival of century-old Pashtun practice, but commentators elsewhere assumed their inspiration was Nazi. As part of another gap between law and practice, there was also little or no Taliban enforcement. ‘The Taliban don’t bother us,’ declared a leader of Kabul’s Sikh community. And their counterparts in Jalalabad felt ‘completely safe’.

  The Taliban’s arrest in 2001 of twenty-four employees of the aid group Shelter Now for propagating Christianity excited much more attention because westerners were involved. The Taliban had also added the death penalty to the laws prohibiting proselytism invoked by Musa Shafiq against Kabul’s Community Church in 1973. The Taliban caught two American employees of Shelter Now in the house of an Afghan family showing a film about the life of Jesus on one of their laptops and reading a story about Jesus. The Taliban found that some of the group’s other foreign workers had Bibles in Dari and Pashto. Their trial, from the start of September 2001, was the Taliban’s first prosecution of westerners. The staff of Shelter Now denied having proselytised because they defined proselytism as ‘when you offer benefits for someone to convert’ such as employment. The trial did not proceed because of the Taliban’s ousting following 9/11. But after being freed, the aid workers admitted that they regularly visited Afghans in their homes to ‘build relationships and share Jesus’.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Enduring Image

  A clinic has posters of mothers and babies on the wall. A street vendor is selling a poster of a woman in hijab with alluring large eyes and plucked eyebrows. Images of people adorn the covers of nearly every video at a vendor’s stall. A studio photographer’s window is filled with portraits to attract more commissions, along with boxes of film so local residents may photograph whatever they choose. This Kandahar, recorded by British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins in 1995, reveals how the Taliban initially tolerated images of people despite some of their leaders declaring portraiture ‘unIslamic’.

  That changed as power within the Taliban shifted. They proscribed all depictions of people, except on passports and identity cards, which they issued only to men wearing turbans. This proscription affected not only civilians but also commemoration of the Taliban’s own fighters. Celebration through photography had been vital to the mujahideen groups that published many portraits of ‘martyrs’ in their magazines. The Taliban stopped this practice.

  The Taliban also prohibited the sale and use of televisions and video players, and staged public ‘hangings’ of them, including vast strands of brown plastic tape gutted from cassettes. They targeted cinemas, with a new twist. In the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Moscow had transformed many mosques into cinemas and turned one into a film studio. The Taliban demolished Kandahar’s main cinema and, in their prime building project in the city, set about replacing it with a mosque able to hold 25,000 worshippers, named after Mullah Omar.

  The Taliban went further in September 1995 when they conquered Herat and attacked the work of Mohammad Sayed Mashal, a former governor of the city and one of its most renowned artists, who had painted a mural celebrating Herat’s history and culture and sculpted a group of horses as the centrepiece of the city’s main fountain. The Taliban whitewashed large sections of the mural showing living creatures, both animal and human, scratched out their faces and decapitated Mashal’s horses.

  On taking Kabul in September 1996, the Taliban made a bonfire of Bollywood films outside a cinema in the Shahr-e Naw and announced they would convert it into a mosque. They burned part of the archive of Afghan Television and stopped its broadcasts. They beat street photographers and forced many studio photographers to close their shops. They ordered the destruction of all portraits, whether in vehicles, shops, houses or hotels and banned the use of pictures of animals on locally-made and imported products. They barred truck, car and house painters from using figurative imagery.

  When the Taliban could not exclude people entirely from images, they continued to excise heads and faces as the most offensive body parts. The school texts produced by the mujahideen in the 1980s, with American funding, were one example. Because these texts might inspire another generation of militants, the Taliban used them, but in edited form, so a typical picture showed a fighter with a Kalashnikov, a bandolier and a blacked-out head. The tickets issued by Ariana Airlines since the 1970s, showing the Buddhas of Bamiyan as Afghanistan’s greatest tourist attraction, were another example. The Buddhas were already faceless, but Ariana’s staff scrubbed out their heads before issuing these tickets.

  These actions fuelled hyperbole. In an essay in early 2001 promoting Kandahar—the first movie about Afghanistan under the Taliban—its Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf characterised Afghanistan as ‘a country with no images’ and ‘a country without an image’. Pamela Constable of the Washington Post identified Afghanistan as ‘a country without faces’. In fact, Afghanistan remained a country of images because the Taliban always embraced those free of living creatures and struggled to enforce their prohibition on those of the living. And Afghanistan remained a country with an international image because the Taliban allowed visits by foreign photographers and cameramen.

  Mullah Omar’s compound outside Kandahar revealed his appetite for murals devoid of people or animals. Some depicted famous Afghan sites, such as Herat’s main mosque and the Minaret at Jam, probably never visited by the reclusive Omar. Some were idyllic landscapes including waterfalls, villages and flowers. Others were battle scenes showing jet fighters and tanks—part of a larger taste for the military manifested on the covers of the small range of cassettes allowed by the Taliban. These recitations from the Qur’an, poems in praise of the prophet Muhammad and Taliban political chants came in cases depicting Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers.

  The National Gallery in Kabul exemplifies the complexity of the treatment of images immediately before and during the Taliban’s rule—and the many conflicting accounts of what occurred. As with the National Museum, staff at the gallery sought to protect its holdings before the Taliban took the capital. While museum staff moved about 2000 of its surviving objects to the otherwise empty Kabul Hotel in the city centre, the gallery’s director had some of its paintings depicting living creatures hidden and others overpainted. But there was still much to offend the Taliban who immediately destroyed many of the remaining paintings, ‘especially those showing women’s faces’.

  For the next few years, the gallery was closed. Then it briefly reopened in February 2000 after a UN grant—$3800 was all it took—funded some restoration of the bulding. The hundred works on show included a few by European artists but were primarily Afghan. Information and Culture Minister, Qudratullah Jamal, announced, ‘We will try to preserve the work and promote the new talent.’ Deputy minister, Abdul Rahman Hotak, who initiated the reopening, declared, ‘We give importance to art and that’s why we have renovated the gallery. We are very happy today that another cultural and scientific centre is revived and reopened.’ Its director, Mohammad Sidiq Sa’ee, questioned why the depiction of living creatures was not allowed when the paintings were not being w
orshipped. Agence-France Presse reported that some had been overpainted with ‘small trees or flowers’ concealing ‘what was originally a living being’, making clear that there was nothing secret about this overpainting.

  Journalists who came to Kabul following the Taliban’s fall in 2001 were oblivious to this history. They also were eager for stories that fitted the stereotype of the Taliban as primitive and ignorant, hence easily tricked, and stories of resistance to them. They soon were celebrating gastroenterologist-artist Mohammad Yousef Asefi for saving perhaps 120 works, perhaps 400, in the gallery and the Foreign Ministry. The journalists reported that Asefi told Taliban officials that he wanted to repair paintings damaged through years of neglect. In fact, he hid their human and animal content, using watercolour on oil paintings and by painting on the glass covering watercolours. Once done, Asefi returned the ministry’s pictures to different rooms to ‘avoid the danger that a sharp-eyed official might notice a missing person or horse’. He did not bother at the gallery where the Taliban ‘never looked too closely’.