The one thing that can never be taken away
In short: In a country where learning was declared a crime, one girl disguised herself as a boy to attend secret classes. Her story reveals how education became a clandestine act of rebellion, hidden in shopping bags and basements, to preserve a future that authorities tried to erase.
In 2001, Afghanistan was under Taliban rule, where authorities had declared education for girls illegal. During this period, children were forced to make up for years of lost schooling. Shabana Basij-Rasikh, who was eleven years old at the time, sat for a school placement test in Kabul and realized the immense risk her parents had taken to ensure she could attend classes in secret.
To bypass the ban, Basij-Rasikh took her education underground. She traveled to secret schools by disguising herself as a young boy, accompanied by her older sister. To avoid detection, they carried their books in unsuspecting shopping bags and intentionally varied their walking routes to ensure they did not establish any patterns that could draw suspicion from authorities. These clandestine schools often operated out of domestic spaces like basements, living rooms, and bedrooms.
Basij-Rasikh’s father, the first in her family to receive an education, framed this struggle as a fundamental investment. He would point to his head and tell his daughters that while everything else could be taken away in an instant during a war, the knowledge inside their minds was the one thing that could not be stolen. This philosophy drove her to co-found the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA) in 2008, which she describes as the only legally operating boarding school for Afghan girls on Earth.
Today, Basij-Rasikh advocates for a future where educating Afghan girls is not seen as an extraordinary act of bravery but as a standard reality. She argues that the secret to a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan is simply the education of its girls. Despite her personal achievements, including a master’s from Oxford, she emphasizes that the ultimate goal is a society where such risks are no longer necessary.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Dare to educate Afghan girls - Shabana Basij-Rasikh
- Also: Shabana Basij-Rasikh
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