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Afghanistan’s war of religious narrations
“Whether to educate or not to educate female children” is today’s question in Afghanistan.
While walking the Kabul streets in the first decade of this century, I often saw signs, a billboard, or writing on the wall saying,
“Learning knowledge is obligatory for Muslims (Muslim men) and Muslimas (Muslim women).”
The above sentence is a literal translation of a Hadith (saying) attributed to Mohammad, the Islamic prophet. I later went to India on a scholarship to study for my undergrad. In a debate on the necessity of education for women, my classmate and roommate told me that the word “women” was a later addition by the infidels. He claimed that in the original Hadith, the term “women” was not there. I was baffled for some time. It was a good Hadith; how was it possible that such a famous hadith could not be authentic, especially when nobody I knew had contradicted it before? It was one of the four hadith regarding knowledge that the Hazara leader Abdul Ali Mazari quoted in his famous speech at the reopening of Kabul university. Another Hadith was
“Seek knowledge even if it is in China.”
