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Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and this is The Takeaway. It's been eight months since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan following the United States' withdrawal after two decades of war and military presence. Immediately, upon regaining power, the Taliban began depriving women and girls of their rights, including severe restrictions on women's employment, and the effect has been devastating.

Last week, the Taliban announced that girls' high schools will be closed indefinitely. This means that after 6th Grade, girls will be barred from attending school. It's something that some school girls didn't even know until they reached their schools last week and found that they were locked out. It left many in tears. In an act of extraordinary courage, some teen girls in Afghanistan are openly protesting the Taliban's restriction on their education.

Girl 1: [Foreign language].

Female Crowd: [Foreign language].

Girl 1: [Foreign language].

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership Afghanistan boarding school. Shabana, welcome to The Takeaway.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Thank you, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You and I were just chatting before we begin the conversation about my college-age daughter, then as I begin to repeat what is happening in Afghanistan, it just really suddenly struck me. Can you tell me a little bit about your own experience of education and schooling in the country?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Yes. I was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan. This past week has been incredibly difficult watching the hopes and dreams of thousands of school-aged girls crushed by a ruling that quite simply does not make any sense. I grew up under the first Taliban regime. I was incredibly fortunate that my parents educated me during that time, even though it was illegal for girls to go to school. March 23rd, 2002, was the first day I ever stepped foot in a public school. As a young girl, I was 12. To watch Afghan girls 20 years later be denied entry to those same schools has felt very heavy.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What were your parents risking by making that choice to educate you, despite the ban on your ability to actually go to school?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: They were risking their lives and our lives, but for them then, as I've spoken to them since, the greater risk was raising us without an education. They could not comprehend or live with the fact that they would raise their daughters without an education. For them, the greater risk was precisely that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, I'm presuming part of the reason that your parents found that hard to imagine is because there has not historically-- I think it's easy, particularly for Americans to think of Afghanistan's history as beginning at the moment that this contemporary past 20 years moment when the US enters post 9/11, but Afghanistan is a place where there's been a long history of women being educated, of working, of being wage earners. How is the Taliban now justifying this decision to ban young women from further education after 6th Grade?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Precisely that, Melissa, the bravery of Afghan women extends far beyond the past 20 years. It was actually only after I left Afghanistan as a student that I learned that Afghanistan was at 1.8 an educational hub, especially for higher education in the region, that there were lots of students from other countries who came to Afghanistan to study. We do have a history of women being educated, women going to work that existed well before the Taliban. Despite the fact that the war in Afghanistan isn't really a 20-year-old war, it's a 40+-year-old war with the start of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union at that time.

Taliban, really, they don't have a credible justification. They haven't been able to convince anyone in Afghanistan as to why they banned girls' education. They've simply been using excuses. When they took over, they were talking about preparation, technical issues, talking about not having proper facilities, but they're not true to a great extent. We have schools in the cities, a lot of things that they're talking about are claiming to be within the framework of Islam, when it comes to an educational environment, already existed. In fact, if anything that is unIslamic is their claim, or what they're currently doing is banning girls from accessing education.

The good thing is that people in Afghanistan have great awareness about Islam and their Islamic rights and know and strongly believe that there is no ban whatsoever in Islam for girls' education. People, in fact, are now bold enough to cite examples from other Muslim majority countries where the women are not only educated but in positions of power. Afghan women are quite strategic about the countries that they point out to. Qatar that has had a key role in these peace negotiations with the Taliban that's been hosting Taliban's political office for some years now.

There are educated women, girls go to school, and Afghan women continue to point that out to Taliban when they talk their about access to education being unIslamic. Women in response, say, "Well, what about a woman in Doha? What about a woman in Qatar? What about a woman and other Islamic countries who go to school and hold jobs?" Taliban simply don't have a response to that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What is this going to mean on a day-to-day basis? I so appreciate your point that even as the shadow of these restrictions are falling, that the people resist in many ways, ways that may not be visible to us, sometimes are visible. Particularly given the overlapping economic and environmental crises also facing the nation right now, what is it going to mean for girls and for their families to be unable to attend school?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: It's devastating. It's heartbreaking because it's undoing years and years of progress that Afghans have fought for, Afghan families who have risked their lives to provide education opportunities. Yes, in Afghanistan, access to education for girls has not been equal or equitable. Especially, there's been a stark of difference between girls' access to education in the cities versus rural areas, but families across Afghanistan have worked really hard to provide those opportunities for their daughters, and to be in the current situation in Afghanistan, is undoing so much of the progress that people have worked really hard for.

