Islam, Education, and Politics in Afghanistan - Rangina Hamidi

This episode features Rangina Hamidi, who, until the fall of the government in 2021, served as the Education Minister for Afghanistan. In this conversation, Hamidi talks about her life in public service and discusses the complicated relationship between religion and education in contemporary Afghanistan.

Transcript

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Chip Gruen: 0:03

Welcome to ReligionWise the podcast where we feature educators, researchers and other professionals discussing topics on religion and their relevance to the public conversation. My name is Chip Gruen, I'm the Director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College, and I will be the host for this podcast. In this season two of ReligionWise, we will continue to consider a broad variety of religious and cultural beliefs and practices, and try to understand their place in the contemporary conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to explore the 12 episodes from season one that are available in your favorite podcast app. Also, we would love to hear from you with your questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes. To reach us, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you will find our contact information and also have the opportunity to support this podcast and the work of the Institute. It's my great pleasure today to welcome Rangina Hamidi to ReligionWise. She currently serves as Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Ms. Hamidi fled Afghanistan in 1981 with her family, first to Pakistan, then settling in Northern Virginia in 1988. After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it became possible to return, which she did in 2003, living and working in Kandahar in development projects in education. Her most recent work in the country was as Minister of Education, a role that she filled until the fall of the Afghan government in August of 2021. I think the three poles of her work and her engagement in Afghanistan have been around religion, politics, and education. If nothing else, it shows the complicatedness of the situation and the factors that influenced the educational system in Afghanistan. I think it's fair to say that she's had both supporters and detractors in that role and in another's. And I think it's also fair to say that there have been understandings and misunderstandings about the confluence of all of those factors that lead to the educational system in the country. More than anything else from talking with Rangina Hamidi is a realization of the complicatedness of the culture, history, politics that lead to a complicated educational system as well. It seems that it is one thing to have an idea about the way that the system should work, whether that be from the religious perspective of those in the country, or advisors from the United States and other powers that were interested in rebuilding the country. And that is in stark contrast to the situation on the ground that requires finesse and empathy to a lot of different stakeholders. It's also interesting to think about how these systems are built, how people end up in positions of power, how different regions are affected by the occupation differently, and how that led to different policies and variation in the way that those policies were implemented. Rangina Hamidi, welcome to ReligionWise. Thanks for being here.

Rangina Hamidi: 3:10

Thank you for having me. It's an honor.

Chip Gruen: 3:13

So particularly because you know, you are a professional working in educational systems, and in particular as the Minister of Education for Afghanistan. I want to start with your own personal experience of education. What was your educational experience, both as a child, as a student, and later as an educator? How did that shape your views of education in general?

Rangina Hamidi: 3:37

Well, thank you for that question. I'll try to be brief. I was a refugee child in my whole entire educational journey. The first initial starting kindergarten as a refugee kid in Pakistan, not in the refugee camps, because my father did not believe in staying and depending on international aid while we waited in refugee camps, as many families did. He actually took us to the city where we grew up and invested his little bit of money that he was earning as a refugee father, to send his daughters to school. And at that time, he only had daughters and while I was in third grade, and my younger sister in second grade, we were warned by the then Mujahideen elements that were supported by the United States government, CIA in particular, to ban us from going to school. And I say we were lucky because the consequences of girls refusing to listen to their you know their command to stop going to school, was that many girls saw the defacing of their faces with acid attacks. And so we were lucky in the sense that we didn't get attacked - we got a warning, and even though my father wanted to argue with them to allow us to go at least until sixth grade so that we could have the basic minimum of literacy and numeracy, my mother was the one who argued and said, No, I'm not taking the risk with these guys. I don't trust them. And my girls are not going. So we were stopped for a temporary short period before landing all the way in America, in Virginia, where we picked up, lost about a year of schooling, in this process, or a year and a half, and finished high school in Virginia went on to University of Virginia to complete my Bachelor's degree. But growing up, particularly after that incident, and coming as a refugee in America, there was this intrinsic feeling or knowledge always of understanding the value of education because we had been stripped away from it or we'd been taken away from it. And so as little children, you know, fourth graders, fifth graders, there was a lot more maturity and understanding of the value of education because of what I had gone through. And there was always this interest in wanting to do something back for education... how I was going to do it? I had no idea. And so coming and taking the position as Minister of Education, for me, part of it was that personal journey that if I had not been able to continue my education, I wouldn't be offered the position of Minister of Education. So I knew the value of it personally and professionally. And having had that personal experience and that personal journey as a girl from the country that I was serving back made my post that more important to me at the professional level.

Chip Gruen: 6:59

So you mentioned your father and that you all were refugees in Pakistan first and then came to the United States. But government service generally is something that seems to run in your family. Can you talk a little bit about him and his service to the Afghan government and how this influenced your own work?

