by Tim Bonyhady
Other Afghan women wore miniskirts with bouffant hairstyles, imported saucer-shaped sunglasses, stilettos and fishnet stockings produced by a flourishing local industry despite also being widely regarded as scandalous. Nokta Cheen, a columnist with the Kabul Times, suggested that miniskirts had ‘deeply penetrated the taste of Afghan women’. His fellow contributor Abdul Haq Waleh saw the miniskirt’s popularity as ‘a compensation on the part of the young emancipated girls whose mothers were not allowed to expose their faces more than a decade ago’. Meanwhile, the few female students in the university’s Sharia faculty—established in conjunction with Al-Azhar University in Cairo and shaped by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—designed yet another uniform. Its headscarf, tunic and matching trousers were ‘as modern as could be’, Nokta Cheen reported, but hid most of the body, so its wearers became ‘heroines’ of conservatives.
Eve Arnold, the first woman member of the Magnum photographic agency, visited for three months in 1969 as part of a transnational project for London’s Sunday Times magazine, recording the changing lives of Islamic women. The result was three features, starting with one about Afghanistan, which the magazine called ‘The Seven Veils of Islam’. In keeping with Arnold’s inspiration—hearing the Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba exhort women to jettison the veil—Arnold’s cover image was a young unveiled Kandahari woman with mirror in hand, looking up from studying her own appearance to gaze directly at the camera. While Safia Tarzi provided Arnold with introductions, accompanied her as she looked for subjects and posed for Arnold in two short stylish dresses, she did not feature. Nor did any other miniskirted women or the female students of the university’s Sharia faculty in their pantsuits. Instead, as usual, the chadari dominated the feature’s opening pages.
In the accompanying essay, Lesley Blanch, best known for The Wilder Shores of Love about four nineteenth-century European women in Arabia, saw almost everything through an exotic lens. She not only embraced the cliché of the ‘mystery of the veil’ but also maintained there was a ‘new mystique of emancipation’ so that ‘some indefinable and subtle air of reserve…like an invisible chadari’ still surrounded unveiled women. Like Edward Hunter in the 1950s, Blanche linked the status and appearance of women to male sexuality. She suggested that the new visibility of women and the appeal to men of seeing female ‘faces, legs, arms and more’ had led to ‘a marked decline in homosexual relationships’.
A West German cartoon, sometimes said to have originated in Israel, fuelled tensions when Islah republished it. This cartoon depicted a turbaned man with nine veiled wives seeking a hotel room with a bed for ten, only to be turned away by the hotel manager. Because the cartoon was widely understood to depict the prophet Muhammad who had nine wives, clerics considered it sacriligeous, prompting a small group of clerics to take to the streets. While the many leftist protests in Kabul had almost no effect on government, the clerics prompted it to sack Islah’s editor and to suspend its publication.
Films triggered more controversy. One was the Soviet Khuda Nest, ‘There Is No God’, about a farmer who prays to God for water, only for his needs to be answered by his fellow men. When shown at Kabul’s Soviet-built, partly Soviet-staffed Polytechnic, members of Muslim Youth protested. Another was the Iranian Yusuf Zulaikha, based on a Persian story similar to the biblical account of the wife of the Vizier Potiphar who lusts after Joseph in Egypt. Afghanistan’s censors passed Yusuf Zulaikha because it was ‘produced in Iran, an Islamic country’. When screened for a general audience at Kabul’s National Theatre, clerics viewed it as a blasphemous attack on ‘the innocent character’ of Yusuf, an Islamic prophet, and ‘contemptuous in outlook to all other prophets’.
The butt of this fury was Mahmoud Habibi, Afghanistan’s Minister of Culture from late 1969. At the time, Afghan Film, a government-owned company, made only propagandistic newsreels and documentaries, including one that lauded the government’s infamously weak efforts to assist the starving during Afghanistan’s drought of 1969–72. There had been only two Afghan feature films: Love and Friendship, shot in India in 1946 with a mixed Afghan and Indian cast, and Like an Eagle, filmed in Afghanistan, which premiered in 1964 to immediate criticism. Habibi endorsed calls for a local industry, which led to Afghan Film’s first full-length feature, Rozegaran. When it premiered in Kabul to acclaim in mid-1970, the police had to protect the cinema from enthusiasts, not enemies of the moving image, another Afghan first.
