Fawzia Koofi is a female MP, who strongly campaigns for the rights of women and children in Afghanistan, where she has lived all her life. She is running for president in their elections in 2014 after being elected as an MP in the Badakhshan province back in 2005 and becoming the first female Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament in Afghanistan’s history. She is a real inspiration and is creating change in order to make a new Afghanistan for her daughters to live in equality with the opportunities they deserve.

She grew up under the Taliban’s strict, repressive rules, meaning that she spent a lot of her adult life having to wear a Burqa, for fear of public beatings. She spoke about her experiences of this in her book entitled, ‘letters to my daughters’, and a particular quote stuck out to me, which was relating to her having to wear the burqa, saying it meant she was ‘looking at the huge word from a tiny window‘.

This is extremely symbolic of how it is used as a tool to narrow women’s horizons and restrict what they can do with their lives when the wearing of it is enforced. it highlights the disconnectedness and distance that it can impose and how it can act as a barrier, both from the world to the woman, and more importantly, from the woman to the world. Regimes that enforce the wearing of the Burqa, such as the Taliban are detrimental to gender equality and women’s rights, but then, there are women that choose to wear it in other areas of the world, does this mean, therefore, that the choice of wearing a Burqa is what’s empowering to a woman,  and therefore the decision in countries such as France where it is banned, is as negative as the decision of those regimes where it is necessary?