Rangina Hamidi: 7:19

My father was and is my hero and my best friend, and I am who I am today because of the values and principles that both my parents, but especially my father, instilled in me and in all of my siblings. You know, growing up with a man who had the principle of working hard, you know, he was a very, very hard-working government employee, at a level of directorship he had reached before the Communist coup of Afghanistan in 1979. And in 1979, up until 1981, two years before we fled, my father had actually, at the time, there were no fancy calculators or computers or, you know, technology programs to enable the Afghan government, particularly the Ministry of Finance staff to work on reports, and these were all financial reports all, you know, balanced, balancing reports. And my dad was working with the customs department, I believe, and what he had done by 19, late 1980s, the story that he would tell us was that he had balanced a multi-year report on imports and exports in the custom department, where he had pretty much like, tracked every single penny or Afghani that was spent and received. And he tells he told us that the report when it was finished - and he did it all by hand, so all manual work. And he spent many, many months, you know, maybe close to a year on this. He took it to the Minister's office and the Minister had reviewed it obviously in the so the Minister had called him after the Minister had reviewed it, and he said that when the Minister looked at him, the Minister of Finance at that time, I don't know him. I don't remember his name. But he said he had tears in his eyes, and looked at my father and said, Mr. Ghulam Haider Hamidi, had you done this work before the coup meaning because at this time the Communist regime is in charge. He said, had you if if if you had completed this prior to the coup of the communists, the government would have rewarded you with such great honor. Because there was a will for looking at such accomplishments. And the Minister had repeated or and had said, unfortunately, the current government is dealing with its own political rifts and issues and attitudes, that there's no there's no desire to acknowledge people who accomplish such great things. And it's that same Minister, who then warned my father to flee the country and take all of his women that were depending on him and the women that my father was supporting was, of course, us five daughters, that he loved very much, my mother, his own widowed mother, and his own one single sister. So he was responsible for all of us in a patriarchy like Afghanistan. And because he refused to join the Communist regime, he was, you know, psychologically and morally against the values of Communism. He was working underground within the Ministry of Finance to support the Mujahideen. The Minister had come to know that so the Minister was kind enough to warn my father to leave, otherwise, he would be killed because the Communists we have to remember, the Communist committed the Communist regime and their leaders committed atrocities against Afghans that, you know, that are probably not far from what the Taliban are doing today. And somehow, history has forgotten that. So having that kind of a hard-working principle-valued father, when we became refugees, I was a child, I was less than five years old when we moved to Pakistan. But the very fact of growing up differently, instead of a camp where all my cousins and friends and family-friends were growing up, and we would visit them, we were not living in a camp. And later on, as I grew up, I realized and learned that the reason my father had not chosen to live in a refugee camp in Pakistan, and instead come out to the city, and work with the private company, to make ends meet, was precisely the reason that my father had shared with his friends who encouraged him to remain in the in the camps, and my father's response, because the camps would provide free food and housing and you know, there was no expense, for that matter. My father's response to them was, I'm a man with two legs and two hands and a brain that works still, why am I going to depend on rations to support me? You know, so that those values are still critically important in the world. And I'm blessed to have had a father who, who had those values and who practiced it. And I carried those and so when in 2007, I had already been in Afghanistan for about close to five years, working with the NGO that I was working in. My father would come every year to visit, he took his vacations from America and the company that he was working for 20 years. He would come to visit Afghanistan because he could after 2003 or after 2001. And he was finally inspired to come and join the government again, unfortunately, this time, he joined President Karzai's administration and got appointed as, as mayor of Kandahar City, where I was working and this time around, unfortunately, his service to his people in his country, ended in taking his life where a suicide bomber attacked him and directly attacked him and only him, which cost him his life on July 27, of 2011, and I was in Kandahar. And so of course, taking that devastation that a man of principles and values and service to his people, to his land, is something that I will always carry with me and, you know, in addition to the personal journey of wanting to serve the very ministry in which I had the personal experience of being taken out of school or forced out of school, but in addition to that, I also asked had my father been alive in 2020, when I was offered this ministry, because he was just a natural lover of education, a promoter of education, he supported not only his own children to seek the highest levels of education that they possibly could, but he privately invested in, you know, encouraging young men mostly because at the time that we were growing up there were more men in Afghanistan who could get education and not in have girls, unfortunately. And he supported many young men to seek education, complete their education to seek higher education. So someone who was just a natural advocate for education, and particularly for his own daughters, he even though he was not with us, in 2020, I knew that he would be so proud to know that his own daughter had taken the role of service to her people in the capacity of Minister of Education.

Chip Gruen: 15:30

So you have this great example of leadership and working in government and working on separate occasions within various within the Ministry of Finance first and then as Mayor. And so you're surrounded by that you see that as an example, yet you I've heard you refer to yourself as a non-political politician, somebody who is not an insider in the way that sometimes we think of politicians being. Can you talk a little bit about how you found yourself in the government position as the Minister of Education in Afghanistan?