Habibi’s critics sought to secure his removal through the Afghan parliament which had become much more conservative—and all-male—in the wake of elections in 1969 staged with far less freedom than those in 1965. When Zahir Shah protected Habibi, the US ambassador Robert Naumann speculated that the king wanted to show that parliament’s power was limited. But Naumann also wondered about the relationship between the forty-six-year-old king and Habibi’s twenty-four-year-old wife, Shafiqa, a member of a prominent Pashtun family, who had been one of Radio Kabul’s foremost broadcasters since she was sixteen. Naumann reported that Shafiqa Habibi was rumoured to be the king’s mistress—a role British intelligence attributed to Princess Adela, wife of the king’s religious adviser, Sayyid Ahmad Gailani.
Babrak Karmal—one of just two communists in parliament from 1969, along with Khalq’s Hafizullah Amin—set out to provoke and succeeded during the centenary of Lenin’s birth in 1970. When Karmal’s Parcham newspaper published a poem that April hailing Lenin as ‘dorud’—a Dari word for praise usually reserved for the prophet Muhammad—clerics declared it sacreligious. Their leader was Sebghatullah Mojadiddi who had been jailed for treason and heresy in 1959, had gone into exile in Egypt and Saudi Arabia following his release, then returned to Kabul. When a delegation headed by Mojadiddi met Zahir Shah and he offered to ban Parcham but refused to punish any of the group’s members, the outraged clerics took to Kabul’s streets from the city’s largest mosque, the Pul-e Khishti.
The clerics were almost as vituperative about the influence of the West as about communism. ‘When a man is excited when he sees this dress, it must bring adultery,’ Mojadiddi declared of the miniskirt. As provincial mullahs swelled the protest and increasingly took charge, they demanded that women wear chadaris, be excluded from schools and barred from travelling overseas, that ‘atheist’ and ‘risque’ movies be banned, and the country be governed by Sharia law. They also stopped delivering their Friday sermons in the King’s name—as in 1928, a sign of rebellion.
May Day occured while the clerics’ protests in 1970 continued. As usual, leftists celebrated it by marching through central Kabul to the city’s Zarnegar Park, where a small rise was the site of so many demonstrations it was known as ‘Revolutionary Hill’. The participants included not only Khalqis and Parchamis but also Maoists who, the American embassy reported, could ‘turn out large numbers of militants, especially female militants’. They were opposed by a small group from Muslim Youth, who have generally been identified by historians as modernisers because many were studying science and engineering. But those who rallied that May Day in support of the clerics were embracing an anti-modernist agenda in relation to women. Had police not intervened, the Maoists and the Islamists would have clashed.
This charged environment was intensified by American evangelical Christians working in Kabul primarily as teachers or doctors. While the city’s small Roman Catholic community had a chapel within the Italian embassy in the Shahr-e Naw, the Protestants worshipped in a rented house but wanted their own church. Having raised the money and gained government approval, this Christian Community Church was dedicated on Pentacost Sunday, 17 May, as the protests centred on the Pul-e Khishti mosque continued. For a week, as described by the evangelicals’ leader, Pastor J. Christy Wilson Jr, the Protestants’ ‘euphoria’ was intense at the prospect of securing a 49-foot-high, A-frame building, topped by a large cross. Then construction stopped because the government was ‘extremely nervous about any visible non-Muslim influence’.
By late May, the gove
rnment had surrounded the Pul-e Khishti mosque with police and disconnected its electricity supply, but about two hundred mullahs remained there. Early one morning, the government sent in its army and riot police—an ‘elite’ squad trained by West- and then by East-German police and dubbed the Whacking Batallion due to its brutality when suppressing leftist demonstrations. Equipped as usual with electrified cattle prods, these riot police arrested eight clerics, who were jailed for up to a year. They returned provincial mullahs to their places of origin, releasing them on condition they stayed away from the capital and abandoned their protests. Over the following days, all mullahs were barred from entering Kabul.
