Daring to defy a Taliban deal
The driver of a car that was stopped in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, was shocked when a passing motorist rolled down the window and shouted at him, “Dirty donkey.”
He was even more surprised when he looked up to see that the insult came from a woman. A woman driving a car. A woman driving a car without wearing the obligatory hijab.
That was Laila Haidari, who runs a popular café in Kabul that allows men and women to dine together — whether married or not, with or without a head scarf — and uses the profits to fund a rehabilitation clinic for drug addicts.
Nearly everyone addresses Haidari, 39, as “Nana,” or “Mom,” and her supporters describe her as the “mother of a thousand children,” after the number of Afghan addicts she has reportedly saved. Now, Haidari plans to start a popular uprising against the continuing peace talks with the Taliban.
“Guys, the Taliban are coming back,” she said one day recently to a mixed group of diners at her restaurant, Taj Begum, which has been subjected to virulent attacks in the local media that have all but compared it to a brothel.
“We have to organize,” she told her customers. “I hope to find 50 other women who will stand up and say, ‘We don’t want peace.’ If the Taliban comes back, you will not have a friend like me, and there will be no restaurant like Taj Begum.”
Her nearly always crowded restaurant, on the banks of the sewage-drenched Kabul River, is named after a 15th-century warrior princess from Herat, who helped rule a vast kingdom, a rare example of female power from that time.
Haidari is as unusual in her own 21st century age. While most women’s activists in Afghanistan have been western-financed and supported, she has insisted on organizing her political activity herself and on her own terms. “We need to change our own men and our own families first,” Haidari said in an interview. “Don’t think of me as a victim, like so many of our women in public life seem to be. I’m not going to sit across from the Taliban wearing hijab begging for my rights.”
Few women’s activists here challenge patriarchal social norms to the degree Haidari does, and those who do tend to do it quietly and politely, and to come from Western-educated, liberal families who support their rebellion. Haidari does it loudly and often rudely, and comes from a religiously conservative family who married her at 12 to a mullah two decades older.
Often arrested, she is always released. “I have a lot of friends on social media,” she said. Neighbourhood drug dealers came after her as well, angry at losing customers.
She lives alone in an apartment, which she said two men broke into late one night, not expecting her to have a shotgun under her bed.
“I blasted a hole in the ceiling and they both ran,” she said.