Changing minds about girls playing sports in Afghanistan takes the support of religious leaders – and they are starting to get on board.<\/p>\n
Mullahs trained by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Afghanistan are preaching about women\u2019s rights and have conducted workshops on girls\u2019 education, child marriage and violence against women that have reached thousands of people and are slowly changing attitudes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, the villagers were really annoying, telling me that a girl in sports clothes is against Islam and our culture,\u201d says 18-year-old Masooma, who just wanted to go skiing. \u201cThey said, \u2018Girls don\u2019t have the right to ski \u2013 only boys can do sport. Girls are born to learn household chores, like cooking and cleaning.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
UNDP Afghanistan trained more than 400 mullahs across the country to preach about women\u2019s rights in Friday prayers. Abdul Rahman Redwani is one of the mullahs who started incorporating these issues into his sermons after the training. \u201cPreviously, local people didn\u2019t let their girls learn how to read or write,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWhen girls went skiing the for first time, people gossiped that they were too westernized. But our Friday sermons helped change their minds.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNow a lot of girls and women come to watch us ski,\u201d smiles Masooma, \u201cwhich was not possible a few years back. This motivates me and encourages other girls to start skiing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the entire story here<\/a>.<\/p>\n No, I’m not involved in this project. But I would love to read all I can about it, and support it however I can, because leveraging the cultural and religious beliefs can be a great strategy for encouraging women’s equality – something I learned in Afghanistan as well. Back in 2007, when I put together a workshop on to help my Afghan co-workers in Kabul feel more comfortable speaking in public<\/a>, I did a lot of research, and learned that women speakers, teachers and leaders have always been important in Muslim society, including in Afghanistan. So I put this into my training, talking about the public speaking and leadership roles of Khadija, first wife of the Prophet, Aisha, the favored wife of Muhammad, and Muhammad’s daughters, as well as Rabia Balkhi, a poet of Afghanistan and Razia, a Muslim woman ruler of 13th-century India.<\/p>\n