Originally published 2021-09-08.
When Afghan universities reopened in early September 2021, a few weeks after the Taliban took Kabul, photographs from lecture halls showed a grey curtain running down the middle of the room: young men on one side, young women on the other. The images quickly became a symbol of what Taliban rule would mean for women's education. They turned out to be an early step, not the end point. Within about fifteen months women had been barred from Afghan universities altogether.
What the curtain photos showed
The Taliban entered Kabul on 15 August 2021, and the last US forces left on 30 August. Private universities were among the first institutions to resume classes, and Reuters reported on 6 September that in several of them, curtains or boards now split classrooms by gender. In September the new authorities also issued rules for higher education: no co-education, women taught separately (ideally by female lecturers), and female students required to follow a strict Islamic dress code.
Students described the change as a shock. One 21-year-old Kabul University student, identified by Reuters only as Anjila, told the agency that putting up curtains was "not acceptable" and that it felt like going "back to 20 years ago". A Taliban official, by contrast, told Reuters that the curtains were a sensible way to let a single teacher instruct a whole class while keeping men and women apart.
How lecturers coped in the first weeks
Teachers were left to improvise. At Herat University, a journalism professor said he had been told to split a one-hour class into two half-hour sessions, one for men and one for women, which in practice halved each group's teaching time. He described his students as very nervous and said he was encouraging them to keep attending while the new government decided its rules.
Other lecturers worried that the economy, rather than the curtains, would empty their classrooms. Afghanistan's banking system was in crisis, foreign aid had been suspended and many families had lost their incomes, so even students who were allowed to study faced a real question of whether they could afford to.
Why many feared a return to the 1990s
The Taliban first ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. In that period girls and women were largely denied formal education, women were mostly confined to their homes, and they generally needed a male relative to accompany them in public. Some former teachers ran secret home schools for girls, at serious personal risk.
After the US-led invasion in 2001, women's enrolment in schools and universities grew substantially over two decades. When the Taliban returned in 2021, their spokesmen told foreign journalists that women's rights would be respected within their interpretation of Islamic law. Many Afghan women were sceptical, and the curtain photos seemed to confirm their fears: segregation was being presented as a compromise that still allowed study, but critics saw it as the first move toward exclusion.
What happened next: from curtains to a ban
The fears proved well founded. The main steps, as documented by journalists and the United Nations, were:
- September 2021: gender-segregated university classes and strict dress rules; secondary schools reopened for boys only. A newly appointed Kabul University chancellor announced that women would not be returning to study or work there for the time being.
- March 2022: girls' secondary schools (grades 7 to 12) were ordered to close again just hours after they were due to reopen nationwide.
- 20 December 2022: the Ministry of Higher Education suspended women from all public and private universities until further notice.
- December 2024: private institutes were reportedly told to stop training women in midwifery, nursing and other medical fields, one of the last routes into professional education left to them.
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world that formally bars girls from secondary school and women from university. UN Women and other UN officials have described the overall system of restrictions on Afghan women as gender-based apartheid.
Why it matters beyond the classroom
Higher education is the pipeline for doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. In a country where many families do not want female patients treated by male doctors, cutting women out of medical training has direct consequences for women's health care. Economists and aid agencies have also warned that excluding half the population from education and much paid work deepens poverty in one of the world's poorest countries.
The bans have also divided the Taliban's own ranks. In January 2025 the deputy foreign minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, publicly called for girls' schools to reopen; he left the country shortly afterwards and was replaced. So far the leadership in Kandahar has not reversed course.
Reading the 2021 photos today
A single photograph cannot show what was happening in every Afghan university, and arrangements in autumn 2021 varied from place to place. But the curtain images captured a real turning point. They documented the moment when women's study was still allowed, on narrow terms, before it was withdrawn entirely. For many Afghan women who sat behind those curtains, that semester was the last time they were able to attend university in their own country.
Some have continued through online courses, underground classes or scholarships abroad, often organised by Afghan diaspora groups and international universities. Those options reach only a fraction of the women who were enrolled before 2021.
Sources: original reporting by Reuters (6 September 2021); Wikipedia: Women in Afghanistan; Wikipedia: Fall of Kabul (2021); Wikipedia: Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai.
COMMENTS