You can't hide the sun.
I was talking to a teenage girl in Afghanistan earlier this fall. She was on her laptop and I was on mine, and she was explaining to me how she’s come to understand that women don’t have the temperament to be politicians. And then she vanished. One moment, she was there. The next moment, gone.
She hadn’t shut off her computer. She’d lost internet access, just like everyone else in Afghanistan, the literally tens of millions of people who went dark in an unprecedented nationwide internet shutdown that lasted more than two days. No phone calls, no text messaging, no emails, no social media, no WiFi, nothing. A complete blackout for everyone in the country.
Blame immediately fell on the Taliban. Properly so: weeks earlier, they cut off fiber-optic internet in several Afghan provinces, stressing the need to combat “immorality and vice” but leaving mobile internet untouched. What happened here seemed like the next step ratcheted up to the level of total information control, a level where the thousands and thousands of girls and women who defy the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education by taking internet classes – including the students of SOLAx, our online academy – would find their opportunities eclipsed, gone dark just like their computers and phones.
The Taliban said they were upgrading Afghanistan’s tech infrastructure. That’s why every person in the country lost internet. One can debate, in this, the Taliban’s level of ineptitude — but beyond this, I feel there is no debate at all.
The Taliban recently banned books written by women from being used in universities in Afghanistan. “All books authored by women are not allowed to be taught,” said one of the men responsible for this decision. More than a dozen university-level subjects have also been banned. Among them are Gender and Development courses and courses on Women’s Sociology. Knowledge, darkened. Gone as though it never existed.
Women, of course, are not attending these universities. Women haven’t attended any university in Afghanistan since 2022. Girls haven’t gone to school past 6th grade since the Taliban’s seizure of power in 2021. Or to say that another way, an Afghan girl’s formal education ends around the time she enters puberty. In the Taliban’s Afghanistan, no further education is needed for the job she is now qualified for.
I’m blunt for a reason. I don’t soften this lived reality of Afghan girls for a reason.
It’s a reason that exists in many examples, and one of them came from the girl speaking to me from her laptop, the girl who vanished into darkness.
“I’m 14 now,” she told me. “I have big dreams. I wanted to be a member of Parliament, I’ve always been drawn to law and justice. Then I did research and found out that women are soft hearted and cannot be great judges. So I thought about other things I can do.”
In the space of four years under the Taliban, Afghanistan has become a place where women’s dreams glow only with dim light. A place where a teenage girl can come to understand that her place in her society is not what she desires it to be. A place where she can come to understand that she was wrong to ever have that desire at all.
Against that eclipsed light stand Afghan women and men, young and old, me and people like me, all of us undeterred as we find ways to overcome the darkness that blocks our sun.
The internet is back on in Afghanistan now. And it needs to stay on.
In 2023, I spoke at the UN Security Council. I urged the international community to take the necessary steps to keep the internet accessible within Afghanistan. With internet, education could come into every Afghan home, into the smartphone in the palm of every Afghan girl’s hand. And we as Afghans would take care of the rest, educators and activists would take care of the rest, but we needed the internet to stay available.
And now here we are.
What I urged the international community back then, I urge again now. The Taliban took the internet dark for two days. They can do it again, and they can do it for much longer. This cannot be allowed. Keep the internet on.
I’d like to talk to that girl again, the girl on the laptop that went dark.
I’d like to share a poem with her, a poem that a different Afghan girl wrote this past summer. A teenage girl in Kabul, looking to the sky and the illumination there that defies all attempts at eclipse. The poem came to me, and I share it with you.
A girl cries,
not for her scars but for her rights
she wants her wings to fly
you can burn her wings,
but she can grow them bigger this time
maybe you can make her wear the burqa
but you can't hide what she has under it
maybe her mind's brightness blocks your sight
but you can't hide the sun with two fingers.