Rangina Hamidi: 16:05

Thank you for pointing that out because I don't know if there is a formal definition for a non-political politician. Kind of my own creation in my head, I guess, you know, I'm broken in this because when I say non-political, I actually am referencing against the traditional the traditional process of how one gets appointed to positions, meaning, if their political parties or political affiliations, often time, you know, an individual or group of individuals are kind of picked to be the representatives or nominees of that political party, to a president or to the leadership of a country to appoint. And whether it's done through a nomination process of the political party or election of both, you know, the common mass populations and or, you know, entities like smaller, you know, structures created by these mass populations. So, in that regard, I call myself non-political. I neither did my father nor myself belong to any political regime or political entity, whether it was a political party or political movement. We didn't belong to any. In fact, I remember, you know, when I was a college student in Virginia and this is in the 19, late 1990s, when the Taliban were in, you know, running Afghanistan at the time or in charge of Afghanistan at that time - I had come for a short break I think we were on holiday or something and there was this event that former Afghan either politicians or older men, mostly men, there was a handful of women, I remember at that time, a gathering in Northern Virginia where all these Afghan entities had gathered together to talk about how to influence bringing unity among Afghan leadership, something similar to what I'm witnessing right now, with the Afghan diaspora, some of them my colleagues, some of them my former, you know, employees, participating in these meetings, gatherings to find a solution or an alternative to the Taliban. And I, my dad took me to that meeting as a young college student, only because I was still interested in wanting to learn more about Afghanistan, and there was a very, very interesting thing that I witnessed with my father which I think shaped my political affiliation or the lack of the will to join a political team or political affiliation, or be affiliated with any politics directly. All these people were getting up and it was a roomful of maybe 150 men or so. Everybody would get up and boast about these individuals who were supposedly fighting the war fighting Jihad fighting, you know, whatever. Some calling some individuals heroes, others calling other individuals monsters. At the end of it, they were all fighting a war and all of them had guns and ammunitions. And, you know, the leftover weapons that the US had given Afghans since 19, you know, early 1980s to fight the Russians, and then once the Russians left in 1989, then Afghan men and warlords and gun lords basically got up and started killing each other for power. You know, logically, it makes sense to say that they were all culprits that, you know, there was no hero among them, they were all killing each other for and Afghans ordinary poor Afghans destroying Afghanistan for power. And so this meeting got really heated because it was divided, and the interesting thing was, it was about unity, how to bring about divisions closer, and my dad at the very end, gets up on the stage, and he just started blatantly cussing every single one of those leaders, you know, those who call some, you know, some individuals heroes, he started cussing them, the ones that were being cussed at, he was cussing them. And I mean, the language that was used in the meeting, everybody was very, not very professional with their words, and my dad, you know, joined in that conversation. And at the end, he said, they're all responsible for the destruction of Afghanistan, and its people. And I don't care which tribe which region, which Province, which language they speak, because a killer has no identity. And, you know, he kind of left the room very, very agitated, and of course, the people who were supporting a certain person to become a hero of Afghanistan's war, of course, they were devastated of how dare a man come in and disrespect their so called hero that they'd created in the mind. And so I grew up with that notion at home and understanding that when people fight in a society, and people fight for not people, men really fight for for power, and you know, they destroy societies and governments and cities and killing innocent men, women and children, for their own power. I don't know what it is, that enables them to either call themselves heroes, and or motivate people who follow them to call them heroes. And so I came with a neutral mind to say that anybody who had had a hand in the politics of Afghanistan, you know, from the communist coup until 2001, when America went and NATO went, there were no winners in Afghan politics, they were all losers. And the majority of the warlords had had enough of a track record to show that they didn't care for the rebuilding of Afghanistan. So that was one of the reasons I personally stayed away from politics to traditional sense of politics until President Ashraf Ghani surprised me with the offer of joining politics as Minister of Education. And quite frankly, I questioned him. I said, Why me? You know, I have no background in this, you know, that I'm not probably the most qualified. And we women often do this - we do question our qualifications. But my sense in qualifications was not that I was not capable of running an institution as big as theMinistry of Education, but more so I had no experience with how government affairs were run. And President Ashraf Ghani's, response was quite blunt, and precisely the experience of my life of criticizing government offices and officials in that he said, the Ministry of Education has become way too politicized, and it has been led and managed way too much on political terms. The reason I want to bring you is precisely to try to depoliticize an institution, as important as the Ministry of Education. So his response then led to make me the first technical politician, the first technical Minister of Education because at least I coming in Yes, I might not have had the political experience of my predecessors since 2001. All men, of course, and all politicians, but at least I had come with understanding what it takes to run a school, what is what it takes to have qualified teachers, what it takes to assess students progress and development, as they learn and as they, you know, develop their minds. How to make learning interesting. What does it mean to have a good curriculum versus a bad curriculum and how you know the role of the role that a curriculum really ultimately plays in the child's mind and in the development of an education process for a child. So I had that background, and I had that understanding, and so in retrospect, you know, when when I was questioning my qualifications, I think in the past, since 2001, I probably was the most qualified in terms of the sector of education to have led this institution. And, and when I take a real introspect and look and assess what I did, does it mean that I did not make mistakes in the 14 months that I was serving? Absolutely. We're human beings, everybody makes mistakes. But were they mistakes that were intentionally made to harm people or disrupt societies, certain societies or, you know, disqualify some regions over others to serve my political interests? Absolutely not. And so for that I take, I'm proud of the fact of my service that I served with, with honesty, with integrity, with that understanding that I inherited a ministry that had been unfair to certain pockets of the populations across Afghanistan over 20 years. I inherited a ministries curriculum that had been basically a trash can model of people, experts, specialists coming from various different backgrounds and experiences and just kind of dumping everything that everybody thought was important and, and relevant for Afghan children to learn. And for the first time, in 20 years, I and my administrative team and group of advisors and it was a handful, not a lot. In fact, just three advisors, we decided that we were going to re-envision a vision for the Ministry of Education, that would make learning an important element for the future of Afghanistan and its children. I inherited a ministry that had no vision, nobody knew what we were working towards. So when I talk about being a non-political politician, that is what I mean is that I focused on education as a technical sector of service. And my clients in this Ministry or in this position, were the millions of children that we were serving, and the teachers that were providing the teaching for them. My non-political politician role did not focus on pleasing parliamentarians, or other government officials, or and or stakeholders, such as the donor community, I refused to speak the language to please the donor community simply because they were providing the dollars and the funds to run, you know, to run this institution. Instead, I focused on how did we as a Ministry of Education, dare to create a vision of a country that looked different than what we had in 2020 10 years from then or 40 years from then. And so in that regards, I guess the simple definition is that is this is what politicians are supposed to do, right? When you appoint politicians to leadership positions in these various sectors, common sense is that you look at the sector, you look at it, most direct beneficiaries and clients, and you work to empower the system to serve your utmost important client, in our case, the children. And that's what in my opinion, that's what politicians are supposed to do. But unfortunately, globally, there is this trend, that politicians don't work for the interests of people. They work for the interests of lobbyist groups, stakeholders, you know, policymakers and other sectors. And in our context of Afghanistan, the various many warlords and drug lords and power brokers who are sitting either in the parliament for their own financial personal benefits, and or outside of the parliament, who were basically wanting to control every aspect of every decision that the government was making, and I stood strong and proudly against those and by not getting the vote of confidence from from our corrupt parliament. I'm actually proud to say that that gave me even more energy to focus on my vision, rather than serve the interests of the parliamentarian - so that's how my definition of non-political politician is and I'm sorry, it's too long, but you know.

Chip Gruen: 29:52

No, that's great, that's great. So as this outsider to the political system, but not to education system, right, you saw this need for these significant reforms. And we can talk about others of those, but I wanted to sort of touch on a major part of the public conversation in the United States, when education in Afghanistan comes up, or when the topic of Afghanistan comes up generally is about, about gender about girls and women. And obviously, you had major stake not only personally and professionally, in including girls and young women in the educational system. Can you talk about how you work to address and change traditional ideas about that in education in Afghanistan, and then, you know, included in that is obviously some of the more traditional or conservative religious ideas, that would be a barrier to you as well.

