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‘We can’t watch our children die of hunger,’ says a defiant beautician
Freshta Ghani and Mahtab Safi* authored this report for the Zan Times in Persian, and it was translated into English by Rustam Seerat.
The Taliban’s edict banning women’s beauty salons was so shocking for Nargis* that she collapsed the day after religious police visited her salon and ordered her to cease her operations. She’d previously experienced occasional nervous collapses when she got upset, so her sister, Shafiqa*, thought this was another brief nervous episode. It wasn’t. “It was 5:20 p.m. when she had the attack,” Shafiqa tells Zan Times. “By the time we got her to the hospital, it was 6:00 p.m. The doctors neither took a report from me nor started a [medical file] for my sister. After 20–25 minutes, they said she had had a stroke and passed away.”
Nargis had hoped the Taliban would reverse their ban on beauty salons. She also thought she might be able to secretly continue her beautician work. But on July 3, Taliban religious police visited women’s beauty salons, including Nargis’s, in the fifth district of Kabul. They reiterated the Taliban’s edict on the ban on women working in beauty salons, warning Nargis and other beauticians that they had just 20 days to gather their belongings and shut down the…
