A photo wearing a traditional emerald green dress, with the head covered by a white shawl. So Kahkashan Koofi, a 28-year-old Afghan who lost his place on state television with the return of the Taliban, challenged the new bosses of Afghanistan who impose on women on the few occasions they are allowed to go out wearing the black burqa.
As did the women who last Saturday took part in a demonstration staged in front of the University of Kabul to support the new Taliban government. Scenes that prompted Koofi and other Afghan women to react by posting their own photos on social media in which they wear clothes, each linked to the tradition of their ethnic group and their region, all colored.
“When I looked in the mirror I had a moment of peace, we live in prison here,” the young woman who, after the Taliban victory, hid with her family for fear of reprisals, told the Washington Post. The campaign with which Afghan women want to challenge the Taliban started with Bahar Jalali, a former history professor at American University, who told the BBC that he started posting photos in traditional Afghan clothes because “Afghan identity and sovereignty I’m under attack. “
#Afghan cultural dress https://t.co/6DjCVSSofl pic.twitter.com/JgpRVwvwOx
– Kahkashan Koofi (@koofi_kahkashan) September 13, 2021
Other women followed her and with the hashtags #DoNotTouchMyClothes, do not touch my clothes, and #AfghanistanCulture, women intend to disprove the Taliban narrative that the burqa, a traditional dress of the Gulf countries, is linked to an Afghan tradition. “I want the world to know that these clothes” worn by women in pro-Taliban demonstrations “do not belong to our culture, to our identity,” the historian explained to the British broadcaster.
Afghan culture is “all about joy and colors”, reiterates Ruhi Kahn, a researcher at the London School of Economics, for whom the online campaign “is not just a protest against the rules imposed by the Taliban, based on what they they believe Islamic, but also against the Western idea of what Afghan women should wear “.