Weighed down in a man's world

Reporting from Kabul is one thing; getting used to life in the Afghan city is quite another. The hardest feeling to cope with is that of inferiority, writes Kathy Sheridan.

It was only a headscarf. Quite a pretty one, in fact. Blue silk, long enough to cover the hair and drape elegantly across the shoulder. I didn't realise quite how much I had come to loathe it until I walked onto the homeward-bound flight in Islamabad. For several weeks in Afghanistan, wearing it had become as routine as pulling on shoes. As a woman travelling alone, to do otherwise would hardly be sensible in a region where the catcall Amrikayee (American) or Londonee, directed at a young Kabuli for wearing her scarf a touch too far back on her head, means "whore" and where a judge can declare: "From the waist down the woman is the property of a man."

While the scarf has become a politicised symbol for much of the West, many Islamic women say it is empowering and helps them advance in Islamic societies. From this you might infer that the scarf is a powerful filter of some kind, obliging men to see women as sensate human beings, with working brains, as opposed to sluts on the rampage. So it follows, you might think, that as a woman enveloped in a scarf and swathed from neck to ankle in loose garments - and every woman in Afghanistan wears a variant of the look, from the burka up - you are immune to harassment.

You wish. Our young translator, the most demure-looking girl in Kabul, was intimately groped wherever men were gathered. And this was in broad daylight. Suddenly, her brother's reluctance to allow her to work after 4 p.m., which initially implied overprotectiveness if not outright ownership, seemed reasonable. The young men who managed the Internet café I used in the late hours - 9.30 p.m. or after in Kabul - and who know their city well, insisted on escorting me home every night, even though home was only a block away.

Wearing a scarf confers no immunity from anything, still less on a Westerner out alone. To us, street harassment might constitute the chorus of whistles and (occasionally) witty banter from a building site; in Kabul, where this reporter got lost in a maze of streets one afternoon, it's of an altogether different quality. There was anything but humour in the intense, insistent stares, the relentless low-level hissing, the mumbled comments. The same day a colleague was almost knocked into a sewer when a turbaned cyclist aimed his bike straight at her.

That afternoon was a sharp lesson for someone who had encountered nothing but courtesy while accompanied and obviously working. (In that context you are regarded as a kind of third gender.) Complacency is a luxury best avoided.

An Irish woman professional and Afghanistan veteran says wearily that it will not be the on-off electricity, the water problem or the fear of Taliban rockets that will drive her out. "It's the fact that you can never, ever, be not aware of your gender," she says. "It becomes very, very tiring."

Some culturally sensitive observers put it down to a fear of Western-induced change. One Afghan newspaper, Kabul Weekly, noted that a small number of women, especially those who work with Western women at non-governmental organisations, say they are tired of the rules and want to know what it's like to break them.

That's easy. One girl reported that a group of three catcalling boys followed her every day from the university to school because she left her head uncovered. She tried travelling by car, but the boys did the same. Allowing women to walk around without covering their faces or heads is the thin end of the wedge, complained a taxi driver: "Soon skirts will be seen all around us. We have to stop them somehow. They are turning into Americans, I tell you."

One might imagine that some sacred traditions were under threat. In fact a glance through the books of Prof Nasrine Gross of Kabul University confirms that only 30 years ago the city was teeming with exquisite Jackie Kennedy lookalikes and women were in everything, including the cabinet. She also notes that the burka was an Indian import no more than 150 years old.

As so many women still "choose" to wear the burka, this reporter tried one for size. I promptly collided with a coffee table. Forget the indignity of being rendered invisible as an individual or of resembling a giant blue bottle, or the ghastly irritant of trying to breathe against cheap fabric. Peripheral and downward vision is fatally compromised, causing wearers to walk into donkeys, ditches and worse.

What kind of sadism is this, I ask Yar Mohammad Bahrami, a charming, young male university teacher. "Only people originally from the city go out without the burka. I live 20 to 25 kilometres out and our women wear it," he answers cheerfully.

