Hijab in Afghan Women’s Lives: Faith, Choice and Everyday Realities
To understand the significance of hijab in an Afghan woman’s life, two questions need to be asked together: what does covering mean to her, and how much freedom does she have to decide? A photograph can show clothing. It cannot answer either question fully.
Religious conviction, familiar ways of dressing, family relationships and personal taste deserve to be heard in women’s own words. So do experiences of compulsion. Treating every covered woman as powerless erases her voice; presenting every covering as freely chosen can erase the pressure she faces. The accounts below follow particular women, places and dates, bringing dress into the wider life of the person wearing it.
Faith and the freedom to explain it personally
In The National’s March 2022 interviews, a Kabul journalist identified as Maryam described wearing hijab while defending the freedom to decide how to wear it. She recalled combining a headscarf with jeans and a top in Dubai and explained that her clothing could change with the circumstances around her. She also spoke about the struggle to retain access to school, employment and movement after the Taliban takeover.
Her account matters because commitment to covering and opposition to an imposed dress code appear together. She did not have to abandon the headscarf to object to someone else determining her appearance. Her explanation is her own religious and personal understanding; it should not be presented as a ruling shared by every Afghan woman.
It also changes the question an observer might ask. Whether Maryam covered her hair was only one part of the story. The ability to maintain her work, move around and make decisions remained important to the life in which she wore it.
Religious communities can themselves become places where women argue for rights. In a June 2024 interview with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Jamila Afghani described her work with imams, including training between 2007 and 2015. She explained that engaging religious leaders helped build community acceptance for educational services that had previously encountered resistance.
Afghani was speaking from exile about a particular history of organising. Her account is not evidence that every religious leader supported her, or that those earlier opportunities remain available unchanged. It does show an Afghan woman working within religious discussion to challenge restrictions, rather than accepting that others alone could define women’s place.
This offers another way to understand the relationship between faith and agency. A woman may draw on religious knowledge in making an argument about education, dignity or family life. Listening to that argument requires attention to her reasoning and experience, beyond simply noting the clothes she wears.
A familiar garment can still become a source of pressure
The Afghanistan Analysts Network’s interviews published on 1 June 2022 show how different the meaning of similar clothing could be. A Kandahar midwife described feeling comfortable in her burqa and recalled speaking before a large group while wearing it. A woman in Baghlan already used a burqa for some outings, including visits to the bazaar, but said she would object to being forced to wear it everywhere.
The contrast is subtle and useful. A garment can be familiar, practical in a person’s circumstances or personally acceptable without giving anyone else the right to prescribe it for every situation. Previous use does not establish consent to a new requirement.
These were individual interviews conducted around the introduction of a particular order. They are not a survey of present-day provincial opinion. Their value lies in the difference between the two women’s explanations: one described comfort with her established practice; the other distinguished something she already did from something she might be compelled to do.
Names matter here. A headscarf and a face-covering garment do not describe the same coverage. Our guide to hijab, niqab, burqa and related garments explains the vocabulary. Using the right term leaves more room to understand the woman’s experience, rather than assuming that every reference to hijab describes one identical item.
When clothing becomes an enforced condition of public life
A key moment came on 7 May 2022. In its statement that day, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, described the Taliban authorities’ announcement that women must cover their faces in public, leave home only when necessary, and face consequences involving punishment of male relatives for violations. UNAMA said the information available to it indicated a directive intended for implementation, rather than a recommendation.
That account identifies an exercise of authority. It should not be confused with an individual woman explaining why she values modest dress. It also shows why the effects can reach into family relationships: an instruction backed by consequences for relatives creates pressures beyond the wearer’s immediate encounter with an official.
The date is essential. This statement records the May 2022 announcement; it is not a complete account of every later measure. Its significance is the connection it documents between appearance, permission to leave home and the involvement of other family members.
The consequences were still concrete in 2026. On 10 June, UNAMA reported arrests in Herat involving at least 30 women on 6 and 7 June over alleged breaches of dress instructions. The women were released on 8 June. The mission’s statement also addressed the response to subsequent protests.
For the women concerned, release did not make the experience inconsequential. UNAMA’s Georgette Gagnon warned that detention can carry severe social stigma and expose a woman to further isolation or violence after she returns to her family and community. This was a warning about potential consequences, not a claim that every woman experienced the same aftermath.
That context helps explain why dress cannot be discussed solely as an aesthetic preference. A woman’s decision about going outside may involve concerns about how she will be treated and how an encounter could affect her relationships afterwards. A brief description of what she wore would miss much of what was at stake.
In her 16 September 2026 Security Council briefing, Gagnon relayed an account from a woman the mission had met in Kandahar. The woman described successive demands concerning a mask, a burqa and a male companion, followed by questions about her relationship to that companion. Her account conveyed the uncertainty of trying to satisfy requirements that did not end with one clothing decision. It should be understood as that woman’s reported experience, rather than a prediction of every encounter.
