She Who Tells a Story: Female lens on Iran and the Arab world

In the Middle East, a number of pioneering female photographers have risen to prominence, using art to defy stereotypes and explore questions of identity in the changing region.

She Who Tells a Story, an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, features the work of 12 contemporary women photographers from Iran and the Arab world.

Curator Kristen Gresh told the BBC that the exhibit and accompanying book showcase the powerful, diverse work of these women and offer a different lens through which to view the politics and culture of the region.

Produced by Ashley Semler and Bill McKenna
Photographs courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Newsha Tavakolian, Gohar Dashti, Nermine Hammam, Shirin Neshat, Rana El Nemr, Rania Matar, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Boushra Almutawakel, Shadi Ghadirian and Lalla Essaydi.

Zinat Karzai, Afghanistan's 'invisible' first lady

I didn't know Karzai was married!  It never occured to me.  It is nice to hear what she has to say. 

 

She has been called Afghanistan's invisible first lady. Zinat Karzai, the 43-year-old wife of Hamid Karzai, is rarely seen in public, prompting criticism that she is not doing enough to further the cause of women's rights in her country. This week she gave a rare interview to the BBC's Maryam Ghamgusar and Freba Zaher.

"Thank you and welcome," says a smiling Zinat Karzai greeting the BBC team in her modest, light-filled sitting room. "I'm very pleased to have you here."
Afghanistan's first lady lives behind a formidable barrage of security in the presidential palace in central Kabul.
It took five security checks, each more rigorous than the one before, to reach the ground-floor apartments which are currently home to her, her husband and their two young children.

It is clearly a situation which poses big challenges to everyday family life.

"It's very, very difficult… to be constantly under guard all the time," she says. "I would prefer it if I could live outside the palace."

The security constraints are one reason why this intelligent and articulate woman rarely appears in public .
"I have not travelled to anywhere inside Afghanistan," she says. Instead, people come to her.
"I have lots of contact with ordinary Afghan women… involved in areas like politics, social affairs, education and healthcare. They often come to see me and share their thoughts."
Zinat Karzai's lack of visibility has prompted criticism from some Afghans, especially the younger generation, that she is not doing enough to stand up for women's rights and to set a positive example.
All the more so, her critics say, because she is a qualified doctor who before her marriage worked for some years in Pakistan.
"I know [my contribution] is not open and visible in the media," she says firmly. "But I've done what I can and what I know it's possible to do given the current circumstances in Afghanistan."
When she talks about current circumstances, Mrs Karzai is not just talking about security issues.
Her role is clearly also constrained by cultural sensitivities. She says the country is simply not ready for a high-profile first lady appearing at her husband's side.
"I think more time is needed," she says. "This country has suffered from more than 30 years of war. We need to fix everything gradually, and work in line with our culture and traditions."
Those traditions include the belief still held by many conservative Afghan men that it is shameful for their wives to be seen by other men.
In fact, her own husband has been accused of having just such concerns. But she says it is her decision, not his, to keep out of sight.
"He and I both know our country's culture, traditions and the current state of affairs," she says tactfully. "We need to take this into account and to work in accordance with this."

Despite being out of the public eye, Zinat Karzai has met a number of other visiting first ladies.

She numbers Cherie Blair, Laura Bush and Gursharan Kaur, the wife of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, among the first ladies she admires. She is also close to Iranian President Ahmadinejad's wife, Azam al-Sadat Farahi, whom she speaks to on the telephone.

Zinat and Hamid Karzai have been married for 14 years, and since she became first lady she has had two children.
Her son Mirwais is now six, and she has a baby daughter called Malalai.
She says President Karzai dotes on the children, although he struggles to make time in his packed schedule to spend time with them.
"Sometimes, perhaps on Fridays, he might be free for an hour or so," she says, "so he will go for a walk with me and the children. We all go out together - once in a while."
President Karzai has in the past spoken emotionally about the kind of Afghanistan he hopes his son will grow up in.
For many Afghan families, a daughter is seen as less valuable, but Zinat says President Karzai is equally ambitious and hopeful for his daughter.
Fashion conscious
"For us… there is no difference between a boy and a girl," she says. "A daughter is the best gift from God."
Like her husband, Zinat Karzai has a keen eye for clothes and has cultivated what she calls an Afghan style of dress.
For the BBC interview she was wearing a light green long dress and matching head scarf.

