The Taliban banned my mother from learning. Now history is repeating itself (2025)

Karima Moqimi was a final-year medical student in the 1990s during the Taliban’s first period of rule in Afghanistan. She was pregnant with her first child when she went to her university to take her end-of-year exams. But she never took them; the Taliban had shut the university to women.

Now, more than two decades after Karima was barred from higher education, the daughter she was carrying, Solmas, has also been shut out. Also a final-year medical student, Solmas, now 25, never had the chance to take her own exams after the Taliban shut the university to women once more.

“It was a more violent time then,” says Karima, now in her forties, describing how she and the other female students were chased out of the building that day by Talibs. “Solmas was in my body,” she said.

Karima went home to the apartment she shared with her husband, where she experienced terrible depression and loneliness, she says. By night she did needlework to forget the anxiety and sadness she felt.

When the Taliban were ousted by the United States and the coalition in 2001, Karima resumed her studies. After graduating she worked as a gynaecologist. She raised her children, two sons and Solmas, to focus on education.

“I never thought what happened to my mother would happen to me,” Solmas tells The i Paper.

Before the Taliban’s edict in 2022, there was a sense at their home that the ban would take place. Solmas’s father reassured his daughter, saying universities would not close to women. But she could tell he worried.

The morning after the Taliban’s edict in December 2022, Solmas and her friends took a taxi to the university building, hoping to be let in. She said the Talibs at the gate said: “It’s out of our hands.”

The Taliban have banned women and girls over 12 from secondary and highereducation.

When Solmas speaks her frustration is clear. “Just let us take the exams,” she says. “The boys have all graduated — they’re doctors. We don’t know what we are. Not a BA or an MA. What are we? They’ve ruined our futures.”

Weeda Mehran, a lecturer at Exeter University, and a secondary school student in the 1990s in Herat, western Afghanistan, recalls the Taliban’s promises in the 1990s to reopen girls’ schools.

“They kept promising they would open the school – the next day, the next day. In a month. In April. During nawroz [Persian new year] it would open. It never opened until the Taliban was ousted,” says Mehran. She adds that these were the “same promises [the Taliban] are offering right now”.

For a while Solmas and her peers were hopeful the ban would be reversed – or that they would at least be able to take their final exams and graduate. Solmas used to call the university’s administration to ask for news. When the men were due to next take exams at the end of the spring term in 2023, the women asked to join them. “But they said it wouldn’t be possible.” Now, there’s been a change in staff, and they no longer call.

Solmas says that while growing up she never felt “less than a boy”. “I grew up among boys – playing, football, school. I didn’t wear a headscarf until grade 7 or 8” — at around 12 or 13 years old – she says.

Despite the war and the dangers of living in Afghanistan, her family and friends decided to stay. They thought “Afghanistan is getting better”.

“I didn’t think it would return. This disunity,” she adds. She never imagined living under Taliban rule. “If they told me in my dreams I wouldn’t believe it.”

“Closing the beauty salons”, she says, or “weddings with just the woman not the husband — what’s the point of this?” She adds: “I’m not the only one. My father says ‘if you’d told me in my sleep I wouldn’t believe it,’” Solmas says.

Growing up she would hear “strange” stories of her family’s struggles in the past. “Now this is the reality – this is what happened, this is what my mother and others experienced. And this is our generation, this is what we are experiencing.”

“The burqas, women beaten outside, no music — I never saw any of this,” she says, referring to the Taliban’s first stint in power.

Heather Barr, associate director of the Women’s Rights Division, at Human Rights Watch, tells The i paper that pursuing accountability is critical. “There are a whole bunch of very rich and powerful countries who played a direct role” in the war in Afghanistan, she said. She adds: The Convention for the Elimination of Violence Against Women “does not apply less to women born in Afghanistan than women born anywhere else”.

“The whole point of [international human rights law] is there’s an international responsibility. What’s happening in Afghanistan right now is testing that commitment and that willingness.”

Most of the women Solmas knows are trapped at home. One study of adolescent girls carried out by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development office in 2022, after the school ban was announced, found that over half of the girls surveyed “met the criteria for probable PTSD, anxiety, depression.” In another study, by Mariam Safi at the Overseas Development Institute, 7.8 per cent of women and girls surveyed knew someone who had committed suicide.

“My neighbour’s daughter cries… She hasn’t been anywhere for three years. Hasn’t left home for three years. No TV or radio,” says Solmas. The young woman had tried to kill herself in 2024, she adds.

Solmas has many female cousins, most of school age and at home. One of her uncles keeps his daughters busy with calligraphy and drawing. For now, Solmas continues with her work as a volunteer at the hospital.

The Taliban, whom she met for the first time in the hospital, walk in openly with their wives, she points out.

Although Solmas was supposed to have graduated and started her training by now, she says she is “hopeful that my future works out. But the future — the one the Taliban has in mind — that’s no future,” Solmas says. “I’m getting older – that’s the big problem.”

The Taliban’s vision of the future is one where “women are in a cage; they must only be at home. They aren’t allowed to do anything.”

“The world is progressing. We can’t be like this.”