Education remains central to the life behind the covering
UNESCO’s August 2026 account places adult literacy and skills training within a system that still bars girls from secondary schooling and women from university study. The organisation describes community learning spaces where women can develop practical skills. The experiences within those spaces need to be considered alongside the educational routes that remain closed.
In UNICEF’s account marking five years of restrictions, a girl given the protective name Shafiqa described repeating Grade 6 so that she could remain in a classroom. She had imagined becoming a doctor. After losing access to further schooling, she took art classes and then a computer course, only to encounter further restrictions on those opportunities too.
The same report describes Mahira, also a changed name, keeping her school notebooks and returning to them after household tasks. These accounts show aspirations that continue when the ordinary route towards them has been interrupted. They do not justify saying that determination has overcome the exclusion.
For readers thinking about hijab and opportunity, this is a necessary distinction. A girl’s ambition, her clothing and the institutional conditions governing her education are separate matters. It is misleading to attribute a blocked educational path to a lack of motivation, or to suggest that wearing the approved clothing by itself opens the school gate.
UNESCO also introduced Razia, a protective name for a 47-year-old tailoring business owner in Samangan. She explained that learning to read helped her keep accounts and manage fabric cutting, after difficulties recording debts had threatened her shop. Her story gives the value of literacy a practical shape: it concerns keeping track of money, carrying out skilled work and having more control over daily responsibilities.
That achievement deserves recognition on its own terms. It is one woman’s account within a supported programme, rather than proof that vocational provision replaces the education women and girls have lost. Preserving an opportunity and restoring a right are different achievements.
Work involves income, skills and contact with other people
A UN Women story published in June 2026 follows an unnamed former economics student in Parwan who developed a knitting business after losing access to university. She made bags, purses and jewellery, but described difficulties earning enough and finding places to display her work. Business and digital training through a local civil society organisation, supported by UN Women and Japan, helped her develop an online shop.
She reported that the business subsequently reached buyers beyond her immediate area and improved her ability to support herself. The account keeps her identity private. It does not establish that every woman can obtain the same training, internet access or customers.
Its relevance is the work involved: learning, making, accounting and connecting with a market. An approving description of her modest appearance would tell us very little about those abilities. Equally, celebrating her enterprise should leave the original loss of educational opportunity visible.
Community work adds another dimension. In UN Women’s February 2024 account, a former teacher and school principal called Mehrgan described assessing other women’s needs for a local organisation. The publication explicitly changed identifying details for protection. Her work included listening to women in remote areas and helping develop projects involving handicrafts, agriculture and access to learning.
The organisation’s staff had fallen from 24 to eight after the restrictions on women’s NGO work and the loss of funding. Support in late 2023 helped it restart some activities. Mehrgan also described passing on organisational training to another local women’s group.
This is a more specific account of mutual support than simply calling Afghan women resilient. It identifies relationships, skills, funding and an institution through which women could act. It also records the reduction in what that institution could do. Both the initiative and the constraint belong in the story; recognising one need not conceal the other.
At the institutional level, Gagnon’s September 2026 briefing described a year of restrictions preventing Afghan women from entering UN premises. She explained that excluding female personnel also affected humanitarian organisations’ ability to consult and reach women and girls. The effect therefore extended beyond an individual employee’s career. Women were needed as colleagues who could assess needs, communicate with other women and help deliver assistance. Public participation matters both to the person working and to the people who rely on her work.
Cultural expression does not have to fit one official image
In September 2021, historian Bahar Jalali encouraged women to share photographs of traditional Afghan clothing under the #DoNotTouchMyClothes campaign. In her interview with Euronews, she connected the images with protecting heritage, culture and identity while opposing the Taliban’s restrictions. Women in different countries contributed colourful clothing photographs.
The campaign was a deliberate public statement. Those contributions should not be treated as a catalogue of what every woman in Afghanistan wore every day, or as evidence that all participants shared one style or religious interpretation. Their force came from women presenting forms of dress they wanted seen, at a moment when their appearance was being defined for them.
This allows cultural pride and criticism of compulsion to be understood together. A woman can value inherited clothing without accepting that one authority speaks for her entire culture. The image becomes part of an argument about who gets to describe Afghan identity, not merely a preference for one colour over another.
For a closer account of particular garments and textile traditions, our guide to Afghan women’s dress looks at documented objects and regional names. Here, the emphasis is on the meaning women give to clothing and representation in their own lives.
Artist Shamsia Hassani offered a different form of expression in Rajul Punjabi’s 2015 interview for OF NOTE. Hassani described changing the shape of the burqa in her paintings, giving the figures pronounced shoulders and movement. Her recurring female character could appear covered or uncovered. She wanted viewers to recognise a person with ideas and presence beneath the garment.
