BADASS Muslimahs

vzhivanie:

womenwhokickass:

(1# Afghanistan) Sakena Yacoobi: Why she kicks ass

• She is the executive director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), an Afghan women-led NGO she founded in 1995. The organization was established to provide teacher training to Afghan women, to support education for boys and girls, and to provide health education to women and children. 
• Under her leadership, AIL has established itself as a groundbreaking, visionary organization which works at the grassroots level and empowers women and communities to find ways to bring education and health services to rural and poor urban girls, women and other poor and disenfranchised Afghans. AIL was the first organization to offer human rights and leadership training to Afghan women and supported 80 underground home schools for 3000 girls in Afghanistan after the Taliban closed girls’ schools in the 1990s. It was also first organization that opened Women’s Learning Centers for Afghan women—a concept now copied by many organizations throughout Afghanistan. AIL has trained over 10,000 teachers since its inception.
• She is is also co-founder and Vice President of Creating Hope International, a Michigan-based non-profit organization. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Global Fund for Women. She is an advisor to the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation. She is advisor to Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) and a member of WLP’s Roaming Institute for Women’s Leadership. She is a member and past steering committee member of the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief.
• She has been a panelist and speaker on education for women and children at a number of international conferences, including the Clinton Global Initiative, California Governor’s Conference on Women and Families, the Central Eurasian Studies Society conference at Harvard University, the One World Forum at Warwick University in England, Association for Women in Development in Bangkok, and the International Institute for Peace Education in South Korea, Turkey, Greece and Costa Rica. She has been instrumental in focusing attention on the urgent need for women’s rights and education and healthcare in Afghanistan.
• Sakena was awarded the Bill Graham award from the Rex Foundation in recognition of the efforts of the Afghan Institute of Learning to assist children who are victims of political oppression and human rights violations. AIL and Dr. Yacoobi are co-recipients of the 2003 Peacemakers in Action Award of the Tanenbaum Center for Inter-religious Understanding and the 2004 Women’s Rights Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation.

I think I’m in love. I want to be her and everything that she is.

fromsoiltoflight:

Afghan girls teaching Afghan girls! A pic from Skateistan’s Facebook page.

Skateistan is a Kabul-based Afghan NGO (Non-Governmental Organization), which is non-political, independent, and inclusive of all ethnicities, religions and social backgrounds.

The simplicity of using skateboarding as a tool for empowerment is really moving, and even better: It works. 

(via math-bro-deactivated20121001)

thepoliticalnotebook:

A Decade of War, the Women of Afghanistan and the White Savior Industrial Complex. There are a lot of reasons for concern about the fate of women and their rights in Afghanistan, and there continue to be further instances of bad news for the current and future status of Afghan women. President Karzai recently backed restrictions issued by the Ulema Council on the conduct of women. Recent reports about invasive searches of female visitors in Pul E-Charki prison are stomach-turning. This week Human Rights Watch released a report on the Afghan women jailed for “moral crimes” like running away from abusive husbands. There ought to be concern and anger, of course. However…

Women’s rights are often held up as the trump card for why Afghanistan needed/needs us. I’m not challenging the fact that the Taliban’s position and the current government’s position on women are reprehensible and warped and need to be addressed, but please, please don’t hold up women’s rights as justification for an extended military presence in Afghanistan. Or for that matter, ever having been in Afghanistan to begin with. Not only is that false on so many levels, but it’s repulsive to use something so crucial, so much about people’s daily human rights, as a superficial excuse to sustain a military presence that, after ten years, has at best kept at bay some of the forces that harm women and erase their voices and their rights. 

In light of critiques of #Kony2012 and fauxmanitarian sentimentality, it’s worth pointing out the elements of that in the rhetoric about trying to troop presence Afghanistan into being more gender equal. Not only is this a stretch of logic, but it’s hardly an accurate representation of any actual commitment by the international community to supporting positive gender role-related change. One only has to look at the vague, unsubstantiated encouragements toward handed down by this past December’s Bonn Conference to see that actual commitment to preserving and increasing women’s agency both politically and socially is a secondary, or tertiary even, concern. Women’s rights are used as a rallying cry and then tossed aside.

Malalai Joya, one Afghanistan’s most outspoken critics of Karzai and the West, and a prominent women’s rights activists, challenges the narrative on helping Afghan women, saying “the real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, and a phalanx of regressive forces.” Assuming the false dilemma of a choice between our decade of occupation and the utter helplessness of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban is wrong. I support the idea of everybody working on social and economic and political strategies that support Afghan women in the peace transition, but that’s hardly what the US and the broader international community has done or attempted to do. The peace transition is favoring warlords over women’s rights. Unsurprisingly, we did not use our decade of war over there to build a system designed to give women the voice and power for which they are fighting. No white savior trophies being handed out today.

I’m going to yield to quoting Teju Cole to end this blog post, because I don’t think anyone can say it better: “there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.”

Photo of Afghan women demonstrating in support of a female lawmaker in Kabul. Oct. 2012. Via HRW.

(via azaadi)

greenshirts:

An Afghan military cadet holds a bouquet of flowers during a ceremony for women graduating at officer level from the Kabul military training centre.

(via theuncolonizedmind)