The government denounced the protestors as ‘agitators condemned by the truly learned Islamic figures as well as by the entire people and enlightened and progressive sectors’. But more unrest followed elsewhere. When mullahs returned from Kabul to Nangarhar in clothing ‘allegedly bloodied during the Pul-e Khishti eviction’, Shinwari tribesmen overran a police station, took its weaponry and were said to have seized the district governor. In the eastern city of Jalalabad, protesters destroyed a girls school and ransacked the one government hotel before the government sent out armoured units, supported by its airforce.
Attacks on girls and women in western dress, including schoolgirls in their standard uniforms, began in Kabul while the protests at the Pul-e Khishti mosque were at their height. One victim recounted: ‘I saw a man, riding a bicycle, with a long beard, coming towards me. He hit me with something liquid. I immediately closed my eyes. Fortunately, the liquid did not enter my eyes but I felt a burning sensation all over my face.’ By the end of April 1970, local hospitals had treated twenty-three victims of acid attacks and women were being advised to carry liquid sodium bicarbonate for ‘on the spot treatment’. A witness of one attack on a miniskirted university student recalled: ‘Her skin was peeling off the flesh. I thought her nylons were ripped and dangling down. In fact, it was her skin.’
The government’s plain-clothed police caught two assailants, both high-school students. But as the attacks continued, some terrified women sought refuge in chadaris. The fear also spread to Kabul’s first discotheque—opened early in 1970 by Ali Seraj, a grandson of Amir Habibullah, who styled himself a ‘prince’, much as his cousin Safia Tarzi was ‘princess’. Seraj’s Twenty-Five Hour Club in the Shahr-e Naw featured a live band twice a month, recorded music in between, with alcohol for sale until three each morning. Its patrons included Afghans but most were foreigners, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and all felt at risk.
Gul Mohammad—a thirty-six-year-old mullah from Herat, who took part in the Pul-e Khishti protests, then served as a cleric outside the city—escalated these assaults. Armed with a pistol and a knife, Gul Mohammad began attacking women. While typically remembered as miniskirted, all the women were wearing longer dresses, which Gul Mohammad still considered indecent. He found his first two victims that October outside high schools and a third near his home. Each time, he shot the woman in the thigh, then escaped by bicycle. Then he attacked again outside Kabul’s International Club which boasted a swimming pool, tennis court, dining room and bar, enjoyed by a cosmopolitan membership similar to that of the Twenty-Five Hour Club.
As Kathleen Trautman remembered it from a few years before, ‘a Western woman wearing tennis shorts on her way to the club was in danger of having rocks thrown at her or being spat upon’. Inside, was ‘another world’ where ‘bikini-clad women frolicked about the pool and gyrated at Saturday night dances’. Trautman was shocked when she introduced a Canadian woman as ‘Mrs’ only to be corrected: ‘But, dear, he’s not my husband. We only live together.’ She was ‘downright jealous’ when her husband danced with ‘a beautiful Swiss girl who looked like the fold-out picture from Playboy’ and ‘ever so loudly and ever so simply’ asked him, ‘Do you want me?’ Because Kabul’s police feared the International Club would be attacked, plain-clothed officers were there to seize Gul Mohammad after he shot another Afghan woman, his fourth victim.
Gul Mohammad’s defence, before Kabul’s Criminal Court, was that his attacks were justified by ‘Islamic codes’. He declared that he wanted to ‘teach all miniskirted women a lesson’. He also threatened to continue his ‘crusade’ against these ‘destructive microbes of morality’ and called on other mullahs to emulate him.
Because the male judge was widely expected to be lenient, women staged demonstrations. In 1968 hundreds of young women had taken to the streets when conservative members of parliament sought to stop them studying abroad. As Gul Mohammad was being tried in 1970, Anahita Ratibzad’s Democratic Movement of Women initiated three days of protests involving up to 5000 women, including most of the university’s female students and many high-school students and office workers. In between calling for the death penalty, they sought the opportunity to deliver rough justice. ‘Give him to us!’ they shouted.
