Rukhsar Habibzai is the founder of Cheetah Cycling Club and captain of her nation’s first women’s cycling team, a group of ground-breaking women cyclists who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for their bravery and courage in defying gender taboos in Afghanistan.
Born in the province of Ghazni, Habibzai was completing the dentistry programme at Cheragh Medical University located in Kabul when she was forced to leave her country as part of the mass evacuation of vulnerable citizens who faced targeted gender violence by the Taliban. Now living in Virginia, Habibzai is a dental assistant and racing for Virginia’s Blue Ridge TWENTY24 Cycling Team in 2022.
On warm afternoons and sometimes late nights, my mom would tell me of her grim memories of when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan for the first time in the 1990s. She would talk about the fear and panic spreading like wildfire across the country, about how most people fled, leaving full houses behind.
She spoke about how the Taliban closed the doors of education for girls and women and, how women were not allowed to go out without a male escort, how a woman had to cover every inch of her body so as not to distract or scar the holy faith of men who looked at them. Seeing a woman getting lashed or beaten with a stick in public had become – and still is – commonplace.
She spoke of the ‘warriors,’ female teachers, who risked their lives to continue reading, writing and teaching in secret.
In Afghanistan, women were – and in many ways still are – viewed as objects to satisfy men. They were, and still are, the caretakers for the kids, the cooks, and the cleaners. They often receive the blame for much of the wrongdoing in the world. Society expected, and still expects, silence from Afghan women.
At that time, the Islam religion, which allowed women to be educated and work, lost to the culture that catered to the vices of a male-dominated society won.
When my mother used to tell me stories from the Taliban rule over Afghanistan between 1994 and 2001, I often wondered how a society could progress without women and how a city like Kabul could remain beautiful without the influence of women. In many ways, our women educate the next generation of society.
Women and girls contribute to the building of any society, and if a woman remains uneducated and unable to work, this society should fear what it has lost.
I asked my mother to tell me her worst memory of the previous Taliban rule, and she told…
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