Discover the legacy of Gholam Muhammad Sabori, tireless education campaigner who defied the Taliban and fought for girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
By Farooq Sulehria / Global Southasia
”Without girls’ education, Afghanistan cannot progress,” was the constant refrain of Gholam Muhammad Sabori, reverentially called Moalim Saheb (Mr. Teacher) by his students, colleagues and friends.
When he died in a road crash on 31 August 2020 in Kabul, Afghanistan lost a formidable education campaigner.
Who was this man, just 65 at the time of the tragedy, whose sudden eternal departure was mourned across Afghanistan – including by many among the Taliban?
Sabori’s death anniversary at the end of August is one of many momentous events during this month over the past decades. This is the month when India was simultaneously partitioned and gained independence and when Pakistan was born in 1947, when Bangladesh suffered its first military coup in 1975 and its first Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was assassinated.
It was also in August, in 2021, that the Taliban returned to Kabul as the US troops withdrew Saigon-style. Since then, the world has witnessed gender apartheid being reintroduced in the country, with education proscribed beyond grade 6.
Six years after Sabori’s passing, reviving his memory offers hope and a guideline for Afghanistan’s future. It is my personal tribute to Sabori Lala, as someone who knew him personally through a mutual connection.
Born in 1955, in the scenic village of Archi in Afghanistan’s northern district of Kunduz, Sabori imbibed and embraced progressive ideas during his college days. As the scion of a mid-ranking landed family, he was able to attend school and college in a country where literacy and tertiary education are restricted privileges. Restive when he arrived at college, Sabori was fired by Marxist ideologies obtained through journals like Parcham (Flag), Khalaq (People), and Shola-e-Javed (Eternal Flame).
Exile
While Parcham and Khalaq laid the basis for the formation of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, PDPA, Shola-e-Javed led to the launch of Sazman-e-Rehay-e-Afghanistan (Afghan Liberation Organisation, ALO). Many may be unaware that the last 20th century Marxist “revolution” occurred in Afghanistan — the 1978 Saur Inqlab, or April Revolution, spearheaded by the pro-Moscow PDPA. The ALO leadership, sympathetic to Maoist thought, sought refuge in Pakistan, joining the “anti-Soviet resistance”. All this is important to understand Sabori’s life trajectory.
When Sabori arrived in Kabul in the early 1970s, the Kabul University was a hub of politics. The campus was churning with bitterly competing political ideologies. Burhan-ud-Din Rabbani taught Islamic Law here at the Faculty of Law. However, he was also sculpting a band of extremists. His notorious disciple in the Faculty of Engineering, Gulbadin Hikmatyar, stabbed to death a Maoist student leader in the neighbouring department of English, Saidal Sukhandan whose nom-de-plume Sukhandan, means the Discourse Man.
In 2007, when I first visited Kabul University, I spotted a few posters plastered to campus walls, featuring Sukhandan’s effigy. An ALO stalwart, he was a fine poet and a popular on-campus figure.
Later, when Sabori’s first grandson was born, I suggested baptizing the newborn as Saidal. With a forlorn grin, Sabori welcomed and honoured my suggestion.
During his stay in Kabul, Sabori befriended many ALO stalwarts but never became a card-carrying member. However, his affinity with ALO circles forced him to seek refuge in Pakistan, moving along with his extended family to Bajour district in Pakistan’s erstwhile north-western Tribal Areas.
His first act there was to establish two makeshift schools. One for boys, the other for girls; the latter housed at his own home. The refugee camps, meantime, were swelling up as more displaced people arrived from Afghanistan.
Hikmatyar, who had escaped to Pakistan in the early 1970s after killing Sukhandan, administered these camps with his cohorts. Islamabad patronised these elements to settle scores with Kabul. Hikmatyar’s longtime links and ideological affinity with Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami catapulted Hikmatyar to the position of de facto sultan of the sprawling refugee camps on the outskirts of Peshawar and other Pakistani towns bordering Afghanistan. These camps became townships of their own.
