Afghan Chadari still necessary
The Frontier Post
3/04/02

KABUL (NNI): AS Afghanistan’s cultural life recovers from the devastation of Taliban rule, a new women’s magazine has hit the streets with a message of
defiance for armed men who still run much of the country. Filled with political and social comment, interviews with prominent women and poems from
contributors, Malalai is the second women’s magazine launched in the Afghan capital, Kabul, since the fall of the Taliban in November.

Jamila Mujahed said the magazine took its name, and inspiration, from a legendary Afghan woman who led a band of guerilla fighters against invading
British troops in the 1880s.

On the front cover of the first issue, distributed free recently, is a photograph of a modern-day Afghan woman dressed in the burqa full-body veil,
which was mandatory under the radical Islamic Taliban militia, reports The Weekend Australian.

Most women in the Afghan capital still wear the burqa despite the collapse of the Taliban regime and the lifting of its bizarre dress codes, which also
required men to grow untrimmed beards.

Mujahed explains that the Taliban may have left, but women feel no more secure with the capital’s new rulers, and prefer to keep their faces
hidden behind the mesh of their burqas.

“The Taliban have gone but there is still no security. We have some factions here who are worse than the Taliban, and until the militias are disarmed we
cannot dare take off our burqas,” she said. Views Expressed and published here are not a property of

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