Rangina Hamidi: 30:51

Thank you. Thank you for that question. And in fact, I cringe when I look or participate, or I'm an audience member in some of these conversations that really address the very complex and critical issue of education in Afghanistan in general, but most particularly the past year, the world has focused on girls education in Afghanistan. Automatically we've kind of assumed that everything is perfect for the boys, and that there's no problems with it, because when we talk about any conversation or any topic that starts with education issue in Afghanistan, the focus directly only moves to girls education, particularly girl's education from grade 7-12, which is currently either on hold or banned by the Taliban administration. And so I want to take a little bit of your time to take us back the past there's this assumption, there's this general global assumption that all the children of Afghanistan from 2001, all boys and all girls, were going to schools, either private schools or public schools, and everybody was becoming educated, and it was this bed of roses. And then all of a sudden, Taliban come and boom, you know, then girls are banned from going to school. I just want to share, we had no data at the Ministry, even after 20 years of investment and billions of dollars, you know, channeled through the government of Afghanistan, I was amazed at the fact that the Ministry of Education had no data to share with its own leadership and or the world about tracking how many girls throughout Afghanistan actually, were in school. So the initial data under question was the actual number of students - so boys and girls included, we had variations that we were quoting from 7 million to about 11 million. You know, anybody who's a scientist or a researcher knows that a variation of 4 million children is no insignificant amount. And in my question to the international community for investing and working with the Ministry of Education for 20 years, is that how come nobody ever raised that to find out how many numbers we how many number of students did we actually have in the system? Was it 7 million? Or was it 11 million or something in between? So not even have not even having that simple data, which leads to then what percentage of that data was actually girls, the numbers that I always used to get was somewhere in the range of 35, to about 45%, but probably in the 40%. So even if we consider that it was in the 40%, out of the 40%, of student body, in Afghanistan, of school attendance being girls, what percentage of that 40% students who started school in grade one actually finished 12th grade? And there was this general understanding that the numbers dropped drastically after sixth grade, even in the past 20 years of the 40% girl population of students that we had, which kind of again, I'm not saying that what the Taliban are doing is okay. This is not my verification of supporting the Taliban's decision that the Taliban's decision has no basis of stopping girls from going beyond seventh grade. However, we need to be educated about what we had in the country that kind of led to the current situation. And so not having any of that data to realize what percentage of girls actually did complete the 12 years of education? And then what percentage of those who completed actually went on to higher education? That's something that, that just that is beyond the Ministry of Education. And we never had the time to look into that. These were the important questions that never got answered, because there was no data available. Additionally, the past 20 years of the Ministry's experience led me and with data led me to believe the data that we did finally ended up collecting in the short time that I was there is that looking at the allocation of resources, both human capital as well as financial resources since 2001, there were areas in Afghanistan, particularly the south and the east, the areas which are unfortunately now kind of experiencing the highest devastation of the Taliban ruling - so the provinces that are fall into these areas are Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, Oruzgan, Paktika, Paktia, Khost, you know, that south and south east belt, where it was very, very difficult to find schools for girls outside of major cities. If they existed, they were not outside of major cities, and at most, there were a handful of schools in major cities, with female teachers to a certain extent, but most of the high school subjects because they did not have the appropriate female teachers to teach all of the subjects in high schools, oftentimes, there were men teachers, because they did not have female teachers in those subjects. Human capital in the sense that the amount of formal teachers that were allocated to these various different provinces, I'll give you one example, Kandahar, which is my hometown, the day or the week that I assumed the leadership position at the Ministry - our data showed that Kandahar had about 6,000 formal teachers across the province. In comparison, although the province is smaller in size and smaller in population, the but comparable the you know, these two provinces are historically always compared a province in the north, which is called which was called Balkh, where Mazār-i-Sharīf is - that province had about 20, more than 20,000 teachers, formal teachers. And I'm just going to focus on these two provinces to show that for 20 years, the province of Kandahar, you know, and I'm not saying that it started with 6,000 teachers, because I was told that initially that it had a much higher number. But over the years, that number decreased by allocating some of the teacher positions in Kandahar to other provinces, on the premise of insecurity. That was a political reason used to say that, well there's fighting in this province, and people are not interested in education, and there are no teachers available, therefore, they have unfilled positions that are just kind of on hold so instead of keeping these on hold positions, let's move them to other provinces. Now, is this entirely a bad decision? I guess it looks, it depends on how you look at it. People who were politically driven to divert attention from such regions to continue the fighting to continue the killing to continue the destruction and keep students and children and their futures away from education - yes, it was a perfect decision for those leaders with those with those thought processes. And today, in retrospect, you know, looking at that data or having received that data when I was in the position, I'm not surprised that many of the foot soldiers of regimes like the Taliban happened to be from the regions where there were no schools, where there was no investment made, you know, in the past 20 years to motivate societies to send their children to school, including boys, not just girls, I'm not talking about girls - I'm talking about boys as well. And so the injustice that was served internally nationally in the country for 20 years or that lasted 20 some years. Is no surprise of how the results have turned out to be in Balkh province from the reports that I gather and the information that I'm still receiving, girls have not been stopped from going to school since the fall last August. Girls continue to go to school, the doors to education up until 12th grade are still open. And I'm happy for that I as as a mother, as a woman, leader, I'm extremely happy that there are at least some corners of our country that are still able to continue on their education and their journey to education, without problems, so it makes me happy for them. But it also makes me think, how unjust we leaders have been to enable some societies and some regions to continue to progress and develop and strategically and actively stop and prevent others from progressing and developing. In my opinion, you know, I would love to challenge all of my predecessors in the past 20 years to challenge them to say, well, instead of just shutting down services and shutting down resource or taking away resources from the regions that were troubled, didn't you think strategically as part of the government of the Republic of Afghanistan, you know, which was this budding democracy that we were all part of - wasn't it your responsibility, to make sure that you reach those communities that were hard to reach? Isn't that the premise of what good leadership and good governance is supposed to do? And instead, now we're sitting after the fall, you know, all of us thrown out to diasporas all over the world, complaining and you know, backbiting and blaming each other where it was so and so's fault so and so's fault. My response to all of that is that it was all of our collective fault for not doing our due diligence of finding information of understanding how our actions and reactions and decisions was affecting the society at large. And, all of that led to the fall, so kind of went on to divergence, but I think this was important to say, in the sense that, you know, when we talk about changing ideologies, changing customs, changing mentalities that have been ingrained in people in societies for thousands and thousands of years, it is no easy task. And not only is it not an easy task, but when you don't do it right, what is it there for us to understand why people should automatically without exposing them to new ideologies without sharing with them the possibilities of what new ways of doing things can do? What would motivate them to change? And it's two different contexts. One is, if you have a peaceful, relatively peaceful environment, where the threat of being killed, the insecurity of, you know, not having food on the table for your children, you know, if all of those basic needs are met, then you can start thinking about development and progress and moving forward. But when you've constantly have put people in situations where the right to life is under question, where there's no, not enough food to feed your children, there are no jobs for the perceived responsible entities for earning a living, which is young men and boys, and there's no job for them. I don't know how we, as human beings can put our ideologies in communities, as I just described, and expect people to say, well, all of a sudden, yeah, my son can't have a job, you know, we're being killed left and right, we don't have food, but let me go ahead and send my daughter to school because she can bring income to me. You know, it's like we've not engaged them in the process of understanding the development of engaging women as active citizens in the society. They've not had role models to see that women can do this, and yet we expect them to all of a sudden be open and welcoming to the idea of sending girls to school. With that being said, though, the one one benefit of the past 20 years investment in Afghanistan, did result in a an overwhelmingly majority of the population across Afghanistan, regardless of ethnicity, of language, of religion of whether they were living in the city or in the rural villages, there is an overwhelmingly majority support for the education of girls across Afghanistan. And we are not hearing this in popular media, but village elders, tribal elders, you know, religious leaders, men and women, children, boys and girls are coming out and have come out at the local level in support of putting demands on the Taliban administration to allow girls to go to school. So there is this overwhelmingly national support for the continuation of girls education. However, the regions that never experienced the beauty of having girls educated in society, they remain in the dark, because they never saw the light in the past 20 years of that experience. And so to blame those societies to say, why are they continuing to shut their girl schools, my response, and my challenge to the world is, they are not shutting opportunities for growth, they never had that opportunity to begin with. And so there's nothing to shut. And I think we just need to be a bit more open to understand the complexity of the situation of Afghanistan. And also understand that what the Taliban are doing with this issue of girls education, they're very smart, they're very strategic, they're not doing this primarily because they intrinsically believe that girls should not be educated. There's, surprisingly, a huge overwhelmingly support even among the lower leadership of the Taliban administration to, to support girls to go back to school, it's only a handful of the top leadership, who's using girls education as a leverage for political bargaining. And it's become a political bargaining tool, and unfortunately, the price is being paid by girls who are not able to continue their school, those who were in school. And so only time will tell how how that goes. But the fight for girls education or children's education in Afghanistan is a complex fight. It's a long term fight and if the world truly and sincerely cares about education of Afghanistan, then we need to think more broadly beyond the politics and continue to invest in educating children, both boys and girls in the best capacity that we can, without politicizing girls and boys to, you know, to think one way or another. And I think the long term solution to education of Afghanistan and globally would be to separate men and women's political drives from educating children. Only if the globe, if the global community succeeds in doing that, will we be able to truly serve children globally, with a neutral viewpoint, which will benefit them, but until and unless until there's this close relationship of politics and education, we're gonna continue to see struggles, as we're seeing the struggle in the past.

