KARACHI: “She was at her best, speaking fearlessly and boldly about the treatment of women by the Afghan Taliban, depriving an entire generation of girls of their future and how they want to erase them from society,” said one educator and one of the Baela Raza Jamil, referencing the speech of Nobel laureate and education activist Malala Yousafzai.
Jamil runs Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, an organization promoting progressive education.
Malala spoke on the second day of a two-day international conference organized by Pakistan’s Federal Ministry of Education and Professional Training (MoFE&PT) on January 11-12, to discuss challenges and opportunities for girls’ education in Muslim communities.
“They are human rights violators, and no cultural or religious excuse can justify them,” Malala said. “Don’t legitimize them.”
Pop singer and education activist Shehzad Roy was equally impressed.
Roy said: “When she speaks, she speaks from her heart. »
It has been just over three years since the Taliban banned secondary education for girls in Afghanistan on September 17, shortly after returning to power in August 2021. In 2022, the Taliban banned women from studying in colleges, then in December 2024 this was extended to women studying nursing, midwifery and dentistry.
In October 2012, at the age of 15, Malala survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban for advocating for girls’ education in Mingora, Pakistan. She was flown to England for treatment and has since settled there with her family while facing persistent threats from the Taliban.
Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a university professor and columnist, acknowledged that the treatment of girls and women in Afghanistan was essentially “primitive and barbaric”, but stressed that “before the Pakistani government assumed the role of liberator (of Afghan women), there are laws relating to women (in Pakistan) that need to be changed and anti-women practices that need to be dismantled.
The dismantling of many colonial laws and legal systems that perpetuate gender inequality, both on a personal and societal level, was also highlighted by Jamil, who spoke of the important role women can play in peacebuilding. But this is only possible, she added, when society can promote education and lifelong learning without discrimination.
“In Malala, we have a living example of the lived experience of a contemporary young student who responds to deadly violence by becoming a unique peacebuilder,” Jamil said in his speech at the conference.
This high-profile conference was deliberately kept quiet until the last minute for “security reasons”. Bank and the Saudi-funded Muslim World League.
Hoodbhoy, however, said the summit was “solely aimed at breaking Pakistan’s isolation from the rest of the world and consolidating a rickety government desperate for legitimacy.”
While some Indian organizations were represented, Afghanistan, although invited, was visibly absent.
This did not go unnoticed.
“The silence of the Taliban, the world’s worst offender when it comes to girls’ education, was deafening,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center, based in Washington DC. Given the strained relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said the former perhaps wanted this conference to draw attention to the Taliban’s appalling record on girls’ education.
“And it succeeded, to some extent, especially with an iconic figure like Malala using the conference as a platform to condemn gender apartheid in Afghanistan under the Taliban. »
Yusafzai was happy that the conference was taking place in Pakistan. “Because we still have a lot of work to do so that every girl in Pakistan can have access to her education,” she said, referring to the 12 million girls out of school.
Kugelman praised host country Pakistan for not trying to “hide its own failures” on the education front. “It was important that Prime Minister Sharif acknowledged the dire state of girls’ education in Pakistan in his speech to the conference,” he said.
With 26 million children out of school in Pakistan, 53 percent of whom are girls, the summit appears to be in line with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s declaration of an education emergency in Pakistan last year, pledging to “bring them (out-of-school children) back to school.
“The Prime Minister is rightly concerned about children out of school, but I am more concerned about those who complete their ten years of education and fail to develop critical thinking skills,” Roy said, commenting on the summit. The pop singer has been a very active education activist for over two decades.
Hoodbhoy had similar thoughts. “If there had been a serious intention to educate girls, the most effective and least expensive strategies would have been to make coeducation compulsory at the primary and secondary levels in order to increase school availability and to design programs for educating and informing girls (and boys) rather than just brainwashing,” he said.
Roy said Yousafzai always emphasized the importance of quality education. With only 150 government training institutions in Pakistan, he said there was an urgent need for reform through public-private partnerships. He also noted that many private schools hire unqualified teachers and advocated for a teaching license, like medical licenses.
Since the establishment of the Zindagi Trust in 2003, Roy has campaigned for better quality education in public schools. He also adopted two government girls’ schools in Karachi and turned them around, providing meals to the children in the nursery and teaching chess and musical instruments, both of which were unheard of in government schools, especially for girls.
The prime minister acknowledged that educating 26 million students was a difficult task, with “inadequate infrastructure, security concerns, as well as deeply ingrained societal norms” acting as obstacles, and said the real challenge was “will” to achieve this.
For 34 years, Jamil has raised questions about the design and process of education in Pakistan through annual reports. She estimates that getting 26 million children back to school is less difficult than providing “basic learning” for those already enrolled. “45% of children aged 5 to 16 fail in reading, comprehension and numeracy,” she told IPS. Besides improved funding and well-equipped school infrastructure, Jamil was also concerned about what she calls a fleeing population.
Lamenting the “lack of imagination to solve the education crisis” within government, she said much more could be achieved. Jamil’s organization’s Syani Saheliyan project in 2018 helped nearly 50,000 adolescent girls (aged 9 to 19) in southern Punjab who had dropped out of school. It provided them with academic support, life skills, vocational training and technological support to reintegrate them into education. The project was recognized by Hundred Innovation in 2023.
Even Dr Fozia Parveen, assistant professor at the Institute for Educational Development at the Aga Khan University, would like the government to think outside the box and find “common ground” by including local wisdom in modern education .
“Instead of Western-led education in an already colonial education system, perhaps we could consider a more grassroots approach using local educational methods,” she suggested, adding: “There are so many wisdom and local knowledge that we will lose if we continue to draw inspiration from and adopt foreign systems. Localized education with all modern forms and technologies is necessary to keep up with the world,” she said.
Furthermore, Parveen, who is interested in environmental and climate education, said that “more skill-based learning would be needed in the coming times, which would require updated curricula and capable teachers to develop these skills.
The two-day International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities concluded with the signing of the Islamabad Declaration, recognizing education as a fundamental right protected by divine laws, Islamic teachings, charters international and national constitutions. Muslim leaders pledged to guarantee girls’ right to education, “without limits” and “without restrictive conditions”, in accordance with Sharia law. The declaration highlighted girls’ education as a religious and societal necessity, essential for empowerment, stable families and world peace, while combating extremism and violence.
He condemned extremist ideologies, fatwas and cultural norms that hinder girls’ education and perpetuate societal prejudices. Leaders pledged to provide scholarships for girls affected by poverty and conflict and to develop programs for those with special needs to ensure inclusion.
The statement concluded by affirming that “this will not be a temporary appeal, an empty declaration or simply a symbolic position. Rather, it will represent a qualitative transformation in the advocacy of girls’ education, bringing prosperity to every disadvantaged girl and every community that sorely needs the contributions of its sons and daughters equally.”
A standing committee was invited to oversee the implementation of these results.
Zofeen Ebrahim is an independent journalist. She posts on X @zofeen28
This article was originally published in the United Nations Office of the Inter Press Service news agency with the support of the Open Society Foundations. It was reproduced on Geo.tv with permission.