Taliban takeover: Afghanistan women stitch future with vivid past

Through small businesses and initiatives in India, they challenge Taliban's dour dress code

Some weeks ago, Arifa (name changed on request), an Afghan student in Delhi, saw poignant images from her homeland on her Instagram feed. “It was full of photographs of women from my country, proudly wearing traditional dresses from different provinces,” she says emotionally, scrolling through the online campaign by Bahar Jalali, a former history professor at the American University in Afghanistan, against the Taliban’s strict new dress code.

Arifa points out details in the photographs of exquisite Afghani clothes embellished with embroideries and mirror work, hash-tagged #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghanistanCulture, on Instagram, saying that the anonymising black coverall the Taliban is