Chip Gruen: 48:23

I just want to underscore something you said and see if you agree with this, but it's interesting. I mean, I'm thinking about, you know, our context now in the United States and thinking about education and how people talk about education. And, of course, we think about reading and math and science, but it seems to me that one of the things that you're saying about the educational project in Afghanistan, is that by people participating in that, that it is also a civics lesson. It is also a lesson about living in a complicated society with people who aren't like you like that Afghanistan is a complicated place and participating in this public project of public education has larger goals that are not just about reading and math and science, but about how one lives in a pluralistic society with other people.

Rangina Hamidi: 49:14

You've nailed it here, Chip, you know, and this was precisely one of the challenges that I discovered in that there was this push to, to teach children. I mean, there's this. Again, there's not a single entity in the world that we can call including a regime like the Taliban that don't think that education is important. The reason the Taliban are banning girls from education is because they know the value of it. That's why they're banning it. If it was not something important in their eyes - why would they even busy themselves with this topic, right? Everybody thinks education is important, but in the context of Afghanistan, what we found particularly in our curriculum, the curriculum was designed kind of to include all the, you know the necessary skills that children automatically need to have the mathematical, you know, the numerical literacy, the actual literacy reading and writing, critical thinking, unfortunately, was not a major component of the curriculum of Afghanistan. And the system of education, the mechanism used to teach was more of a rote memorization. So the top student was the one who memorized the most amount of material. And so in a pluralistic, divided society, like Afghanistan, that has politically become what it has, since, you know, the Russian invasion, or the Communist regimes coup in 1979, it was the responsibility of the Ministry of Education to create a curriculum that would bring the various factions back together, and lead the education leaders to bring consensus to the understanding of what it meant to be an Afghan, you know, to work on this national identity, to work on this national vision for what we wanted to do with this broken country called Afghanistan, because the children are the future leaders of this country, right? The warlords and the drug lords that everybody complains about, they're not going to live forever, hopefully, they're going to leave one day. And so who's going to be then the next generation leaders, and it was really up to the Ministry of Education to kind of set the foundation for the value system that we would want in our leaders. Unfortunately, you know, maybe 20 years was not enough time for people to really think through. But for me, that was the obvious thing, that the mission and the vision of the Ministry of Education was to instill the values within our mass population of children as they're growing up, to bring them together, to unify them, to help, to have them respect one another, rather than continue to push the divisions that unfortunately, we witnessed every day, across the country for almost 20 years, which of course, then led to the fall. So you're absolutely right, the Ministry of Education, and even here in America. It's an interesting comparison that I'm making to America now, I'm not involved obviously in the administration by any form in my new home, but my daughter is attending a public school in the state of Arizona. And to be quite honest, I'm amazed by the lack of proper attention by at least my state administrators to I mean, I don't know enough about it to know whether it's funding that is causing issue is there not enough funding to, to have the problems that it has, but you know, I can speak from my daughter's school, but nationally, we hear this conversation around a deficit of teachers, you know, many teachers don't want to remain in these jobs anymore. It's hard to recruit teachers to qualified and quality teachers to bring them on board to teach. And one of the most important factors in education, as we all know, globally, is the quality of a teacher, if we don't invest in keeping and retaining our good teachers, how do we expect this sector to move forward? And again, similarly, it is the children of today who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. And if we're not making the proper investments today, what kind of a future are we creating for ourselves as the great, you know, great nation called America, in the world? So it's critically important so, but kind of in comparison, now that I come here, and I understand and I see the challenges that the Ministry of Education or the sector of Education has even issues and problems in a country like America, imagine that that problems are these problems are 100 fold in a country like Afghanistan that has no economy right now that has no infrastructure that has no proper government even anymore to to address it. So I hope that listeners can understand that the wish or the desire of the global community to educate children in countries like Afghanistan is a wonderful and an admirable desire. But when it comes to the nitty gritty of how to go about doing it, it is not so easy and it is not, and it cannot be done with the appropriate investment both financially and either morally or psychologically.

