Afghanistan and women’s education: why is it even a debate?

In the past week the Taliban, who seized back control of Afghanistan from the corrupt and ineffectual US-backed government last year, issued a decree banning women from the country’s universities, after already having shut girls out of secondary schools. Both of these things were the case last time they were in charge, of course; it is what they were best known for. They and their supporters claimed that once security had been established, they would open the best schools and universities in the Islamic world for men and women; at the same time, both their supporters and some western media commentators praised them for establishing security. Also this past weekend, they have demanded that both local and foreign NGOs dismiss all their women staff on the pretext that some of them have not observed proper hijab. The expulsion of women from universities has been condemned worldwide, including from Islamic scholarly bodies in countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but it’s produced the predictable debate on the Muslim internet, with some men in particular claiming that the policy is perfectly in keeping with Islamic law and that the Taliban are well within their rights to impose it.

It should go without saying that the Taliban’s behaviour is completely out of step with Muslim practice almost everywhere in the world. The only times observant Muslims have stepped back from formal education is where it adopts policies hostile to the practice of Islam, such as preventing women from observing hijab. Victorian Britain and America, in which women were barred from attaining degrees, are not a model for Muslims or Muslim countries. In every other Muslim country, including places like Saudi Arabia before the ‘reforms’ of the current crown prince, women have gone to school at every level and to university. In the classical period of Islam, women were among the noted scholars and taught men and women; scholars married each other and noted major male scholars had women among their teachers (Imam Shafi’i being a well-known example). It wasn’t considered anything but respectable for women to be scholars and they could not have been scholars without having studied in the first place. It’s not classical Islamic practice the Taliban are inflicting on everyone in Afghanistan; it’s rural Pashtun tribal practice as found in both southern Afghanistan and neighbouring regions of Pakistan.

The issue of women as medical doctors has been a focus of the debate, and while it’s not the only reason girls should receive an education, it’s actually quite important. You can’t have a medical profession without an educated population; medicine is based in science, and in the UK at least, the first two years of a medical degree is all science and if you leave after two years, you leave with a science degree. (In the US, you go to medical school after your first degree.) The development of medicine — the chemicals themselves — require science. Research. That’s a whole separate discipline. The equipment needs to be developed and manufactured. More science. Physics. Nuclear physics, even. This is also why we can’t just allow only those girls who are cut out to be doctors to receive a formal education beyond primary school, because without all the other scientists, there would be no medicine to administer in the hospitals and clinics (and because you can’t judge a thing like that at age 11). There needs to be ways to treat mental health problems also, especially in a country traumatised by decades of war, and men are often no use to traumatised women. Their presence can exacerbate trauma in some cases.

Someone told me on Twitter this morning that it wasn’t really essential to have women doctors, and that the Muslims didn’t always have them; it was permissible to allow a male doctor to see as much of a woman’s body as was necessary. In a country where most women wear all-concealing long cloaks and would never contemplate showing a random man a private part of their body, and where (again) a lot of women have been traumatised, why would we expect this to be normal practice? But apart from this, an all-male medical profession, much like an all-male Islamic scholarly profession like the one that produced the Taliban, is one that is ill-equipped to treat women because it is blind to female experience and sometimes simply ignorant of differences in how the two types of bodies work; see how the profession has only recently become aware of how heart attacks manifest differently in women, for example. Women do not just need women to physically treat them; they need them (especially in a gender-segregated society) to talk to about their symptoms with someone who knows how her body works from living in one like it and sometimes without a third person (such as their husband) being in the room. These are not simply matters of personal preference or comfort but of medical necessity.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, of course. Medicine and medical research are just two professions that need women in them to be able to serve everyone. They are not the only reason a society needs education. A society without education is an ignorant, uncultured society. It’s that simple. Not everyone is cut out to be a scientist or a medic; even if someone’s biggest priority is marriage and children, they should learn literature and poetry (it was usual for civil servants in the UK to have classics degrees). Even if they forget pretty much everything they learned in school, they will not forget the books they read. People need to learn life skills and job skills; some of this can be taught at home but it can be taught better by educated parents. Women need these skills as well, because they may find themselves without the support of a husband because of divorce, or disability (or incompetence) on his part, and may well end up as the matriarch of a family because women live longer. Besides all this, an educated man will want a wife who is on roughly the same intellectual plane as himself, not someone who is just about literate.

The Taliban are accused of dragging Afghanistan back to the “dark ages”. Let’s not forget that those ages were ‘dark’ in Europe only, where the church monopolised learning and kept the masses ignorant. Afghanistan was part of the Islamic Persian-speaking world and was quite advanced before the Mongols invaded; Herat in particular was a centre of learning. Yes, it’s true that there are other problems in Afghanistan, including widespread hunger, even starvation, but throwing people out of education will not solve any of that. It will just make it difficult for people to build their country back up again. It will just keep an impoverished country poor.

Image source: David, via Wikimedia. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 2.0 licence.

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