Although six years of Taliban rule did much to damage the Afghan school system and diminish local women's rights movements, community-based efforts have made progress towards restoring education and women's rights to the war-torn country, geography professor Jennifer Fluri and gender and development researcher Lina Abirafeh said in a lecture held in Spaulding Auditorium on Wednesday.
In the lecture, titled "Can a Broken System Produce Tomorrow's Leaders and Gender Balance?" Fluri and Abirafeh discussed the intersection of women's rights and education in Islamic culture.
Women's rights as defined in Islam are "a lot better" than the current state of women's rights in Afghanistan, according to Fluri, who also teaches courses in the women and gender studies department.
Since Islam is an integral part of Afghan culture, it can play a positive role in future women's rights movements, she said.
"Islam is such a respected part of everyday life [and] an important vehicle to support women's rights," she said.
Following the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States failed to understand the importance of the community over the individual in Afghan culture, Fluri said.
"Thinking about yourself and thinking about your own personal wants and desires does not really make sense to people in Afghanistan," she said.
The community-oriented culture puts the family at the center of social life and leaves women with a heavy domestic burden, making it difficult for them to pursue opportunities outside the home, according to Fluri.
"We need to think about how to provide education and economic opportunity while considering [a woman's] household burden," Fluri said.
The burqa, for example, has become a far too politicized issue in the west, Abirafeh and Fluri said, leading the burqa to be wrongly viewed by western nations as a "tool of oppression" used in Afghanistan.
"My sense is that Afghan women long for choice the choice to wear a veil, a burqa or nothing at all," Abirafeh said.
Fluri said that the burqa can have a positive practical application for women as it allows them to carry books and school supplies without getting harassed.
Young women carrying books are often the target of Taliban attacks. However, the burqa can act as a cover for young women, since men assume that such individuals are headed to a mosque instead of a school. This allows girls to move safely throughout their communities, Fluri said.
In the lecture, Abirafeh described her work with the global women's organization Women for Women, which provides financial support and training for women survivors of war and civil strife.
In working with the organization, Abirafeh interviewed 3,000 Afghan women and collected data from Afghan men, women and policymakers on gender issues in Afghanistan.
"We looked at what the [gender] rhetoric was, what was put down on paper and compared that with what the policymakers and practitioners put into practice," Abirafeh said.
Demands from the United States and other western nations for increased women's rights following the United States' 2001 invasion of Afghanistan were often detrimental to indigenous feminist movements and marginalized the voices of female Afghanis, Abirafeh said.
As a result, Abriafeh sought to prioritize Afghan voices that she felt had been "silenced in policy decisions," she said.
Widespread poverty and the region's instability have negatively impacted education in Afghanistan, Fluri said.
Insurgent violence has increasingly targeted hospitals and schools traditionally thought of as "nonviolent areas" and many parents wish to send their children to school but lack the money or protection to do so, according to Fluri.
Additionally, Afghani education policy has often been the subject of political fighting since leaders disagree over what should be taught in schools, Fluri said.
"Education has been used as a political vehicle for 30-plus years now for creating [political] ideology in Afghanistan," she said.
Fluri also stressed the importance of community-based education programs, which can provide a safer environment for learning.
These education programs can allow leaders to overcome the political directives of the government's education policy.
By focusing on home-based education programs instead of building schools, communities can avoid creating physical targets for insurgent violence, she said.
Efforts to send displaced Afghani women abroad to pursue higher education in countries such as the United States, India and Iran have proven successful, Fluri said.
"Sending Afghan students to neighboring countries for higher education is an option that we should really consider more carefully," Fluri said.
Fluri said she disagrees with coercive education policies requiring schools to educate both boys and girls in order to receive consistent funding.
Funding boys-only schools will still promote education by developing educated fathers who will pass on the importance of education "generationally," she said.
The lecture was the fourth installment of the seven part summer lecture series, "Perilous Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran," sponsored by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth.
