Five years ago this month, as the last United States forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban grasped the reins of government and have kept a tight hold on them since.

The group’s harsh interpretation of Islamic rule excludes girls and women, who make up half of Afghanistan’s estimated 50 million people, from any meaningful education or employment opportunity, beyond primary school. Such limitations affect untold individuals and families as well as the overall development of a country mired in decades of civil war and foreign occupation.

Yet, even amid a system likened to “gender apartheid,” Afghanistan’s girls and women refuse to be completely cowed. They tune in to sessions on the radio – or the internet, when it works. Some, whose families can afford it, attend clandestine informal schools in neighborhood homes. Others read and reread the same textbooks that they or their siblings used in pre-Taliban years, when girls could attend secondary school and even university.

“I study in an online school and we have not lost ourselves,” one girl told researchers during a survey recently completed by Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security. “I am an Afghan girl, full of light, full of knowledge, full of power; they can close the school, but they can never extinguish the science from my mind,” she declared.

Her assertion of individuality, intelligence, and independent thought is drawing support at home and abroad, in ways that are both quiet and quietly transformative. (See these weekend reports by the Monitor’s Mark Sappenfield and Dominique Soguel.)

Last week, Agence France-Presse reported on conversations with Afghan fathers, many of them religiously observant, who chafe at the limits on their daughters’ learning. The news agency described these men as “losing sleep over what to do to help their bright and frustrated daughters” – and noted that 9 out of 10 believe in the importance of girls’ education.

“Culture and religion are often used as an excuse by ... extremists,” according to Malala Yousafzai, girls’ education campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. But “the religion that I know ... encourages education,” she said in a 2024 interview with CNN. Ms. Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 by Taliban fighters, referred to dozens of Muslim countries where women can access education, and called on their leaders “to step forward and actually challenge” the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education.

Countries as diverse as Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Iran have enacted changes to traditional family law and social restrictions over the past several decades. In 2018, Saudi Arabia lifted restrictions on women driving cars, enabling new learning and job options for them. Iran, despite its current strict dress codes, has allowed education and workplace opportunities for women for nearly a century. And it’s easy to forget that Yale and Princeton only began admitting women in 1968 and 1969, respectively, while Columbia held out until 1983.

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Girls’ and women’s right to a full and fulfilling education has not always been a given, but it has been successfully claimed the world over. While the situation in Afghanistan is dire, it need not be dispiriting or hopeless. In the Georgetown survey, 80% of Afghan women said they were focused on supporting girls’ education, viewing it as central to personal empowerment and, eventually, political peace.

“As an activist woman, I am not a victim of war, but an architect of social peace,” one respondent told the researchers, “and this is a voice that must be heard globally.”