Hassani also explained that removing a covering would not, on its own, resolve inequality. In that interview, her concern extended beyond the visible garment to what a woman could do and how she was understood. That was an artist’s stated position at a particular time, rather than a verdict on what every wearer should feel.
Looking at the work in this way avoids making clothing the entire subject of a woman’s life. The figure has scale, expression and a relationship to the public space around her. Covering is one element through which the artist asks an audience to notice the person.
Her later explanations also deserve to be heard. In a December 2022 interview with Zahra Mousawi for Zan Times, Hassani said she had removed the veil from her painted character after learning that some viewers read its presence as approval of covering. She explained the closed eyes as an artistic response to tragedy, rather than blindness, and described changes to the musical instruments through which she had represented the character’s voice.
She also spoke about the difference between online discussion of her art and the hostility she had sometimes encountered while making murals in public. These were reflections on her own creative practice and experience.
Read alongside the earlier interview, they show why a woman’s public expression should not be frozen into one convenient image. An artist can revise a character, respond to an audience and develop her argument. That change does not authorise a reader to invent her private religious beliefs or make her represent every Afghan woman.
A personal decision can acquire a different meaning after displacement
In Casa Asia’s March 2026 interview, Najiah Mohammadi described an educational and working life spanning Afghanistan, India and later Spain. She had studied economics and worked in education before leaving Afghanistan. In Spain, where she arrived in 2022, she valued the support of organisations and people who helped her establish a sense of belonging.
Mohammadi also spoke about questions concerning her hijab. Some felt like an attempt to understand; others felt judgemental. She emphasised the importance of being able to choose whether to wear it and asked for more empathy towards refugee women. Support, in her account, could include listening and making contact, rather than assuming that money was the only useful contribution.
Her experience belongs to a particular life after displacement. It cannot describe the options available to a woman currently living under Taliban restrictions. It does show how the meaning of choice can become especially important when someone is rebuilding ordinary social relationships in a new country.
Listen to what women identify as necessary support
Dress is one visible aspect of autonomy; access to help is another. In its 2026 account of joint consultations, UNAMA reported that 14 per cent of the women consulted said they could access formal dispute-resolution services, compared with 53 per cent of the men. Its account draws on discussions held online and in person in December 2025.
Those percentages describe the people consulted, not a census of everyone in Afghanistan. Participants identified the loss of women-focused institutions and services among the obstacles. Their recommendations included women-led dispute-resolution arrangements, confidential counselling and affordable support services.
These findings widen the discussion of agency. The ability to make a decision also depends on whether someone can seek help, be heard and find an institution willing to respond. Asking only whether a woman likes her clothing leaves out those practical conditions of her life.
An earlier joint consultation report covering January 2023 brought together 118 Afghan women leaders from 21 provinces through ten online and in-person discussions. The report identified the removal of bans on education and NGO employment as immediate priorities among the women consulted. It also described their concern that restrictions in different areas compounded one another.
The method matters to the meaning of the account. Participants came from particular fields and positions; their views were anonymised, and the report cautioned that the findings were indicative rather than fully representative. Their priorities should neither be ignored nor turned into a claim to speak for every woman.
What the discussions offer is a record of women articulating what they wanted to change. They were considering work, learning and participation together. That is a fuller expression of agency than an outsider deciding that one photograph proves either complete freedom or the absence of any independent thought.
UN Women’s August 2026 assessment of Afghan women’s futures adds a longer perspective. Its public overview describes aspirations continuing while the conditions needed to realise them become increasingly restricted. It also draws attention to the disappearance of visible professional role models when women are excluded from education, employment and public life.
That distinction is especially important when describing hope. A woman can retain ambitions while losing the route towards them. The existence of hope does not measure how much opportunity remains, and a difficult period does not entitle others to dismiss her aspirations as unrealistic or unimportant.
The assessment calls attention to the future as well as the present. Opportunities matter not only because someone might earn an income today, but because younger girls need to be able to imagine a life of study, work and participation. This places women’s ambitions at the centre of the discussion instead of making their clothing the limit of what an audience notices.
Understanding significance without demanding one story
A useful conversation leaves room for several questions: what does this woman say about her own practice; what choices are actually open to her; and what does she want to do with her life? The answers may concern worship, family, creative work, education, employment or a wish for an ordinary day without interference.
Those questions also leave room for privacy. Someone does not owe strangers a complete account of her faith, her family relationships or what she has experienced because she wears a visible covering. If she chooses to speak, the words she uses deserve more attention than the meaning an observer has already assigned to her clothes.
Understanding hijab in Afghan women’s lives therefore requires both attention to personal meaning and honesty about coercion. A woman’s commitment should be respected, her constraints recognised, and her ambitions allowed to extend far beyond the garment that first drew someone’s attention.
Official context checked on 28 October 2026. Personal accounts retain their original dates and describe the speakers’ circumstances at those times.