Under Hikmatyar’s tutelage facilitated by intelligence agencies of various countries including Pakistan, girls’ education was banned in the refugee camps. Ergo the Taliban ban on girls’ education can be sourced to Foggy Bottom and Zero Point in Islamabad.
Underground
When Sabori’s daughter and other girls in his extended family were barred from going to school, through his old ALO contacts, he reached out to the underground schools run by the radical women’s organisation known as RAWA – the Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan (Jamiat-e-Inqlabi Zanan-e-Afghanistan), unofficially affiliated with the ALO.
The founder of RAWA, known simply as Meena, and her spouse, the ALO founder, Faiz Ahmed, were both assassinated in the late 1980s in Pakistan’s refugee camps.
Sabori’s daughter, Jamila (named after Algerian freedom fighter Djamila Bouhired), his nieces and a stepsister, undertook a 24-hour train journey to reach an underground school in Quetta where they were lodged with about 80 other children.
Locked inside, they were rarely able to see the sunlight. Even going to the rooftop was forbidden as was any conversation with the neighbours. They had to stay quiet for fear of attracting neighbours’ attention.
Additionally, all these girls, and the women of RAWA, had to change their names multiple times as a security measure.
This was the price they paid for their education.
While traumatic on many counts, the experience was also fulfilling and lifechanging. Jamila, who now goes by one of her other names, obtained a law degree, LLB, from the University of London as an external candidate from an Islamabad college, and later did her Masters in Arts at SOAS, University of London. When she moved to Scandinavia, she studied to become a schoolteacher, fulfilling an unspoken promise to her father.
She also wanted to work as a human rights activist, and so, besides teaching, she remains active in socio-political circles of her host country. On Sabori’s death anniversary this year, she was performing election duties as a volunteer.
Sabori’s younger daughter Yasmin attended Beaconhouse, an elite private school in Pakistan, which in the 1990s admitted 100 Afghan children to its Jhelum and Peshawar campuses. Yasmin later worked for Afghan and international media outlets, including the BBC, and as an analyst and researcher at the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Presently, she lives in Europe. But we are running ahead of the story.
It was not easy to re-start life in refugee camps as a patriarch for an extended family. In a situation of forced displacement, holding dignity and economy together is a daunting job. Sabori’s children were growing up in different underground schools around Pakistan. He himself was teaching at an underground school. But he never complained.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, was becoming an unending tragedy, wrought by the world’s most powerful countries: the USA, the Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia. Although not powerful, Pakistan too played a role in prolonging the Afghan tragedy. When the Soviet troops withdrew in 1988, the Afghan refugees could not return to their home as the so-called Mujahideen outfits, armed, funded, and trained by multiple intelligence agencies, began fighting each other to secure Kabul for their respective factions.
Defiance
In the process, Afghanistan’s capital Kabul was reduced to rubble, literally and figuratively. Pakistan wanted to install Hikmatyar at the helm. However, the Northern Alliance, enjoying the support of India, Iran and Turkey was largely in control of the country and Kabul. Before the Taliban captured Afghanistan and instituted their puritan dictatorship, the Mujahideen in control of Afghanistan were already practicing the Taliban-style Sharia.
The Taliban regime brought peace of the graveyard to Afghanistan, invisibilising women and banning the girls’ education. Since Saur Inqlab, in a matter of twenty years, Afghanistan had gone from a “socialist state” to an “Islamic Republic”.
Besides gender apartheid, harsh punishments were the other hallmark of the Taliban regime. Sex offenders were thrown down from helicopters. Thieves had their hands chopped off. The Olympic Stadium in Kabul was turned into a public gallows.
It was in this atmosphere of fear and terror that Sabori returned to Kabul to help organise underground schools for girls. Disguised as a grocer, Sabori ran a small store. His loyal spouse and three sons lived with him to provide the veneer of a normal family.
Life for Sabori was never easy, never safe. This perhaps was the most dangerous situation he ever faced. He was a lynchpin for a network smuggling books from Pakistan, arranging blackboards, training teachers, and organizing domestic spaces which did not look like schools in the case of Taliban raids. Sabori survived.
