Re-posted from Muslim Voices
As part of my reporting in Khost Province, Afghanistan, I hoped to interview an Afghan woman. I recognized early on this seemingly simple task was going to be challenging.
Khost Province is in an extremely conservative Pashtun tribal region, where Islamic women are most often isolated from unrelated males in a practice called purdah. When in public, Khosti women typically wear burqas, the enveloping shroud that shields them from gaze.
A number of years ago, I had become acquainted with Pashtun women in burqasin the adjacent tribal regions of Pakistan. Northwestern Pakistan and eastern and southeastern Afghanistan are the heartland of the burqa, particularly the chadri, the loose-fitting garment that covers the entire body, including the eyes, which are veiled with a fabric grill. Westerners often call the chadri a “shuttlecockburqa,” descriptive of the profile a burqa-ed woman presents.
While the sight of Pashtun women in burqas was unfamiliar and unsettling to me, I recognized the burqa also represented a fundamentalist Islamic communication that the woman was an inviolate spiritual creature.
‘Whose Fiat In Matters Of Fashion Was Law’
While the Koran and the hadith, the collected commentaries on Muhammed’s life, require Muslims to dress modestly in public, there is, however, no mention of theburqa in these sacred texts. The requirement for modest dress by women, calledhijab from the Arabic word for “curtain” or “cover,” is interpreted in diverse ways across the Muslim world, from chadris to no head covering at all.
For centuries, Afghan women in particularly strict households have used theburqa, though it was not in widespread use until the reign of King Habibullah, who ruled from 1901 to 1919. He decreed his two hundred comely wives should wear the burqa when outside the palace to prevent them from enticing other men.
Quickly becoming the au courant fashion, the use of the burqa spread among the ruling Pashtuns.
In the Westernizing years of the 1950s and ’60s, burqa-wearing dropped off among the upper classes in the modernizing cities, in the process creating aburqa fad in the working classes as they inherited their employers now passé outer garments. (Though there was a revival during the Soviet era of the 1980s, when some women sought refuge from the increasingly secular culture, even in the progressive capital of Kabul.) But it was the Taliban who made the burqa a symbol of female oppression, requiring that all mature Afghan women wear the garment when in public when they took Kabul in 1996.
When the Taliban fell from power in 2002, the wearing of burqas ceased to be mandated. However, it is still seen in the more liberal cities, such as Kabul and Herat. In the conservative hinterlands of eastern and southern Afghanistan, theburqa is the norm.
So given the conservative culture, I knew it would be somewhat of a cultural challenge to arrange an interview with an Afghan woman in eastern Afghanistan.
To Interview An Afghan Woman
The wild insurgency in Khost, Afghanistan’s most violent province, added another level of complexity. The insurgency necessitated stringent security. Afghan families cooperating with American forces also faced danger from the Taliban.
But I still thought I could interview at least one Afghan woman. After all, there were Afghan government officials who were women; Afghan NGO workers who were university educated. Perhaps I could arrange an interview through an American woman, and pose my questions from behind a screen. I am nothing if not flexible and resourceful. I had faith I could interview an Afghan woman.
About a month before I departed for my embed with the Indiana National Guard 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team (ADT) in Khost Province, I began making inquiries about an interview. I asked the ADT if they could arrange something. They said they’d try.
I approached CARE, a highly regarded NGO with active aid projects in Khost, to see if I might arrange an interview with one of their female workers. I researched the nascent Afghan woman’s organization, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), but quickly learned it was a secret organization due to Taliban threats.
No Meeting, No Quarter
When I arrived in Khost, I began to realize the challenge I faced. A tentative meeting with the Khost Province Director of Women’s Affairs was abruptly taken off the books. The Taliban blew up her car and said they were going to kill her. She left on a military plane for Kabul, with no plans for returning.
While there was indeed a CARE female worker in Khost City who was willing to talk to me, we needed to coordinate a neutral place to meet. Due to the dire security problems the humanitarian NGOs face, they very wary of being seen as allied in any way with the U.S. military. Given that, the CARE worker could not come to Forward Operating Base Salerno, the military base where I was embedded with the ADT. Nor could I arrive at her CARE location in any kind of military vehicle, or with any kind of military security.
Cognizant both of the extreme security risk and his responsibility for me, the ADT commander, Colonel Brian Copes, explained he could not let me travel unaccompanied into Khost City. Nor did I think it a particularly prudent thing to do. Kidnapping journalists has become almost a cottage industry in Afghanistan.
