Imagine every freedom you’ve fought for, everything you take for granted, everything that makes life worth living, snatched from you. You can’t travel any more, or work, study, play sports, access healthcare, go out on your own, or even speak in public.
That is the living nightmare recounted in ‘The Vanishing Girl of Kabul’, a compelling and harrowing book I’ve read over the summer about what’s happened in Afghanistan and how the world has responded. It combines memoir, call to action and stark warning. I recommend it to everyone who cares about half the world’s population, women’s rights and gender equality.
Written by celebrated Afghan journalist Zahra Joya, with her friend and fellow writer Amie Ferris-Rotman, the book describes Joya’s promising life before the Taliban retook the country five years ago, and the sadistic hellscape that came after.
Joya is the founder of Rukhshana Media, named in memory of a young Afghan woman stoned to death because she fled a forced marriage to be with her true love. The online news agency courageously reportson the suffering of women and girls under gender apartheid, while the world has largely looked away.
It’s a book that can’t fail to move you.
- I was intrigued that Joya, as a child in a large family of mostly girls, became a bacha posh – a pretend boy – for seven years so she could go to school. This experience, she says, gave her ‘permission to exist’.
- I felt her anguish as she fled Kabul when US and British troops pulled out and the Taliban swept back to power.
- I found it really hard (but necessary) to read about their grotesque sexual violence and dehumanising of women.
- And appalled to learn that some male journalists and ‘influencers’ have since chosen to visit Kabul and either failed to notice the complete absence of women in public – or even celebrated their oppression.
As rights are eroded in other nations, and women publicly mocked for questioning the powerful, Joya urges us to hear these stories and not forget. Hope for change drives her on. But she warns: ‘If the world does not listen to us, does not heed our warnings, if you dismiss our suffering as exaggeration, then one day this will come for you, too.’
Do read and share the book and its messages, and support the work of the Rukhshana Media charity. I fervently hope that former UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer will also be able to act on this with the focus he’s taking on tackling violence against women and girls.
The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, Betrayal, Hope and an Extraordinary Fight for Women’s Rights, is published by Robinson, an imprint of Little, Brown.