The president usually attends public occasions unaccompanied by his wife

 

While for many outsiders the burka is a symbol of the lack of freedom many Afghan women still experience, Mrs Karzai maintains that it is not actually part of Afghan tradition at all.
"The burka… is imported from abroad," she says. "In rural areas the majority of women just wear a big headscarf. This is Afghan dress."
Looking back to her own childhood, Zinat Karzai remembers with affection her father who worked in the education ministry and pushed all his daughters to study.
"My parents… made sure that me and my sisters all got an education and went to university," she says. "All of us went through higher education. It was important for our family."
Although she feels unable to play a greater role in public life, Mrs Karzai says she is keen for both her children to be educated in Afghanistan, and maybe, if they are interested, even to go into politics.
"Their father has done so much for this country," she says. "It would be good if they could also serve their country."

The women in Afghanistan's political families

BBC Persian TV interviewed three other Afghan women connected to powerful families to understand how they cope with life in the public eye of a conservative nation.

Waheeda Mohaqeq, 37, third wife of the Hazara leader and resistance fighter Mohammad Mohaqeq lives with him, their six children and his two other wives and all "get on very well together".
She has a degree in literature but says, "I'm a housewife and I like living a simple life. I'm happy that I can live just like any normal person, going out, going shopping. This is how I want it to stay."

Fatana Gillani, is the head of the Afghan Women's Council and married to MP Ishaq Gillani.
She is one of the few wives of prominent Afghan politicians who has a career of her own. The couple have been the target of much criticism from conservative Afghans because of her public profile.
Her charity provides support to a network of 500 under-privileged women.
"The oppression that Afghan women are subjected to now is like what was happening in the dark ages before Islam. There is still so much to do," she said.

Princess India (pictured above), 83, is the daughter of former King Amanullah, a moderniser who was deposed in 1929. She grew up in Rome.
Her mother was Queen Soraya, the first Afghan woman not to wear the veil. Her mother's glamorous modern fashion sense was hugely shocking to conservative Afghans at the time, and still would be for many people today today.
"One important thing that needs to happen is that Afghan men need to be educated. I'm sorry to say it, but Afghan men just don't have good manners. They need more education," she says.

Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

Why Afghanistan's past is being 'rewritten'

By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Sarubi and Charikar

 

Afghanistan's government is rewriting history, literally.

The education ministry has endorsed a new history curriculum for school students that deletes nearly four decades of the country's war-torn past.

The government says textbooks based on the new curriculum will help bring unity in a country traditionally polarised along ethnic and political lines.

But critics accuse ministers of trying to appease the Taliban and other powerful groups by erasing history that portrays them in a bad light. They say the government is trying to win over the Taliban before Nato and US forces leave the country.

Afghanistan is entering a hugely uncertain time post-Nato, during which tricky arrangements with the Taliban and other players are expected.
'No mention of the misery'
The past 40 years in Afghanistan have been some of the most turbulent of any country in the world.

The suffering of people in the Shomali plains is not mentioned in textbooks

But the bloody coups of the 1970s, the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Moscow-backed communist regimes in Kabul and countless human rights excesses committed by secret police have all been erased from the history curriculum, critics say.

Nor is there much mention of the bloody civil war between mujahideen factions that tore Kabul apart in the 1990s, leaving an estimated 70,000 people dead.

That conflict gave rise to the Taliban - but there is not much mention of them either, or the US-led forces that drove them from power and have stayed for more than a decade.