One day the CARE worker and I thought we had a plan: The ADT was going to the local Shaikh Zayed University. We could meet in a room near the ADT’s meeting with the administrators. There’d be sufficient security nearby, and her neutrality would be respected. So close. But instead the Taliban sent a “night letter” to the university administrators, and the meeting at the college was canceled. Maybe next time.
‘Let Me Look For Dogs And Women’
As the weeks rolled by with no woman interview in sight, I began to get increasingly nervous. I could see Khost Province was far more conservative than even the Pakistani tribal regions I’d seen. Indeed, I seldom even ,em>saw Afghan women, let alone spoke to them. For the most part, they were hidden in their homes.
One day I was in a remote mountain village with the ADT, on a visit to plan an irrigation project. Excited by the possibility of some help, a village elder led us through the hamlet to show us some existing watercourses. A pack of small boys followed us. The village men watched from under the shade of a pepper tree. Curs growled from the shadows. Our village guide suddenly darted ahead, dodging through a gate. “Wait here,” he called over his shoulder. “Let me look for dogs and women.”
Expats Found, And Lost
At one point, I thought I had it worked out. There were three Afghan female interpreters on Forward Operating Base Salerno. All three were long-time refugees from the chaos of war-torn Afghanistan. After decades in Pakistan, Europe and the United States, they’d each returned to serve as translators for the military, drawn by the high pay.
They were essentially Westernized women, who had grown up in Afghanistan. But I had lowered my expectations considerably. If interviewing an expatriate Afghan housewife who’d spent the last twenty years in Boston or Fresno was all I could get, that was good enough for me.
I approached the friendly women, who ate their meals together in the mess hall. They agreed to meet me after work for a group interview. I was giddy. But when I arrived for the interview, the three sat glumly on the steps to the building. As they left the offices of the private company that supplied the civilian translators, a manager asked where they were going. “To an interview with a reporter,” they told him. The manager told them they absolutely couldn’t do an interview with the media. I told them I understood, and would see if the ADT might be able to intervene. But I thought there was little hope. Drat, foiled again.
A Chorus Of ‘No’
I became reduced to asking virtually every person I met if they knew an Afghan woman I could interview. It became sort of a hobby.
A doctor told me some Afghan men interpreters brought their educated wives into the base hospital for treatment. Maybe I could arrange some sort of screened interview where I couldn’t see the woman, chaperoned by the translator husband and a female American soldier. An inquiry to the men brought stunned silence, and then a no-nonsense “No.” No.
I got so many negative responses, I began recording them. “Oh, man-that’s not going to happen,” was a pretty typical (polite) response. The less polite responses questioned my intelligence.
One veteran army captain who’d worked in Khost for a year on a development team told me he’d never spoken to a woman. Captain Bob Cline of the ADT told me the tale of his translator going into a paroxysm of fear as they approached a vet clinic. An Afghan husband was approaching with his two burqa-ed wives. The translator was terrified that the captain might see the women. They had to immediately back up and negotiate safe passage to avoid a potentially disastrous sighting.
Sharing Joy And Triumph
My relentless nudging finally paid off. When I agreed to keep the name of the female interpreters secret and not ask any questions relating to their work, the translator company finally relented, albeit with the prompting of the ADT’s Major Shawn Gardner and Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Sari. But two of the three interpreters still refused to be interviewed, fearful of losing their jobs.
With the intervention of ADT Deputy Commander Colonel Cindra Chastain, one kindly 51-year-old interpreter took pity on me, and agreed to sit for an interview. Lieutenant Melissa Gutzweiler sat as a chaperone.
The Afghan woman was tense when she sat down, her mouth a thin line of worry, her eyes flicking from side to side. I emphasized that her identity would be protected, and I’d ask no questions of her work. Soon she was cheerily telling me about her privileged girlhood in pre-war Kabul; about her father, an international businessman with contacts in London and other European capitals. Then her life as a refugee in Pakistan and eventually the United States; being part of the growing Afghan community in America. Her smile was warm and open as she talked about her large extended family; the message of peace and brotherhood her religion promulgates.
As we sat there taking in her shared joy and triumph over adversity, my long, seemingly futile quest to speak with an Afghan woman suddenly seemed all the more worthwhile.