EDITORIAL: The two-day conference on “Educating Girls in Muslim Societies: Challenges and Opportunities”, jointly hosted in Islamabad by Pakistan government, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Muslim World League, was attend by leaders and religious scholars from all over world. But the Afghan Taliban stayed away.
Theirs is the only country where girls and women are officially barred from secondary schools and universities. Pakistani Taliban have also been burning girls’ schools and attacking girls who insisted on going to school. Malala Yousafzai, now 27 years old, was 15 when she was shot in the head in her native highly conservative Swat town for speaking out about girls’ right to education and had to be evacuated to the UK for treatment, where she now lives.
As expected, in her address to the conference, Malala reserved the strongest criticism for the Afghan Taliban government which, she said, had created ”a system of apartheid”, weaponising the faith to justify it. “They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification... In fact, they go against everything our faith stands for”, she added.
In his inaugural address, Grand Mufti of Egypt Prof Nazir Ayyad underscored that Islam places the highest importance on education, making the pursuit of knowledge an obligatory duty for both Muslim men and women. Advancing opportunities for girls’ education is not only a religious duty, he averred, but also a social imperative for achieving sustainable development and creating a just society.
Aside from extremist elements hampering progress in patriarchal societies such as ours is an entrenched gender bias, poverty, and successive governments skewed order of priorities. As Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif mentioned in his speech, 22.8 million children between the ages of five and 16 years are out of school in Pakistan, a disproportionate number of them girls.
This is one of the highest figures in the world for children whose potential remains untapped despite the fact that the Constitution calls for provision of free and compulsory education to all children in that age group. While iterating his government’s commitment to provide quality education, create job opportunities, offer scholarships and demand-driven skills to young people, the PM seemed to be looking for outside help when he added the conference declaration would be placed before the UN as a collective aspiration of the Ummah. Having equitable education systems is an aspiration the Ummah can and should try to meet itself.
It is good to note that the 17-point Islamabad Declaration, vowed, among other things, to mobilise all resources to support Muslim countries in advancing education with an emphasis on girls’ education, including provision of scholarships to those affected by poverty, conflict, and social challenges.
Furthermore, Muslim countries have been urged to enact laws to promote girls’ education and work in coordination with media organisations, relevant experts, religious scholars, and imams to effectively address opposition by elucidating true principles of Islam.
The declaration has also called for disavowing those who resist these principles. Such efforts may sway some individuals and groups, but the greater challenge at this point in time is the Afghan Taliban’s policy, though moderate factions among them are said to be in favour of opening up educational institutions to girls and women.
The Gulf Arab governments, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, now normalising relations with the Kabul regime, perhaps, are better placed to persuade the hard-line Taliban leadership to relax restrictions on female education.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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