Chip Gruen: 55:03

So right now the situation in Afghanistan, I mean, most of the headlines, you know, that we hear in the U.S. from our media outlets are about the Taliban government floundering not being up to the task of running the country in all kinds of ways. Right? Did they just the Ministries aren't properly staffed, you know, the garbage isn't picked up, right, that that sort of the basic, you know, nuts and bolts of running a society running a country are not present with the current administration. What do you think that does for education? Does that, I mean, does that just make regions sort of operate independently or independent schools? Are there religious organizations that are going to step into that breach? You know, what does education look like in Afghanistan with a not functioning federal government?

Rangina Hamidi: 55:52

I think you've answered part of your question, which is yes, the, you know, local communities, or governance, and I use that word very loosely, has become very localized, which might not necessarily be a bad thing, to be quite honest, a country that was so divided over ethnic and linguistic and religious lines, and the various factions wanting to be in competition with each other constantly. My experience of the past 20 years of Afghanistan, kind of tells me that maybe a strong centralized government is maybe not possible. And maybe there is a need for a more decentralized approach to governing and running the affairs of the country. The challenge, though, with that proposal, which is kind of pushed by many, many sectors in the country, both outside and inside the country, is that today in the global community that we live, some people who have been savvy in the past 40, you know, 45 years, they've learned languages of the international community, they've become educated, they're a lot more connected to some global leaders and countries, much more so in their connectivity than other regions, it is going to be that unjust service or unjust way of continuing the serving, or the governance of a people divided by the regions, because those with stronger connections with stronger financial support from perhaps some neighboring countries, they'll, you know, they'll have far more leverage over those areas in those communities that don't. So the role of a central government is still critically important to make sure that we don't neglect certain societies over others across the country. Remember, it is 40 million people. And at the moment, it's 34 provinces. So this is no small, you know, nation, to just kind of let things be governed by itself. But there is one interesting thing that kind of comes to mind when we talk about Taliban. There's this assumption, and I know, I know where the world is coming from, or to this - but there's this assumption that the Taliban have a background or should have a background to govern, and to administer. I want to challenge our listeners to think about where did these Taliban, you know, the members of the leadership of the Taliban come from? What is their experience? What is their knowledge? And remember, for the past 20 years, they were fighting mainly in mountainous areas, very little access to infrastructure development services. They've killed in the name of the jihad that they believe in. They've been trained in terrorist training camps, not so far from Afghanistan's border in our neighboring country of Pakistan. You know, away from women, away from girls, away from a normal functioning society. And what happens in these chair, you know, these training camps, there's plenty of resources now available out for people to search the conditions under which these young boys are trained and raised. So to expect these people to know the very capacities and capabilities that were, you know, kind of invested in the previous governments, staff and you know that young men and women who went abroad, got master's degrees, PhDs, training building capacities both internally and externally outside of the country. I think it's just not fair to compare the Taliban to expect them to deliver the same services in the same format as the previous administration, did. They're simply not going to be able to do that, period. Unless, of course, you know, my frustration is, the world knew that. The world knew, in 2017, when the Trump administration, you know, sent a delegation led by Khalilzad to negotiate with the Taliban, they should have done their homework to understand who the Taliban were, in what capacity were they going to negotiate with them, and by completely neglecting the Afghan government, in this process of so called peace talks, they've, they kind of empowered the Taliban, and kind of ratified the Taliban to make the Taliban think that they were such great beings that they could potentially run a nation state called Afghanistan. And so, you know, the responsibility, in my opinion, really, is put on the U.S. administration under Trump's administration, who began the process, and then the Biden administration without taking the time to assess and to analyze what these supposed peace talks could lead to, and by completely neglecting and not supporting the the Afghan Republic, you know, government in place, the Biden administration made the mistake of turning its head away from the government that was intact. And the decisions led to the fall of the Republic, which was an automatic win for the Taliban. And of course, nobody prepared for how the Taliban were going to govern this country, or whether they're capable of, of it or not. But I laugh at some of the recommendations or requests by the international community towards Taliban, for example, the U.N. and the U.S. administration constantly calls for the Taliban administration to be inclusive - and I laugh at that, because when we talk about inclusivity, there's a promise there's an understanding of some logic and some sense prior to opening up and becoming inclusive. And why are we expecting the Taliban, and how are we even expecting the Taliban to have those values intact? And then in retrospect, if we are honest and truly honest with ourselves, were some of the elements in the government of Afghanistan, you know, since 2001, were they inclusive in their activities, particularly the security sector? Were we inclusive in making sure that all elements of Afghanistan or all people of Afghanistan were included in the, you know, foot soldiers in the leadership positions of the security sector? It was predominantly led by one particular group of people in Afghanistan, and they had a monopoly over this. So I sit and reflect on these conversations, which kind of make me think that it's a deja vu, you know, when the Republic was intact, and certain elements of the Republic were very exclusive in their operation of how they ran and managed their institutions, now those same people are asking and demanding the Taliban to be inclusive. I just don't think that there's deep enough conversations around this issue to understand who the Taliban are, what their mission and vision is in this, and for me, it's clear the Taliban's vision is not to govern a democratic country, providing service to all its citizens and people and whether the mass majority of the population is happy or not, is not a mandate of their policy. And to expect them otherwise, is probably a wishful thinking. And if the international community wants them to change to that mindset, then I think the international community needs to reinvest like they did with the Republic for another 20 or so years to build their capacity, give them the training, give them the appropriate attention for them to change their mindset as well, because I don't think it's fair to expect the Taliban to deliver services as some of our leaders did in the past 20 years.

