In late 2021, not long after Kabul fell, I received a message from a young woman I had once mentored during my time in Afghanistan’s parliament. She was smart, sharp-tongued, and obsessed with becoming a judge. I still remember her saying, “I want to be the one who tells old men they’re wrong.”
When the Taliban banned women from working, she lost her internship. When they shut down universities, she lost her degree. When they required a mahram for women to move between cities, she messaged me from a relative’s house—stranded, with no way home.
Her last text came months later. It read:
“They say we should stay home for our dignity. I’ve never felt more humiliated in my life.”
I haven’t heard from her since.
Across Asia, the language of control is changing—but the goal is the same. From Afghanistan to Bangladesh to Iran, the architecture of gender suppression is being quietly rebuilt. Not always by bullets. Often by bureaucracy, social pressure, or the co-opting of religion to justify power.
In Afghanistan, women and girls are vanishing from public life by design:
- 2.2 million girls banned from school.
- Women barred from universities, parks, gyms, travel, and prayer.
- Floggings in 9 provinces in one day.
- No jobs, no voice, no visibility.
This isn’t Islam. It’s gender apartheid.
But the logic behind it—the systematic silencing of women through force, fear, and fabricated morality—isn’t limited to Kabul.
In Bangladesh, girls’ football teams have been targeted by Islamist groups. Uniforms deemed “indecent.” School programmes cancelled. Sanitary pads banned from book fairs after pressure from clerics. It’s not yet Taliban rule, but the ideological playbook is familiar: shame them, isolate them, erase them.
In Pakistan, control is enforced more brutally—often off the books. According to the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, over 20,000 Pashtun youth have been forcibly disappeared. Baloch groups report over 30,000 disappearances.
When men are taken, women are punished in their absence.
Mothers, sisters, daughters carry the weight—organising protests, facing soldiers, knocking on dead-end doors.
They gather at the Balochistan Assembly, Quetta Press Club, KP Assembly, Waziristan, and beyond. In return, they’re harassed, beaten, detained, and blamed for “dishonouring” their families.
Even the head of the Commission on Enforced Disappearances, Justice Javed Iqbal, was accused of making lewd remarks to a Pashtun woman seeking answers.
Afghan women in Pakistan face similar abuse—especially in Islamabad and Karachi, where police detain them for hours despite valid UNHCR documents, demanding bribes or threatening imprisonment. Their “crime” is existing without protection.
In Iran, over 17,000 women have been arrested for violating hijab laws. The state deploys surveillance cameras and public beatings to enforce its version of dignity. One woman stripped on a police car in Mashhad—not for attention, but to show the regime what shame truly looks like.
And the world watches it all with polite statements and soft condemnations. It has accepted moral policing as a domestic matter. It has allowed authoritarian states to dictate what counts as “cultural” and what counts as a crime.
What links these countries is not Islam. It’s not culture. It’s the decision to weaponize morality to maintain male political dominance. It’s the idea that a girl sitting in a classroom or a woman running a marathon is somehow a threat.
And they’re not wrong—she is.
Because an educated girl challenges every lie the state depends on.
A girl who plays football reminds everyone watching that women can compete, lead, and win.
A woman who shows up to protest, unveils her hair, or speaks into a microphone shatters the narrative that her silence was ever voluntary.
This isn’t about modesty. It’s about control. And control only works if the world stays silent.
I think of that young woman in Kabul often. She wasn’t a headline. She wasn’t famous. But she had a plan. She wanted to stand in a courtroom and deliver justice. Now, she’s invisible—like millions of others across this region.
We talk about women’s rights like they’re a cause. But in much of Asia, they’re a battlefield.
And right now, the other side is winning.
