Hopes held library will counter growing isolation
A women’s rights organisation is aiming to help those increasingly cut off from education and public life under the Taliban.
AFGHAN women’s rights activists opened a library in Kabul last week, hoping to provide an oasis for women increasingly cut off from education and public life under the ruling Taliban.
Since taking over Afghanistan a year ago, the Islamist Taliban have said women should not leave the home without a male relative and must cover their faces, though some women in urban centres ignore the rule.
Secondary schools for girls largely remain closed after the Taliban went back on promises to open them in March.
‘‘We have opened the library with two purposes: one, for those girls who cannot go to school and second, for those women who lost their jobs and have nothing to do,’’ Zhulia Parsi, one of the library’s founders, said.
The library’s more than 1000 books include novels and picture books as well as nonfiction titles on politics, economics and science.
The books were mostly donated by teachers, poets and authors to the Crystal Bayat Foundation, an Afghan women’s rights organisation which helped set up the library.
Several women’s activists who have taken part in protests in recent months also helped establish the library in a rented shop in a mall that has some stores catering to women.
The Taliban say they respect women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law and that since March, they had been working on a way of opening girls’ high schools.
Many Afghan women have expressed frustration and called for Taliban authorities to respect their rights.
‘‘They can’t annihilate us from society; if they annihilate us from one field, we will continue from another field,’’ Mahjoba Habibi, a women’s rights advocate, said at the library’s inauguration. — Reuters