New Kabul library aims to counter Afghan women’s Taliban-imposed isolation

Afghan ladies’s rights activists opened a library in Kabul on Wednesday, hoping to supply an oasis for girls more and more lower off from schooling and public life beneath the ruling Taliban.

Since taking up Afghanistan a 12 months in the past, the Taliban have stated ladies mustn’t go away the house with no male family member and should cowl their faces, although some ladies in city centres ignore the rule.

Secondary colleges for ladies largely stay closed after the Taliban went again on guarantees to open them in March.

“We’ve opened the library with two functions: one, for these women who can’t go to highschool and second, for these ladies who misplaced their jobs and don’t have anything to do,” stated Zhulia Parsi, one of many library’s founders.

A Taliban spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for remark.

The greater than 1,000 books within the library embody novels and movie books as effectively non-fiction titles on politics, economics and science. The books had been principally donated by academics, poets and authors to the Crystal Bayat Basis, an Afghan ladies’s rights group that helped arrange the library.

A number of ladies’s activists who’ve taken half in protests in latest months additionally helped set up the library in a rented store in a mall that has numerous shops catering to ladies.

In March, the Taliban made a U-turn on a promise to open women’ excessive colleges. Most teenage women now haven’t any entry to lecture rooms and hundreds of ladies have been pushed out of the workforce because of the rising restrictions and Afghanistan’s financial disaster, worldwide improvement businesses say.

The Taliban say they respect ladies’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic legislation, and that since March they’ve been engaged on a method to open women’ excessive colleges.

Western governments have stepped up their condemnation of the Taliban’s try and get rid of ladies from public life within the nation. Many Afghan ladies have expressed frustration and referred to as for Taliban authorities to respect their rights.

“They can not annihilate us from society, in the event that they annihilate us from one area, we are going to proceed from one other area,” Mahjoba Habibi, a ladies’s rights advocate, stated on the library’s inauguration.