It is devastating. At the same time, I have to say, though, while having students out of school has great consequences, negative consequences for the entire country. I know that the girls and their families won't give up. To some extent, there are families that will most likely be forced to leave Afghanistan because they want their daughters to be able to continue with their education. In other cases, they will try to educate their daughters secretly like my parents did, for instance, and many other families did under the first Taliban regime.

In majority of the cases where families don't have the means or the ability or cannot afford to take that kind of a risk, they will hope for a change of regime or change of this kind of ruling. We, as a boarding school, we'd recently announced our admission season for the next academic year while we have explicitly mentioned that we will not be able to admit girls from inside Afghanistan for this academic year because of our concerns that they will not be able to leave the country.

We have been receiving messages from families inside of Afghanistan asking for their daughters to be considered. Some families have even expressed their intention that they're willing to become refugees in neighboring countries so that we would admit their daughters to our boarding school. This year, our focus is educating Afghan girls from the refugee communities across the world especially girls who were recently displaced. To receive those messages from families, from fathers, from brothers, really vouching for their daughters to be given an opportunity, it's really heartbreaking especially when we see that Taliban are doubling down on denying girls and women who are unaccompanied at the airport to depart the country.

They have gone as far as to say that they may stop issuing passports for Afghan women in an effort to control their departure from the country making it even harsher for Afghan women to seek opportunities, a situation that is already difficult, but families will still try to figure out ways. It's really devastating what the situation is forcing people to do.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Has there been a response from the international community? I can't let go of the ways in which the ramp-up to invasion over 20 years ago here in the US was often couched in the language of liberation for off-gone women and girls, and the idea that these restrictions have been put into place so swiftly after the US withdrawal. I'm wondering if there have been meaningful responses, and how the Taliban regime may even feel some sense of pressure about that.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: There have been some response, but it's not strong enough. We've seen from the Muslim majority countries, we have seen Qatar and Turkey condemn this decision by the Taliban, but we need a unified loud, a much louder condemnation from Muslim countries really showing solidarity with Afghans, but most importantly, there is an obligation to voice how an Islamic Taliban's decision is, and I haven't yet seen that. I hope to see that. I'm hoping that especially influential Muslim women in the region will send a very strong and unified message condemning this decision by the Taliban, that solidarity is incredibly important and can be quite effective.

I know that the US government, that was supposed to have a meeting with the Taliban in Doha last week, they canceled that meeting because of Taliban's reversal of the decision to allow girls to go to school. It's difficult. It's happening at a time when, like you said, Melissa, the economic crisis in Afghanistan, it's not even a crisis, it's a catastrophe. People are starving, food prices have skyrocketed. In about two days, we have the start of Ramadan and people are starving. It's a very difficult situation to watch. Today, the UN is vouching for the largest budget request for humanitarian aid ever, and this is coming at a time when the Taliban have made this decision to bar girls from attending high school. It's difficult.

It's how do you continue to provide support for people in Afghanistan while making sure that these funds don't benefit Taliban and that has to be a priority in these discussions? Taliban should not get any kind of message from this that they can ban girls from attending school in 2022 and still get away with it. In our view, in a lot of Afghans who are working very hard for a bright future for the country, we only look at this as the beginning of an end for Taliban. Afghans deeply disagree with what the Taliban stand for and unless they change, unless they accept girls' rights, women's rights, and most importantly, minority rights, they're not going to survive, politically speaking.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there a message in this moment that you want to send to girls who have just learned that their education is being halted for now?

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: My message to Afghan girls is just that of incredible gratitude for their bravery, for expressing their anger about the decision, for pouring into the streets of Afghanistan protesting this decision by the Taliban knowing what happened to-- recently, what happened to Afghan women who protested. That takes unbelievable courage for young girls to protest at this incredibly difficult time. They knew the risk, they know the risk of going out into the streets, knowing that they could be put away and no one know where they are and what's happening to them.

My message to them is simply thanking them for their bravery, for being who they are, but my most important message is to Afghan men. They need to show a strong solidarity to stand in support of their wives, and sisters, and daughters right now and not allow a handful of armed men deciding the future of the women in their lives. My message is to the international community not to give Taliban legitimacy unless the Taliban seeks that legitimacy first from Afghan women.

My message is to the Muslim majority countries to strongly condemn Taliban's decision, and for the world not to look away from Afghanistan. Quite frankly, we cannot afford to look away, look at what happened the last time the world chose to look away from the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Shabana Basij-Rasikh is co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan boarding school. Thank you so much for joining us.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Thank you, Melissa, for having me.

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