Chip Gruen: 1:05:12

So we started off on kind of a personal note, and I want to finish up and bookend our conversation on another personal note. So what's next for Rangina Hamidi? What does the future hold for you, both in the United States, and potentially one day in Afghanistan?

Rangina Hamidi: 1:05:31

Thank you. And I like the fact that you've included Afghanistan because it has not left my soul, or my heart or my mind. I'm forever grateful to my adopted home of America because my upbringing, my educational experience, what I think and who I am today is largely due to the experience of having been brought up in a country like America. However, in the global community that we've all become to be, nation states, in my mind, don't really have that much value anymore. Because I really do see myself and the global community as you know, one, one in the sense of we're all one ultimately, yes, there are these symbolic boundaries that we've created from and we've inherited from, from centuries before us that define each country as with its boundary, but with the technology and the way how the global community works, and our ability to communicate within seconds with people across the globe, I really don't see myself bound to one boundary versus another. I really do see myself as a global citizen. And I know that within my body and my soul, I share two, two geographies - one being Afghanistan, where I was born and where my roots are from, and then the other is about is the geography of America where I was raised, and I've become an adult here, and my thought process has developed here. The past 20 years, when I went to Afghanistan, I really did it partly because it was to serve, you know, my people that I that I share roots with, but also to serve as a bridge between my adopted home of America and my birth home of Afghanistan. And I did the best that I could to make sure that the values and the principles and the work ethics and the work practices were kind of exchanged between those, those two societies and I think at a personal level, I did my best to dispel myths about each and every country, to the other country, and to the people and the citizens living. And I'll continue doing that, I'll continue doing that, in my capacity that I'm away from Afghanistan for the time being, primarily because I have a young daughter, and she would be she is in seventh grade today, so if I had lived in Afghan, if I'd remained in Afghanistan, she would not have the opportunity to continue her education. So I have made the selfish, motherly decision of enabling my own daughter to have a future. So that is why I'm here in the United States right now. But my continuation to serve as a bridge to make understandings between these two people and now it happens to be on the American side. I am talking to various groups, you know, having this conversation with you and having the listeners listen to me, hopefully, my hope is that they've learned and that they've understood a little bit of the complexity of what Afghanistan is all about. And when the future possibility comes, and there's an opportunity for me to return back to Afghanistan, to serve, to serve the millions of women and girls that I've left behind, I will gladly pack my bags to go back. Because I really don't, I've never lived for the luxury, or the peace and stability of being in America, which is important. But I lived through the bomb blasts, the gunshots, the you know, I've paid the sacrifice of my dad and my best friend's head to this to this nonsense war in Afghanistan. And when I, when I assumed that leadership role of Minister of Education, I knew every single day that I could be attacked. I mean, I was I was leading that Ministry at a very critically violent time in the period of Afghanistan's history, but yet I did it because for me, the fight towards what I was fighting against or working towards, was much more important than the risk that I that I had in front of me. So this is this is how I live, who knows what the future holds for me. But I know both of these countries are near and dear to my heart. And wherever I might be physically, morally and emotionally, I'm going to be committed to working towards peace and development and prosperity for all people all over the world, particularly in a country as devastated as my birth country, Afghanistan.

Chip Gruen: 1:10:34

So we've talked a little bit about the various regions of Afghanistan, you've talked a little bit about, I mean, obviously, there's a region around Kabul, there is Kandahar, where you're from. There is a lot of diversity in the different people, the different regions. And then another part of that is the religious diversity. I mean, we know that Islam is the religion that is dominant in Afghanistan. But yet that's not even one thing, either, that there's lots of variety there. How do you see the religious context of Afghanistan playing into education, governance, your work at the Ministry?

Rangina Hamidi: 1:11:19

That's a very deep and important question. And thank you for asking. There's, you know, there was a discovery, internal mental discovery that I made, which was taking my religious studies background, I have a double major in Religious Studies and Women's Studies from the University of Virginia, with a focus on Islam, but it is more comparative religion background in monotheistic religions, so Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And I thought that when I, what I was going to Afghanistan that there was this monolithic one version of Islam that I had studied, and I knew from my, from my experience, and my background, growing up in America, and the exposure that I had to Muslim communities here. When I went back to Afghanistan, I actually discovered that even though the name Islam is obviously something that we all hold and identify ourselves to, there are obviously different versions of Islam, not not that the creed or that the scripture has different versions, but the people who interpret Islam, of course, diversify it. And then of course, in Afghanistan there is the majority of the population is Sunni sect of Islam, but we also have a minority sect of Shia's, who also reside and live in and work in Afghanistan. And in the, in the education sector, what I guess the most interesting surprise that was made to me was that Afghanistan's historic literature or historic literatures around both Islamic values, but also just the Afghan identity values, the classic literatures included a very spiritual version of Islam, because remember, Sufism, which is the spiritual sect of the Islamic tradition, kind of developed in the region of Afghanistan, not Afghanistan, per se only, but in that in that geographic region, and so it has deep roots within the culture and within the society. And Rumi, as the greatest global author of last I heard was that Rumi's books have been the most translated into the greatest number of languages globally. The Ministry of Education of Afghanistan in 2020, had no reference to the literature, the rich classic literature that we had in the country as a as part of the curriculum. So we had stripped the curriculum out of the classic literature that kind of created the identity and served as the as creating the identity for Afghans in the past. And part of our reform agenda included rebringing or reviving those traditional classics back into the literature component of the curriculum, to revive those traditions back and to reignite that understanding of what it means to be a Muslim, a good human, a good Afghan in the sense. Because the you know, Rumi's literature is just is completely about that - it's about that self discovery, it's about that understanding who you are as a human in the time that you're born, or the reason for why you're born, it's about the relationship between you and God, and you as an individual, kind of taking ownership of defining that relationship, and then practicing it at your, you know, community level. And unfortunately, the four decades of war and destruction that my country and my people have seen, it has pushed people away from being in touch with their spirituality of the version of Islam that had for centuries been practiced in Afghanistan, but instead kind of pushed people to go into that dry political, you know, the Wahhabi version, which has definitely found its place, within the communities across Afghanistan, because it's the political violent version that has been introduced. And a lot of the youth has been mobilized around this idea of taking arms to become, you know, to be a jihadist or to play jihad, that in the literature aspect of the word jihad, remember that jihad means 70 different meanings. One of it is taking arms, the greatest of the definition, where the religious consensus across the globe is that it's an internal jihad, which is a spiritual jihad, which is you fight against your ego, as a person. And and that that was the kind of Islam that I grew up with, and that I admired and aspire to be is to be that constantly internal judge for criticizing and assessing the steps I take the decisions I make, and its impact on my community. And if we could have been able to divert the curriculum in that direction of Islamic studies, to kind of motivate Afghan individuals, boys and girls, to be those internal introspects to themselves, and really be the judge for their own actions, I think that could have transformed Afghan society and any society for that matter, into a much more responsible society where citizens, you know, take actions with precautions, and with the understanding that they're responsible for the actions that they take, which unfortunately, was not the case that I found. So I think there is still even a great room for reviving school curriculums, particularly in Muslim societies to kind of shift its focus more towards that intrinsic value and principle based spiritual Islamic awakenings among individual among children even, rather than this hardcore, militarized version of Islam that is politically driven by political leaders across the globe. And we attempted, we started the conversation, we attempted to bring this reform. Unfortunately, we didn't succeed it at the time. But hopefully, if there are opportunities in the future, not necessarily as Minister of Education, but I will continue to work towards reviving that the spiritual aspect of Islam within societies, because I really believe that Afghanistan more than any other country in the world today needs that spiritual awakening, to understand who we are, why we're here, and why are we going through the struggles that we have been going through for more than four decades. Because until and unless Afghans internalize this issue, and assess it and come to terms with it, with all the diversity that we have as a nation, and as a people, no outside force can solve this problem for us.

