Zahra Hussaini, a student from Afghanistan, talks of life under the Taliban and the path to education that took her to Glasgow.
Zahra Hussaini sits by a window in the Wolfson Medical Building. There is an examination table and a teaching skeleton on her right-hand side – props which serve as incidental reminders of her degree. Zahra is one of seven women in the university – and nineteen in the country – who travelled this August from Afghanistan to Scotland to train as doctors after their own universities closed to them under the Taliban regime.
“Tell me about yourself” I say, and she begins.
“My name is Zahra Hussaini and I was born in 2004 in Iran, and when I was nine years old I went to Afghanistan, which is my own country. […] In the summer of 2022, I started at university. I was studying medicine and […] at the end of the second semester the new government – I mean the Taliban – closed the universities and after that, I didn’t have any formal education in Afghanistan. So it was in August of 2024 that I came here to continue my education.” She speaks quickly and is sure of herself.
She tells me her university was mixed until the Taliban came to power. It was then converted to a single-sex institution, before eventually closing its doors to women entirely under ever-stricter laws in 2022.
“The boys who started the same year as we started – now they are in their third or fourth year, but I’m just at the very start of the premedical course.”
“So you had to start again?” I ask her, and she tells me it was a condition of her scholarship, which covers her tuition fees and is funded by the Scottish government. Her passion for medicine is clear. She talks of loving the cardiovascular system in particular, and perhaps working in that field some day, although for now, it is too early to tell.
Zahra talks of Glasgow, and how different it is from her home. “I like it a lot. […] So we come here five days a week and two days you are off, right? Saturday and Sunday, and even during those two days I miss here and […] I just come here to walk around, even [though] there isn’t any class or any lecture to attend. You know, I like it.”
Zahra tells me of the Linda Norgrove Foundation, which secured her scholarship, enabling her to continue her education. “It was published in a Telegram channel that [they were] going to give ten scholarships […] to ten female students”. She describes the “severe competition” of the process, which saw just ten women out of 500 awarded scholarships. Of how she felt when she found out, she talks of “a sense of pride and also excitement. [Being] a little bit worried about the future.”
Zahra worries about returning to Afghanistan – she wants to return, but only if things improve and she is allowed to practise as a doctor. She worries also about the women she knows and loves, whose lives are becoming smaller and more dangerous with every Taliban edict that’s announced.
Zahra speaks to her family “every day. But before the course began we used to speak like once per three hours, because I missed them a lot.” She didn’t realise how much her mum missed her at first. They would talk of missing each other in a “kidding” way: “she’d say ‘no, I don’t. Why should I miss you?’ […] Now that we [are] very far from each other – when I ask now, she says ‘Yeah. I’ve missed you too much.’ and it is clear from […] the way that she talks to me, it’s clear that she has missed me a lot.
“There’s no way to express how I feel about them, about this new environment – new people, new language, new culture, even new weather. It’s very, very… sometimes it can be very upsetting for me. But then I think about University, that I am here to study – I get better automatically. Life is difficult, it has ups and downs and it will pass.”
Above all, Zahra is motivated. As a medical student, as one of 500 young women prepared to leave their homes and families to become doctors, and as someone who, homesick and nineteen years old, is determined to see the good around her and look to her future.
But the future is a difficult topic and, since August 2021, a source of “hell” for Afghan women. Since the withdrawal of international forces, women’s basic human rights have been eroded under Taliban rule. Their “profound rejection of the full humanity of women and girls” has been called gender apartheid, something which Afghan and Iranian women activists are campaigning for a legal definition of, and which would mean the Taliban’s actions constitute crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court.
On a better, fairer time, Zahra reflects. “Five years ago […] there was freedom, there was education, [when] we had the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.”
Now “all the schools and universities are without women. You cannot see colour, you cannot see women with coloured clothes on the street, they’re all black clothes. And on the television you cannot see journalists with the same style as they used to [have] in the past. Now it has changed a lot.”
When asked if she feels less safe now than before the takeover, she says “Of course. There’s just more risk, it’s riskier to be outside. It was in winter this last year that the Taliban started collecting girls from the street – those girls who did not have the proper dress. And they used to take you to the jail and they used to call a male member of the family to come to take their like, daughter or their sister from the jail. They used to say that it’s a condition, that if once again we see your daughter on the street with the same dress, with the same appearance – we won’t let her go anymore.”
She talks of this time last year. “That winter it was kind of hell, you know. Like, when we wanted to go out, we couldn’t go out without a male member of the family – as we call it, mahram – and now it has changed, it’s severe, yeah it is.”
I ask how her family copes with such constrictions in their daily lives. “For my family of course it is very difficult, as it was for me. But, you know – humans have the capability to get used to a situation.” Her sisters, aged thirteen, nine and five, “have accepted that condition as a reality. And of course, it is depressing […] but they have accepted the reality of it.”
“Hope has always been with me,” she says, “even in the darkest moments. You know I used to say to myself – things won’t remain the same, it’s always changing. And the future of Afghanistan, it might change […] don’t ask me about how. Just, I hope it changes”.
Zahra says that people see the violent oppressions of the Taliban and believe it is “because of Islam”. But she stresses that the Taliban do not represent Islam. “I want people to know that what you see is not the reality of Islam […] Islam started by the word read. Like, in Arabic we say iqra”. Islam puts emphasis on “reading, studying, exploring. But what the Taliban are doing is just the opposite. […] Afghan people, they’re always shown as [victims of] war, poverty – I don’t know, ignorance, lack of education, but no. When you come inside the society, you see that in spite of the severe conditions […] girls spend their time by studying. Now they cannot go to school or university, they do online courses […] they are in their homes, they are in their rooms – but they are working on their skills and they’re trying to be better than their yesterday.”
She states simply, “girls in Afghanistan are much more powerful, are much better than what the television shows”.
Zahra’s gratitude is evident. She says she “would like to thank the founders of [the] Linda Norgrove Foundation, John and Lorna, and anyone who has supported us on this way”. She smiles as she mentions Sophie, who “worked for three years [so] that now we are here – Sophie Brown is her complete name, and I would like to thank her from the bottom of my heart. […] when you see the news there is no clue of Sophie Brown. She is, I guess, at the back of the scene. But she was the main part of the journey.”
We talk of the weather, which she finds “unpredictable”, but says hopefully that she “might get used to it”. Outside it is grey, but not raining. Zahra finishes on a positive note. “The good point about Scotland is that here you have the freedom to be Muslim, to be, I don’t know, Christian – to be who you are […] it’s the complete freedom that I really love the most”.
The Glasgow Guardian would like to thank Zahra Hussaini.
