Afghans Debate Sexual Equality and Schooling

Custom often dictates that boys get an education while girls are left "one step behind", speakers at discussion events say.

Speakers at three recent debates in Afghanistan's Herat, Balkh and Parwan provinces agreed that girls were routinely deprived of the rights accorded them by Islam.

In one debate held in the Salang district of Parwan province, north of Kabul, the local state prosecutor, Abdul Raqib Mezamyar, noted that some families prevented girls from continuing their education while encouraging boys to study.

"In my view, depriving girls of an education per se shows that the treatment of boys and girls is different," Mezamyar said, adding that one reason parents kept daughters out of school was that they were harassed by local boys on their way there and back.

In Mazar-e Sharif, the main city in the northern Balkh province, Taqi Wahedi of the regional office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission said that in the typical family, boys get a say in economic decisions, so girls are always "one step behind".

Sayed Mohsen Danesh, a member of the council of Islamic scholars in the northern Balkh province, told the debate in Mazar-e Sharif that parents often believed it was worth investing more in sons that in daughters, and that doing so for girls would be "costly and without benefit".

According to Danesh, Islamic precepts do not discriminate between the sexes, apart from one proviso that "a woman cannot be a judge, an imam or a president".

In the debate held in Parwan, the discussion was again about girls' right to an education.

Muslim scholar Abdul Malek Mofakker said that in Islam, the right to study took precedence over marriage.

Speaking at the debate in Herat, religious affairs expert Ezatullah Raji, the Koran did not give men precedence over women, and instead regarded both as equal halves of society.