Why on earth . . . ? "We want them to wear it. I wouldn't take my wife out without a burka. They like it, they have grown up with it." No doubt. But how about some of life's simple pleasures, such as being able to see where you're going ? "They can see enough," he says airily. "It's our culture: it requires women to be like this. Also our religion." If there are house guests the wife can make an appearance only if they are close relatives, he says - and, naturally, she could never be allowed out to work. "I am Pashtun, and we are very strict with women," he says, as if this explains everything.

This open, smiling man is not yet 30. It emerges, unsurprisingly, that he is a tad nostalgic for the Taliban. "I had no problem with them," he says; "other people" joined in and gave them a bad name.

To summon up those jolly times of only four or five years ago a few of us gather round a colleague's laptop that night to watch Osama, an Afghan film. It is the beautifully shot story of the adolescent daughter of a widow at a time when women, no matter how desperate, with no matter how many starving dependants, were not allowed outside without a male relative.

As the widow's male relatives, not unusually, have been dispatched to various wars, she is forced to disguise her daughter as a boy, nicknamed Osama by the girl's only trusted male friend. Afghans regard the harrowing scenes of the child's exposure and eventual fate - given as wife to a lecherous old mullah with several existing wives, in exchange for her life - as an accurate representation of the Taliban years. Combine it with covert footage of women being executed in the city's sports stadium and they are a reminder of how fundamentalism and power - the Taliban brought welcome order initially - can so swiftly trigger primeval savagery in the hearts of decent men.

Afghan women are adamant that Islam is not to blame. "There is nothing in Islam that makes women inferior to men," says Ghizaal, a dazzlingly articulate 24-year-old student and prime mover in a human-rights-law group. Ghizaal is showing courage in commenting at all. Mawlawi Fazel Hadi Shinwari, a 70-year-old Pashtun, was fresh from nearly 40 years of teaching Islamic law at a Pakistani madrassa, or religious seminary, when President Hamid Karzai plucked him out to be Afghanistan's chief justice.

Shinwari is a man from whom the charge of blasphemy flows as naturally as breathing. He tried to disqualify a male presidential candidate for blasphemy for asking whether it was undemocratic to require women to obtain their husbands' consent before filing for divorce. The issue is crucial, given that a quarter of the women in Kabul prison are there for "adultery". What this often means is that the first husband divorced them verbally, provided nothing in writing, then laid charges of adultery when they remarried. Shinwari believes that sharia law calls for adulterers to be whipped or stoned to death. He also managed to ban cable television for a while and tried to segregate the sexes at university. Even now, in the classrooms, girls cluster to one side; outside, the girls and boys are rarely seen together.

They are right to be fearful. Amnesty International's recent report noted a"shocking" ignorance among judges and lawyers about the country's laws. One appeal judge in Kandahar was unable to point to the law that made running away from one's husband a crime.

The people live under a system that sees Shakila, a childlike 18-year-old, languish in prison for having been raped by her landlord's son and then refusing to marry him. No family member has visited her, and her uncle has threatened to kill her if she gets out. Unless she marries her rapist she is safer inside. This vision of women as nothing more than conniving sex fiends and temptresses permeates society. A murderous "night letter" against female election workers declared that the women's voting centres were set up by the UN assistance mission to facilitate sexual relations with UN members.

Meanwhile, despite the sparkling new constitution and the need for role models, there is a distinct lack of example from on high. The suave President Karzai never takes his wife to official functions. "When such men don't bring their wives out, yet call on ordinary men to let their wives go out to work, what they are saying is: 'Your wife is a whore, mine is not,' " says Prof Gross. "People follow actions, not words."

Stepping onto my flight in Islamabad, still surrounded by veiled women and their men, it took a few minutes for the slightly guilty realisation to dawn that, as a Westerner on a European airline, I was back on my turf. Back in a place where there is the rule of law, judges are mostly sane, people are innocent until proven guilty and sexual harassment is a crime. It was a powerful feeling. I unwound the scarf, used it as a footwarmer for the journey, then left it on the plane.