Tales of the Dark Age (No. 78)
Written by Hakim Badi,Translated by Shekib Jaghori
In a remote village in Daikundi, where girls’ schools have been shuttered and life is a daily struggle, one young woman has turned books into her strongest weapon of resistance.
Life is a daily struggle in a remote village in Daikundi’s Miramur district: survival here feels like “digging bread out of a mountain,” making a living against all odds. The harshness of this land weighs most heavily on women; under the Taliban’s suffocating rule, the burden has grown even heavier. For Afghan girls, the dream of education has all but vanished.
Shahla was one of them. She was in eighth grade when the Taliban returned: schools closed, dreams collapsed, and life shrank to the walls of her home. But she refused to break. “Society became a prison,” she says. “I tried to keep freedom alive inside me. The darkness that came with the Taliban ruined all our plans, but I decided not to surrender to it.”
Now 18, Shahla lives an ordinary rural life: tending sheep, cutting grass, helping her family. But there is one thing that sets her apart: she reads. Every spare moment, she opens a book. “When I read,” she says, “I feel free; I feel stronger.”
For Shahla, reading is not a pastime; it is resistance. It is how she defies the Taliban’s attempt to keep women ignorant and submissive. “Reading is like fighting them,” she says. “When I see my awareness growing, I feel victorious. Books are not an escape for me; they are my stronghold. They give meaning to my life, like a spiritual experience after prayer.”
Shahla treats books with profound seriousness. She avoids quick-fix titles like How to Get Rich Overnight or Eat That Frog and other superficial motivational reads. Instead, she chooses works that expand her understanding of life, history, and society. For her, reading is not a hobby; it is an act of resistance, a way to stay loyal to the frontlines of knowledge in a battle against ignorance.
“I want to see different societies and people up close, to learn life’s lessons as if I had lived them, but that is impossible,” she says. “Serious novels and philosophical and historical works make the impossible possible.”
She believes that school and university can continue online and that jobs can be found virtually, but reading and writing go far beyond careers for her. They are a moral and spiritual duty in an age ruled by darkness.
Her reading list speaks volumes: Sophie’s World, The Alchemist, Les Misérables, The Forty Rules of Love, and The Hazaras: From Massacre to Identity. She avoids shallow self-help books; instead, she seeks works that deepen her understanding of life, history, and society.
Her daily life remains hard; her future is uncertain, just like that of millions of Afghan girls. But her devotion to books shines as a quiet beacon of hope. The Taliban can close schools and universities, but they cannot extinguish the hunger for knowledge.
A future where “bread, work, freedom” become realities will not emerge without the stronghold of books and words. Shahla’s life, her resilience, offers a glimpse of that future.
Note: The photo is from the Internet
