Why is it that non-Afghans only care to learn about Afghanistan when there are pictures of women in miniskirts involved? By shifting the topic to women's clothing, broader questions around the problems facing Afghanistan become elided – and the discussion goes back to a simplistic dichotomy between Islam and secular modernity.View Post
“(…) The idea that these photos reveal a time when “women were free” seems to equate “women’s freedom” with miniskirts. This is essentially the same standard, albeit in reverse, used by those who measure women’s freedom in terms of how covered women are.
Instead of defining women’s freedom in terms of social, political, and economic rights – like literacy, access to healthcare, and so on – both positions reduce “freedom” to how much skin is showing or not showing. A photograph becomes all it takes to decide that women are free or not free.
The problem is not that these images are inaccurate. Indeed, some people in Afghanistan did live the lives of those pictures. But this was a tiny segment of the population, comprising a Kabul middle class that enjoyed the support and patronage of a King who built a bubble of prosperity in Kabul but kept the rest of the country in utter poverty – part of the reason for the 1973 coup and the 1978 Revolution.
In the 1979 – at the end of Afghanistan’s “Golden Age“ – only 18% of Afghans were literate – and average life expectancy was only just above 40, meaning that half of Afghans died before that age.
The average Afghan was certainly not wearing miniskirts and attending Kabul University, nor were they taking fashionably-dressed vacations to the mountains in imported cars. This was a very small urban elite and middle-class segment of society shown in the pictures of Kabul in the 1970s, and one that did not reflect the conditions of the majority of Afghans.
The pervasiveness of these photos and their spectacularly misleading claims to be representative of Afghan life in the 1970s contribute to the idea that only when women have thrown off their hijabs can they truly be free, that an Afghanistan without burqas is an Afghanistan where everything is good and free.
Few of these articles mention that veils were widespread in Afghan society outside of that tiny elite – or that, since 2001, many Afghan women wearing veils have attended schools, universities, and become gainfully employed.
These articles simplify the slippery realities of the past – that pre-1978 Afghanistan was a largely impoverished place and that Soviet warfare as well as US-backed mujahedeen warfare were both violent and had negative cosnequences for women – and instead present a narrative suggesting that Afghan society was once hijab-free and could (and should!) return to that reality. (…)”