An Afghan journalist, who did not wish to be identified for security reasons, told the BBC he was surprised the civil war and the Taliban regime had been wrapped up in just a few lines.

''There is no mention of the misery [the war] brought. No mention of Kabul being the killing zone. The books say Mullah Omar was removed in 2001, without saying who Mullah Omar was.

"There is no mention of the US and Nato presence. It is as if someone is trying to hide the sun with two fingers."

The education ministry denies suggestions that foreigners had any role in devising the new curriculum, and US military officials say they had no discussions on content in the books, some of which were paid for with US money.

But a spokesman for the US military in Kabul, David Lakin, added: ''Our cultural advisers reviewed the social studies textbooks for inappropriate material, such as inciting violence or religious discrimination."

The BBC visited two schools just outside Kabul where the new books have been introduced.

At one - Sarubi High School, 75km (40 miles) from Kabul - I sat in on a class and listened as a teacher asked one of his grade six students to read from his glossy new history textbook.

The chapter was on Sardar Mohammad Daud Khan, prime minister from 1953-63 and the country's president 10 years later.

The chapter talks about Daud Khan's rise but is silent on the full details of how he overthrew the monarchy of his first cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah.

The following chapters, too, make no mention of the numerous bloody coups that unsettled the country's political landscape, the Moscow-backed regimes including that of President Najibullah, the civil war that began after his resignation or the rise in 1996 of the Taliban and their subsequent fall.
'Children will never know'
"What happened in Sarubi during the Soviet invasion?" I asked 11-year-old Muslim, who was listening diligently to his classmate.

Students will find few references to the rise and fall of the Taliban

''The Russians wanted to remove Islam from Afghanistan. A lot of people got killed, villages were bombed. Millions were forced to take refuge in Pakistan,'' the boy says.

"How do you know? This information doesn't exist in your history book."

"My parents and teachers told me," he says innocently.

The teacher, who also requested anonymity, says the new textbooks will deprive knowledge of the past to an entire generation.

"Since internet penetration is low and contact with the outside world is limited, children in Afghanistan are more dependent on textbooks than anywhere else in the world," he said.

"But now that the government has decided to delete the past 40 turbulent years from history books, millions of children will never know why and how the Afghanistan we live in came to be."

Like Sarubi, the Shomali plains north of Kabul also suffered the excesses of the Soviet Red Army and then the Taliban.

The bustling town of Charikar, just off the main road, was until 12 years ago a picture of devastation. Accused of supporting the Northern Alliance, the town bore the brunt of Taliban violence.

"Thousands of trees were cut down, fields and vineyards burnt, houses destroyed and people killed," Abdul Qodoas, a history teacher at Mirwais High School, said.

But the Taliban's "scorched earth" policy finds no mention in the new history textbooks either.

'For students it is important to study every political regime whether its rule was good or bad," Mr Qudoas said.

"One of the primary objectives of studying history is not to repeat past mistakes. If students will not learn about past violence, how will they avoid it in future?"
'Deception'
Education Minister Farooq Wardak says the decision to delete part of history from the books is based on the larger interest of the country.

The fear is that children are being denied the truth about key historical events

"There are hundreds and thousands of issues over which there is disagreement in the nation," he told the BBC.

"My responsibility is to bring unity not disunity in the country. I am not going to encourage a divisive education agenda.

''Now, if I am writing something over which there is no national consensus - I am taking the disagreement, even the war to the class, and school of Afghanistan. I will never do that.''

But for many others, what has been done to the curriculum is simply "deception". How can you move forward if you brush your past under the carpet and don't confront it, such critics argue.

"Kabul was destroyed during the civil war, thousands of people were killed," said a female member of parliament, also on condition of anonymity.

"During the Taliban rule atrocities were committed on females. They were prohibited from working or going to school. Hundreds of women were stoned to death for alleged adultery. None of this finds a place in textbooks. Are we not hiding the truth from the children of this country?"