by Ruchi Kumar, UnHerd
A few months ago, Manizha’s eight-year-old son came to her with a question. “What,” he asked, “is jihad?” His words left Manizha speechless — especially when the former Kabul office worker heard what came next. “He wanted to know how he could fight the enemy,” the boy’s mother explains, the disbelief still echoed in her voice. She sat there stunned, unable to reply.
Five years on from the Taliban’s return, and life for Afghan women like Manizha has become a kind of hell. Banned from schools, universities and even parks, they need a “male guardian” to travel more than 70 kilometres from home. And now, the mother of three fears for her children’s future too. Taught that unbelievers should be killed, and that women’s rights are mere Western propaganda, young Afghans are being groomed to become the extremists of tomorrow — with worrying implications for their country and the world.
Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has become infamous for its restrictions on female education, locking over two million girls from the classroom. But that still leaves millions of boys, and millions more girls under 14, in the regime’s pedagogical clutches. Certainly, it’s clear that the Taliban itself understands its power here. As far back as 2022, a 78-page leaked document outlined a raft of changes to what was dismissively called the “modern curriculum”. Instead, the document argued, schooling should be transformed in line with the Taliban’s radical interpretation of Islamic law, suggesting, among other things, that natural disasters should be explained both scientifically — and in terms of “Allah’s will and power”.