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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Marcus: Afghan first lady delicately broaches women’s issues

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The most striking thing about interviewing Rula Ghani, the first lady of Afghanistan, may be that the interview is taking place at all.

Consider Zeenat Karzai, the physician wife of former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was rarely seen in public during her husband’s decadelong tenure. Ghani, whose husband, Ashraf Ghani, became president last year, is a natural-born diplomat, careful to note the distinction between her situation — she has two grown children — and that of her younger predecessor.

“We are in different phases of our lives,” said Rula Ghani, 66.

Zeenat Karzai herself once acknowledged the societal constraints against taking an active role as first lady. “He (Hamid Karzai) and I both know our country’s culture, traditions and the current state of affairs,” she explained in a rare 2013 BBC interview. “We need to take this into account.”

Ghani, raised in a Lebanese Maronite Christian family and educated in France, the United States and Lebanon (she and her husband met as students at the American University of Beirut), has adopted a decidedly different route. It began during the presidential race, when she campaigned alongside her husband on International Women’s Day.

“I told him, it’s kind of strange. Here you’re going to be talking about women’s rights. … I think I should be there with you,” she recalled in an interview at the Afghan embassy. She not only appeared, but, at her husband’s suggestion, spoke briefly about women’s ability to use the skills developed in the household — educating, managing and peace-keeping — in a public capacity.

“For me, it was really a no-brainer, and I was surprised by the reaction that people thought it was such a huge step,” Ghani said.

She made news again during the inauguration, when her husband lavished praise on “my partner” for her work on behalf of Afghan women.

When they returned to Afghanistan in 2002 (Ashraf Ghani had been working in the United States, for the World Bank) and her husband served as finance minister, she worked with an organization, Aschiana, that helps feed and educate street children.

In a Western democracy, the job of first lady is at once anachronistic and fraught, its occupant caught between competing conceptions of women’s roles. Multiply those tensions a thousand-fold in a developing Muslim country such as Afghanistan, which simultaneously has quotas designed to ensure women’s representation in government, and appalling practical restrictions on the ability of women and girls to obtain educations and live freely.

A gentle push for change

Ghani deftly threads the cultural needle, serving as a soft-spoken force for change, while refraining from pushing too hard. Thus, Ghani is happy to wear a headscarf when in Afghanistan but goes uncovered in the West.

“I’m now first lady, and so I’m no longer myself. I have a responsibility to the rest of the women, and so if that’s the culture of the moment, I will abide by it,” she said.

Similarly, she speaks not of feminism but of the family.

“If I were a feminist, I would be talking about women’s rights left and right, and annoying men and pushing their buttons,” Ghani said. “I have a very mild approach to things. It doesn’t mean that my commitments are not strong.”

To speak with Ghani is also inevitably to worry about the tenuous future facing girls and women in Afghanistan, as the U.S. presence recedes and her husband’s government weighs peace talks with the Taliban.

“We need to find solutions that include them,” Ghani said of the Taliban. “Certainly women’s rights will be a very important issue, and I don’t think that my husband will stand for any regression on that account, but this is their country, too.”

In the interim, she says, women’s gains in education and the workplace need to be entrenched: “The women of today will not kneel in front of the Taliban, but we can make them even stronger, and then the question will be moot — totally moot.”

Let us hope.

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