In Afghanistan, it’s rare for a woman to take the wheel

Published 5:32 pm Saturday, October 9, 2010

KABUL — Karima Yousafzai jumps behind the wheel of her 1994 Toyota Corolla and heads into traffic, deftly negotiating around wannabe motocross champions, oblivious pushcart peddlers, a roadside herd of sheep and several contenders for the crazy-driver-of-the-year award. She takes little notice of the looks directed her way.

“I’ve stopped caring about the stares men give you,” the 43-year-old university professor says. “I just ignore them.”

A female driver in Afghanistan is something of a rare bird.

In the first six months of the fiscal year, the number of driving permits issued to women in the Kabul area was up fourfold. That sounds great until you consider that officials issued just 180 licenses to women in the last 18 months, compared with 27,985 for men.

Men own the roads of Afghanistan, and many of them want it to stay that way. They say it is un-Islamic and culturally offensive for women to get behind the wheel.

Yousafzai, who happens to teach the Quran for a living, disagrees. The holy book makes no mention of internal combustion engines, automatic transmissions or driving restrictions on women, she says.

Afghanistan, a male-dominated Muslim society, often has discouraged women from participating in public life. That includes driving, especially from 1996 to 2001, when the fundamentalist Taliban government all but outlawed the practice. It is “against Afghan traditions and has a negative impact on the environment,” the Taliban declared in May 2001.

After the Taliban was ousted at the end of that year, President Hamid Karzai vowed to respect women’s rights. Afghanistan saw an initial jump in female drivers, but tradition dies hard, and Karzai’s promise has faltered.

Men commonly contend that women shouldn’t be subjected to the unpredictable Afghan traffic and that their security could be compromised, given all the violence.

“Imagine if a woman had an accident,” says Abdul Habib, a 20-year-old student, strolling with two male friends. “Hundreds of men would gather around and curse at her. Then I’m sure she would cry.

“After that she’d probably call her brother or husband for help,” he adds, to the amusement of his friends.

Freshta Nahad, 21, an economics student at Kabul University, sees little humor in such jibes. “If men obeyed the law,” she says, “we wouldn’t have so many problems.” “Security’s a problem all over Afghanistan,” says Fatima Maisjadi, 17, a carpet weaver who has driven a few times off-road with her family. “Why blame it on women?”

At the Mamozai Driving Academy in the basement of a Kabul shopping center, founder and instructor Summer Gul Khan runs students through a tutorial in a grubby room with road sign posters and disemboweled car parts.

“Carburetor, drive shaft, engine block,” says the instructor, tapping each component with a stick.

Mamozai was the first private school in Afghanistan to offer driving classes to women, nearly a decade ago. During its first two years, under Taliban rule, there were just two female students.

Now 20 percent of his several thousand students each year are women, he says, although few of them drive regularly after getting their licenses.

Khan, who charges $70 for the course, thinks Afghan women and men are suited equally to driving. The problem is that society doesn’t offer women much encouragement or opportunity to practice, so they often lack confidence. Many of the men who disparage them are illiterate and threatened by women’s (slowly) rising status, fearing women will take away their driving jobs one day, he says.

In fact, women are better at driving than men because they drive defensively, says policeman Mohammad Usman Nawabi, 53.

“Some of these guys seem to think they’re doing loop-de-loops in an airplane,” he says.

Zubaida Akbar, 19, a student and government employee, has been driving less than a month. She doesn’t have a license. “Getting a license isn’t easy,” she says. “You either have to know someone or pay money.”

She started driving anyway, she says, because it was such a hassle to have a male relative drive her every evening to her visual arts classes.

Akbar says she worries that if she gets into an accident, or if a soldier or policeman stops her on a lonely road and sexually harasses her, she’ll be blamed.

“They automatically say it’s the woman’s fault, even when it’s not,” she says, heading around a traffic circle twice after getting bad directions from her cousin. “Women here are defined by men. We don’t even know who we are sometimes because they make all the decisions for us.”