How just one educated woman transformed a family, a tribe, and a country in Afghanistan.
Prologue
I spent the entire year of 2016 dodging slippers my mother threw at me. It’s a favorite educational aid of displeased Pashtun mothers: slippers fly in your direction most of your childhood, especially if, like me, you’re less than obedient and opinionated to no end. There’s even a term for it: a flying chapal.
She’s been trying to hit me with one ever since I announced my decision not to go to Oxford. From the moment I uttered those words, I didn’t even have to open my mouth for my mother to reach for her slipper. Seeing me sufficed.
I grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan, one of 4 million Afghans living there at the time, displaced by the decades of war. Everything in my life was geared towards education. It was the only way to leave the refugee life behind. The odds were near impossible, but I made it. I was admitted into a year-long preparatory program in Oxford. An essay I wrote led to an offer of a full scholarship. It wasn’t an admittance to the university itself, it was merely a geographical coincidence, but it felt like a sign. We had it all planned: I was going to ace that preparatory program, then, I was going to get myself admitted to Oxford University proper and study philosophy, politics, and economics. Oxford was my dream. It’s the university that Indira Gandhi went to before she ruled India, the one Benazir Bhutto finished before ruling Pakistan. It’s where Malala was. Oxford wasn’t just a school; it was a mythical place that turned women of South Asia into heroines. I was going to be one of them.
Until I wasn’t.
It wasn’t a sudden decision. There was always a nagging thought in the back of my mind that I didn’t have time for all that. My reluctance wasn’t about fear: I was 18, I thought I could do anything. I didn’t know enough about the world to be scared. I’d never been to England, and the only place there that I heard of was Oxford. Not even London. What I wanted, what I dreamed of, were rows and rows of leatherbound books and my own education.
Yet I suspected for a while that what I needed to do was something else entirely: I needed to continue to fight for education of other girls like me.
Educating girls was our family business.
My father opened a school for our community with his own money decades ago. The school didn’t require much: he blocked off two rooms in our house and put family members to work. My aunt taught there. My mother taught there. I started teaching English there at the age of seven; I’d come back from my private lessons and teach the girls everything I learned in class.
It didn’t take much introspection to see that I was different. We, too, were refugees, but my family’s life differed greatly from those around us. My father was a tribal leader, like his father before him, and his grandfather before him. Once established, hierarchy and privilege travel with you — even to a refugee camp. Although most the ancestral land the family owned was made inaccessible by war, we were lucky enough to have vineyards and orchards on the Pakistani side, too. He could afford to educate me the way the Pakistani middle class educated their girls — with tutors and obligatory English classes.
My father loved history. Kids obsess over Disney princesses all over the world, but my father didn’t approve of them. Growing up, he kept drumming into me: “You don’t need fairytales, Pashtana, you need history. There are so many Afghan women who mattered far more than those princesses.” Truthfully, it was difficult to see the difference between the two. At that time, Afghanistan was under the Taliban rule, and Cinderella looked only slightly less fictional than the Afghan heroines of the past. But I understood what he was saying: no one is coming to save you if you’re an Afghan woman.
My entire childhood, my father insisted that I should be of service to my community. He’s the one who kept teaching me history. He’s the one who insisted that I mattered too, despite being a girl. He’s the one who kept telling me to keep my eyes open to the troubled world around me. “Don’t take your education for granted. Just look around! Education is a privilege. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”
I listened. I did what he asked me to do, I looked around. I saw the camp that had no running water, no electricity. Girls around me were going hungry and illiterate; most of them have never left the camp. Once they marry, they don’t even leave their homes. For too many of them, death is the only opportunity for mobility.
In most Afghan households, girls can only eat after all the men are done eating. The father eats first, then the sons, then, if there’s anything left, it’s a girl’s turn. Often, in the poorest of the families, there’s nothing left. Education is no different. Girls are meant to wait their turn, until we’re done educating boys. Not that anyone is trying hard to educate boys either: with Afghanistan perpetually at war, there’s little learning to be had before they get to pick up guns. We always seem to wait for something. We wait for the fighting to stop, for schools to open, generation after generation. When it comes to education, Afghans are the most patient people in the world.
I too was waiting. I spent years learning about Afghanistan, but I had never seen the land. It was too broken, never safe enough to visit, let alone move back to. I wanted to help bring about change, but Oxford would add at least four more years to that perpetual holding pattern. If the point of my going to Oxford was to eventually help Afghani girls, how many of them could afford to wait for me? How many would I lose during those four years it would take to finish?
I was an accidental activist. In the beginning, I was just trying to stand up for myself. I was relentlessly bullied growing up: by my cousins for being a girl, by my schoolmates for having tribal roots, and by the state system for being a refugee. My refusal to tolerate it had far wider-reaching consequences on my life than I had originally intended. If you’re a tribal woman, the bar for activism is low. Trained our entire lives to be neither seen nor heard, whenever one of us tries to raise her voice, it becomes a political act.
Shutting up never seemed like an option, though. I was born loud and whatever the consequences of speaking up might have been, suffering in silence seemed so much worse. At first, I just tormented my family with my views on educating women, a cause I made my own. I quickly branched out to sharing them with my friends. By the time I was sixteen, an Afghan paper published my first op-ed on rights of refugee girls. It was hardly controversial, but in a country where dissenting voices are faithfully policed, it’s not difficult to get noticed. There weren’t many of us speaking up.
To leave for Oxford now seemed selfish, it seemed like betrayal of everything I stood for. I was already privileged. I already had a head start other girls could only dream of.
I don’t think I deserved those flying chapals at all. Not going to Oxford was my father’s fault, really. He started it.
Oxford was the fairytale.
I chose history, so I packed my bags and went to Afghanistan instead.
Excerpted from LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN: MY LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN FIGHTING TO EDUCATE WOMEN by permission of Kensington. Download Buzz Books 2023 to read more of this title, as well as dozens of other excerpts of forthcoming books.