Chip Gruen: 1:19:20

So I'd like to follow up actually, just real quick, if you don't mind. So why do you think, so it seems like a very natural thing, that a Minister of Education, not that I'm not giving you credit for this very good idea, but it seems like from 2001 on, the idea of incorporating, you know, local culture, somebody like Rumi into the curriculum, I mean, that seems very natural and great idea, right? Why do you think that it took, you know, 20 years? Why was it excluded for so long? Do you think that there is, I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is that because of American involvement, and the ideas about church and state in the United States, that these sorts of values are being - I would argue, maybe improperly imported into a very different context. Is, does that make sense to you?

Rangina Hamidi: 1:20:14

It makes total sense, the battle between religious education versus the so called secular modern education. And, and you, you nailed it on this too, the donor community driven by this, we don't want to deal with religion. Yet, in a country that is titled The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and its very first article of the constitution states stated, it doesn't just state stated that Sharia law is above any other law, including the constitution of Afghanistan. How do you separate religion or spirituality from that community? And because Minister of Education's predominant funding, or almost 100% of the budget was coming from donor funding, they simply did not want to address it one, but second, it also entailed, you know, bold enough leadership, to be able to, you know, identify the obvious, and stick to it, regardless of whether people you know, your donor community or the stakeholders, like it or not, and this is this goes back to our conversation around politics, because politicians are very careful, individuals, they don't want to harm anybody, or you know, cause any dispute to anybody, because they're always thinking about their future. If they're, if they get into trouble with somebody or some entity or some stakeholder today, they might have to be responsible to answering that same stakeholder in the future for some other position or within another position. But someone like me, who had no interest in being responsible to various stakeholders, per se - for me, it was obvious as someone who had, you know, started in an international school with the foundation of Islamic values, because those were our three models, Islamic foundation, Afghan values, international curriculum, those were the three pillars that we started our work with, being the dual citizen of America and Afghanistan, having studied religion, and having gone and lived in a in a Muslim country of Afghanistan, for me it was obvious how important this component of the identity of the Afghan people was. And we cannot, even at the political level, the reason that the jihad in 1981, or 1979, after the coup of the Communist regime started in Afghanistan, was using Islam as an identity that was under threat. U.S. succeeded in breaking Russia apart in Afghanistan's fight, because we mobilized people around the notion of you're fighting this war, not because you're saving Afghanistan, from Russia, but because this is what God wants you to do. So God has always been part of the fight in Afghanistan, it continues to be the motivator, the Taliban fought for, you know, the last 20 years. Every time a suicide bomber, blew himself up and killed innocent people, that suicide bomber took pride in the fact that he was doing this for a greater cause, that was God's cause. So remember, Afghanistan never can be separated from its religion. And it's interesting, some of my colleagues or countrymen and women on international stages, get up today and say and talk about secular curriculum. Afghanistan never had a secular curriculum, never historically, even in the past 20 years with the international investment and the donor community there and you know, supposedly democracy - 30% of our curriculums time, even in the modern schools, was Islamic education. So Islam or religion has never really separated itself, from the day to day life of Afghan citizens whether they were living in the city or in the rural villages. However, of course, the rural villages hold onto those conservative ideologies that they think are religious or inspired by religion, much harder and much closer than the city dwellers because the city dwellers across the globe have a tendency of changing ideologies. But the core is always there and so my quest and my team's quest in trying to address the religious aspect of our teaching, to shift it's gear from the hardcore dry version of Islam that was being taught to our children, to make it more spiritually inspired, and bring that spiritual personal component into it so that it was more relevant to the individuals to the children to understand really, who they were and who they are as being born in this in this world in this particular time. I think that was a critically important step in the reform that we were trying to take. But, again, my predecessors I don't know why they didn't do it, because as you say, it was obvious, but my only understanding is probably because of the politics that they were trying to play, and I luckily didn't have to do that.

Chip Gruen: 1:26:10

All right, Rangina Hamidi, thank you very much for joining us on ReligionWise This has been great, all the best to you and whatever the future holds. Thank you very much.

Rangina Hamidi: 1:26:20

Thank you.

Chip Gruen: 1:26:24

This has been ReligionWise a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement. Please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.