Poppy Cottle-Bailey
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai has urged Muslim leaders to back efforts to make gender apartheid a crime under international law.
Speaking at a Girls’ Education summit in Pakistan, Yousafzai declared there is “nothing Islamic” about the Taliban’s policies.
She appealed to the Muslim leaders at the summit to “openly challenge and denounce the Taliban’s oppressive laws.”
THE SUMMIT
On the 11th and 12th January, over 150 dignitaries from 45 nations attended the Girls Education in Muslim Communities summit.
The event was organised by The Muslim World League, in partnership with the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings”
However, the Taliban were notably absent. Pakistan’s Education Minister, Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, told AFP that an invitation had been extended, “but no one from the Afghan government was at the conference.”
During her speech, Yousafzai highlighted the “system of gender apartheid” the Taliban regime has imposed in Afghanistan: “For three-and-a-half years, the Taliban have ripped away the right to learn from every Afghan girl. They have weaponised our faith to justify it.”
The term ‘gender apartheid’ is also used by the United Nations to describe the Taliban’s austere interpretation of Islamic law.
Yousafzai continued: “The Taliban are explicit about their mission. They want to eliminate women and girls from every aspect of public life and erase them from society.”
“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings. They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification.”
THE TALIBAN RULINGS
In 2012, Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban gunman when she was on her way home from school. A Taliban spokesman told the BBC they attacked her because she was “anti-Taliban.” Still, she continued to campaign for the right to an education and received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Her advocacy has garnered a global audience ever since.
“An entire generation of girls is being robbed of its future”
The Taliban first prevented girls from attending secondary school in August 2021. In January 2022, de facto authorities announced that girls would be able to return to school in March, but when the time came, the Taliban Ministry of Education abruptly backtracked on their commitment.
Since then, the system of gender apartheid has only expanded, with a current estimate of 1.4 million girls unable to attend school.
With this in mind, Yousafzai declared: “In Afghanistan, an entire generation of girls is being robbed of its future.”
THE PATH FORWARD
Despite the event, which has been described as groundbreaking, being held in Pakistan, a portion of Yousafzai’s speech was censored by the state’s PTV channel. In the unaired segment, Yousafzai alluded to Islamabad’s 2023 mass deportation scheme, in which thousands of Afghan nationals fled the capital under the threat of arrest.
As Yousafzai reached the end of her speech, she underlined the “tremendous amount of work” still to be done in Pakistan, where 12 million girls are unable to attend school.
Yousafzai announced: “As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voice, use your power.”
She then urged leaders to support the Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. “It is time we have real tools to prevent an extremist regime from systematically erasing women and girls.”
Watch Malala Yousafzai’s speech here.
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Featured image courtesy of DFID – UK Department for International Development on Flickr. No changes were made to this image. Image license can be found here.
