Thirteen-year-old Bahara Rustam attended her last day of classes at Bibi Razia, but there was no graduation ceremony to celebrate the sixth-grade girls’ final day at the school.
“Graduating (from sixth grade) means we are going to seventh grade,” she said. “But all of our classmates cried, and we were very disappointed,” the teen said.
Similarly, 13-year-old Setayesh Sahibzada was saddened by uncertainty about her future.
“I wanted to be a teacher,” Setayesh said. “But now I can’t study, I can’t go to school.” Now, the young girl wonders how she will ever stand on her “own two feet” without access to education.
U.N. envoy Roza Otunbayeva says that an entire generation of Afghan girls risk falling irrevocably behind with each passing day under the Taliban prohibition. Analyst Muhammad Saleem Paigir warns that Afghanistan faces disaster if women and girls remain excluded from education, stating, “We understand that illiterate people can never be free and prosperous.” However, the Taliban seem unmoved and continue their severe restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms.
While the Taliban now claim that girls of all ages may attend all-female madrassas focused on religious education, Otunbayeva questions whether these schools actually provide girls with standardized, modern curriculum subjects.
As previously covered by BLACK ENTERPRISE, Afghan broadcaster Tolo News aired an all-female panel on March 8 to discuss the position of women in Islam. The broadcast marked a rare event after Taliban bans forced many female journalists to flee the profession or move off-air.
Source: Black Enterprise