The events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent U.S. occupation of Afghanistan introduced many oxymoronic changes in the country. The ban on girls’ education was lifted. Sabori, seizing the opportunity, returned to Kabul University to complete his own education left unfinished in the 1970s. Secondly, he wanted to pursue a degree to serve as an Inspector Education. He was the eldest pupil in the classroom, often older than his teachers, providing many an occasion for witty remarks by his relatives and class-fellows.
His family was finally re-united — almost! Based in Pakistan, Jamila was travelling across the globe to promote the cause of Afghan women, sandwiched at the time between liberal feminists supporting the US occupation and religious feminists tacitly supporting the Taliban barbarisms committed in the name of resistance.
Over the next few years, working as Inspector Education, Sabori rose to the position of Overseer.
Meanwhile, the Taliban insurgency was gaining strength. By early 2010s, the Americans ruled by day, the Taliban by night. The US-propped Hamid Karzai-Ashraf Ghani administration controlled the urban centres, the Taliban held sway over the rural areas. Afghanistan is largely countryside.
Hungry for education, Afghans all over the country wanted schools in their villages and towns. To justify the occupation, education was given a priority. Thousands of schools were set up across the length and breadth of Afghanistan. But the schools were often staffed with the henchmen of local warlords. Besides ghost schools, there were ghost teachers, drawing salaries but never turning up for the job.
Sabori took it upon himself to inspect all such schools. In the process, he antagonised two groups. The Taliban wanted to blow up the schools they viewed as US imposition, while the ghost teachers as well as their patronising warlords were not happy with Sabori either. He exposed their system of corruption. Every inspecting trip was a life risk. Threats or bribes, however, nothing dissuaded him from his mission.
“Girls going to schools would be the real revolution in Afghanistan,” he once told me when I sought his opinion on the politics of Afghanistan’s left.
Meanwhile, his children landed good jobs. His brothers in the countryside, back from Pakistan, were able to revive farming on the lands deserted since the late 1970s. The canal was rehabilitated which contributed to cash crops.
Legacy
For the first time in many years, Sabori was experiencing stable sources of income and comfort. He built a three-story home on the outskirts of Kabul. The idea was not merely to house his sons, now getting married, but also to accommodate his nephews and nieces arriving to study in Kabul, from Archi. He always referred to the village as “my Archi”.
He must have been very amused when his youngest son named his first-born boy Archi. Beyond his family, his second love was “Archi” where he built a girls’ school on the land he donated from his own fiefdom. Later, he donated more land for a playground on the campus. Sabori viewed every new enrollment as a victory scored against the puritan Thermidor – the reactionary coup.
As if inadvertently anticipating Afghanistan’s relapse into Talibanised reaction in August 2021, he departed for his idiomatic eternal abode exactly a year before the fall of Kabul. As mentioned earlier, even the Taliban attended his massive funeral in Archi — perhaps in an effort to build their “Taliban 2.0” image, they paid tribute to Sabori for his educational services.
Epilogue in brief
Six years later. Hikmatyar continues to live lavishly in Kabul while his countless victims, including Saidal Sukhandan, lie in graves all over Kabul. During the Taliban’s first stint in power, he went into self-exile to Iran, returning to Kabul post-9/11. The Taliban’s return in 2021 did not drive him or his ilk into exile.
The daughters and granddaughters of these warlords, like those of several key Taliban commanders, live and study abroad. Sabori’s school in Archi is half-closed, owing to the ban on education for girls over 12-years of age. Several underground schools have sprung up where even some Taliban foot soldiers send their daughters.
Saidal, Sabori’s grandson, fled the country at the age of 10 along with his family, when the Taliban returned to Kabul.
The puritan Thermidor has yet again interrupted Sabori’s Afghan revolution, that will be achieved when girls can go to school.
Farooq Sulehria teaches at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He is the author of ‘Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan’ (Routledge).
This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com.
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