The death sentence was an accepted part of Afghan law for murder, typically carried out by hanging within jails, sometimes before large audiences. But death for assault was unusual, perhaps unprecedented. After dismissing his Islamic defence—‘Gul Mohammad neither knows the Qur’an nor are his views sound on the basis of religion’—the judge sentenced him to death. But Gul Mohammad appealed, supported by the weekly Gahiz, which was funded partly by Pakistan’s Islamic Society. In defending Gul Mohammad, Gahiz blamed the victims. The ‘appearance of some of the women and girls caused such incidents’, it contended.
The Women’s Welfare Association responded by identifying the attacks by acid-throwers and Gul Mohammad as part of a ‘barbaric campaign’ against ‘the position of women in the society, and the women’s movement’. It blamed mullahs generally—characterising them as ‘white clothed black devils’. The association considered it self-evident to all Muslims that for women to wear ‘revealing raiments’ was sinful, but it argued this sin was eclipsed by the ‘despotic treatment of women, denial of their legitimate rights, and above all, acts of terrorism against women’. It declared: ‘Such actions are impermissable and deserve punishment. In our society, the number of women who, contrary to the Islamic tenets, live under the tyranny of men, is thousands of times larger than the few urban girls.’ In a letter to the government, the association fixed on Islamic ‘extremists’, a term already in occasional use. The association demanded that ‘the hands and tongues of the extremists be kept from threatening the lives and liberties of women’. While the Appeal Court commuted Gul Mohammad’s death sentence, it jailed him for eighteen years.
When Afghanistan’s all-male parliament had the opportunity to discuss these events, just one deputy welcomed the emancipation of women. None deplored the acid and pistol attacks. Instead, as the Women’s Welfare Association described it, one after another made ‘fantastic and biased comments against the rights, freedoms, work and education’ of women, often fixing on their clothing. Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi, a senior cleric from Logar Province, decried ‘the rising nudity in fashions and dresses worn by Afghan women and girls’, echoing the castigation of Queen Soruya forty years earlier. ‘The dresses of women are getting shorter from the bottom and lower from the bodice and the two are about to meet,’ another deputy exclaimed. ‘In the name of god do something to stop this.’
One of these young women responded to the assumption that she must be immoral. ‘I wear minis but that does not mean my character is bad,’ she declared. ‘I am as religious as anyone else.’ As ‘a modern, university going girl’, she identified freedom of dress as a democratic right. Nokta Cheen, who gave voice to her views in one of his columns in the Kabul Times, was a supporter. In another column reporting the first prosecution in Uganda for wearing a miniskirt three or more inches above the knee—prohibited by Idi Amin as conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace—Cheen lamented: ‘There the girls are punished by law, and here by Mullah Gul Mohammad.’ ‘What Afghan women want,’ Cheen declared, ‘is not only the freedom to dress and do make-up, but to be free in all walks
of life.’
This freedom was lacking, even for those women who had unveiled, as German anthropologist Erika Knabe found through hundreds of interviews. Traditionalists abused unveiled women on Kabul’s streets. Boys threw melon skins at schoolgirls or pulled their hair before riding away on their bicycles. Only about one in four women from the most westernised families in Kabul had some say in the selection of their husbands. Interaction between young men and women remained slight, even at the co-educational university where about twenty per cent of the students were women.
Movies screened in Afghanistan had long been subject to government censorship, with western films attracting the most cuts. Nokhta Cheen was a censor, with many films to scrutinise as more cinemas opened in Kabul in the early 1970s. Most showed Indian films, though a couple primarily screened Hollywood productions. Conservatives continued to think movies ‘damaged public morality’ and turned Afghans ‘into antagonists of religion’. Liberals lamented the films’ declining quality, so months would ‘pass without one being able to view an imaginative, tastefully produced movie’. Afghan Film maintained it had imported ‘some good movies’, but they drew such small audiences that they screened at a loss. Its examples were two Hollywood musicals: Funny Girl and The Sound of Music.
