Reem Djebli/ Wise Afghanistan/ San Francisco, USA
After having completed the first phase of my summer project with WISE-conducting source-based research- I discovered that the process was sometimes as telling as the research itself. When undertaking research, I found it very difficult at times to find sources that weren’t inherently biased. Whether it be the subtle undertones of Islamophobia that were embedded in otherwise informative and useful articles or the Western-centric solutions to a complex, decades-long Afghan problem. Filtering through available sources that were either credible or actually came from Afghan women themselves was not a light task. Learning how to make judgment calls on what information to take at face value and what to disregard was a skill that took time to polish. I found that this process led to a deeper discussion of how Muslim women are viewed, treated, and valued in public space with the head of WISE, Ms. Alia Rasoully.
The contents of my research shed light on what I intuited to be true, the issue of women’s education in Afghanistan is too complex to be synthesized from one point of view. Women across racial, socio-economic, and geographic backgrounds have been on either side of the issue based on their experiences with imperialism, militarism, and orientalism. This issue, so commonly reduced to religious extremism versus humanitarian justice, is too an amalgamation of the results of the Cold War, British colonialism, U.S. militarism, classism, and racial tensions. Many trace the origins of the issue to the Taliban’s fight for control of the country beginning in the 1990s, but it doesn’t take much research into the history of the nation to discover the topic of women’s education predates our expectations. To understand how women feel about their right to education, we must de-center our notions of “rights” and “secularism” and what a classroom environment should look like. What of the women who desire to learn about their religion or who want to learn to carry on the traditions of homemaking passed down in their families? Should their definitions of just education be disregarded simply because it doesn’t fit into our image of what education should look like?
To gain a better understanding of what Afghan women see as their right to education, I will turn to them, and let their voices speak for themselves. The next phase of my project will be creating and distributing interview questions and surveys to a selected group within WISE’s communities in Afghanistan, to allow them to share their visions of an Afghan-centric educational system. I will design these surveys keeping in mind the regional context these women are living in and will rely on what I’ve learned through the research phase to avoid replicating the same problematic patterns in my work.