Afghan women turn to music and poetry to raise voices against Taliban's silence law

New law sparks anger over requirement to be quiet in public, on top of earlier restrictions

Just days after Afghanistan's hardline Taliban rulers introduced a law that silenced their voices, Afghan women gathered in secret to show their defiance through poems and songs recorded and shared online.

Among them was Adilah, a former law student in Kabul who organised the protest along with other women activists, many of whom she had met in the days after the Taliban stormed the capital and seized power in August 2021.

Since then, the Taliban have imposed severe restrictions on women through a succession of decrees, including bans on higher education, taking jobs, appearing in public without a full-body covering, or niqab, and travelling without a mahram – a male guardian. The new law, issued on August 21, codifies these restrictions and adds a few new ones, such as forbidding women from speaking loudly or singing in public.

“We have known for a while that they would do this; we had been warning the world that the Taliban are not to be trusted. But when I first heard about it, it was very painful,” said Adilah, whose education stopped when the Taliban seized power.

Unlike in the early days of Taliban rule, the protest against the law had to be clandestine. The group cracked down on public protests against their restrictions, forcing some women to flee the country and others to go into hiding in Afghanistan.

“We decided to have a meeting, a programme to read poems,” explained Adilah, who gathered with eight other women at a house in Kabul. “But since we were all in different places, some of us met in Kabul at a friend’s place, some others gathered in Pakistan and a few others joined in online.”

A poem was weaved together from verses brought by each woman. “Some brought poems they love, others wrote their own verses that resonated with our situation,” Adilah told The National.

She recited some of the verses in Persian, one of Afghanistan's national languages, in which she found strength, adding that she chose a poem that speaks of defiance and freedom of speech and warns the world that women "will fight back".

“I am a woman, I am the world. I love my freedom … If the boots are on my throat, the fist on my mouth, I swear by the light of my heart, I will not stay in this terror.”

Those who could not join in person recorded themselves singing verses and sent these clips to the WhatsApp protest group. These were then combined into one clip and uploaded to social media and distributed among other chat groups.

Since the law was introduced, "singing was our resistance", Adilah stressed. “Through the poems, we told them that we don’t fear the Taliban.”

Similar protests have taken place all over the world. In France, Afghan athlete Marzieh Hamidi started a campaign on social media, under the hashtag #LetUsExist, asking Afghan women and their supporters to speak out against the Taliban’s attempts to erase women’s identities.

“Women joined in on social media, especially from Afghanistan, because the act of singing became a way of protest when the Taliban decided to ban women’s voices," Hamidi said. "Through our songs we are telling them that they cannot simply cut us away from society; we are humans and we will exist."

She explained that the hashtag was aimed not only at the Taliban but also at the governments who “by dealing with the Taliban, or even by staying silent against their atrocities", were "supporting their apartheid state".

First street protests

Although the Taliban government has not been recognised internationally, several countries have entered negotiations with the group on humanitarian, trade and security issues.

The online campaign against the Taliban's law snowballed quickly, with many women posting videos on social media platforms along with protest hashtags. While some, like Adilah and her team, had to hide their identity by singing from behind veils or face masks, others did not.

“I am not weak like the willow that blows with every wind,” Taiba Sulaimani, a student activist, sings in Persian in a video of herself putting on her headscarf. “I am from Afghanistan and I have to suffer, but one day I will break this cage, leave this humiliation, and sing with happiness.”

Ms Sulaimani said she chose the song because it was "defiant, but also more hopeful”.

“It conveys my protest, but also my hopes for freedom.”

She was among the first women to take to the streets in protest after the Taliban seized power.

“When the Taliban took over, I was scared, but then I thought about my dreams, my plans for the future, all the rights we fought for before the Taliban, and it made me so angry and gave me the strength to join the demonstrations in Kabul,” Ms Sulaimani added.

But it made her a marked woman. Just days after the Taliban crushed the women’s protests, they started to identify and persecute the protesters. Several of her friends were detained and she was forced to flee Afghanistan.

“The Taliban arrested my two brothers and put them in jail, for over two months, because of my activism,” Ms Sulaimani said, adding that her brothers were told to “silence your sister”, which made the new law against women’s voices all the more personal to her.

She now fears that if not resisted, the law will become a way of life for future generations.

“It is an unjust law now but it will become part of the culture for the next generation, who might follow it without questioning or understanding how it impacts women,” she said.

Adilah warned that, apart from being repressive, the new law also gave a lot of power to men. “Women can’t leave the house with a man in charge of her, as though she is property.” There had already been a rise in cases of domestic violence, she said.

“Besides, what man has the time to follow his wife or sister around all day while doing basic tasks like taking the child to school, or doctor's appointments, or even accompany them to work if any of the women are still employed?”

Adilah said the law was even harder for women who do not have a mahram, or close male relative.

“What about women who lost their husbands and sons to the Taliban’s suicide attacks or who were killed in the military? How will they survive?

“Some say it is like gradual death, but even the dead seem to have more rights in Afghanistan than women."