Women, religion and the 'Afghan Education Movement' in Iran

Ongoing resistance to gender equality in Muslim societies, despite considerable industrialisation and development in many of them, has supported the assumption that Islam, itself, poses a formidable barrier to gender equality. In recent years, the treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban has only reinforced that assumption. However, it happens that certain social transformations have taken place in some Muslim societies, sometimes in unlikely corners, which deserve our close attention. There are lessons that we can draw from them regarding strategies for the further promotion of gender equity and women's empowerment. This paper reviews the experience of Afghan refugee women whose exposure to different visions of Islam in the Islamic Republic of Iran led them to embrace a different vision of Islam and 'Muslim-ness'. The internalisation of this new Islamic understanding empowered Afghan women, first, to envisage a different and transformed Afghan community. This vision led to the creation of an educational movement in which tens of thousands of Afghan boys and girls - but also adults - were educated without external financial or institutional support. It is a process very different from previous Afghan governments' top-down educational policies, or transplanted international agencies' programs, or other elite-based movements. A vibrant civil society has been created and the women, themselves, have changed. This educational movement transformed gender roles in ways that few social scientists or policy makers could foresee. Significantly, new configurations of various levels of empowerment at personal, community and transnational levels have arisen. Analysis of this case suggests that perhaps development practitioners and policy makers need to re-examine the potential for Muslim women, using their indigenous resources, to challenge their exclusion from the power structure of their communities and to transform their cultures and societies. Given the experience of once rightless, disempowered Afghan refugee women, why should we assume that, given the right circumstances, other Muslim women could not internalise a more egalitarian vision of Islam empowering them to take charge of their own lives and embarking on a process of societal development?