Nadia Anjuman

Nadia Anjuman (Persian: نادیا انجمن‎‎; December 27, 1980 – November 4, 2005) was a poet from Afghanistan.

Life

In 1980, Nadia Anjuman Herawi was born in the city of Herat in northwestern Afghanistan. She was one of six children, raised during one of Aghanistan’s more recent periods of tumult. In September 1995, the Taliban captured Herat and ousted the then-Governor of the Province, Ismail Khan. With the new Taliban government in power, women had their liberties drastically restrained. A gifted student in her tenth year of schooling, Anjuman now faced a future with no hope for education, as the Taliban shut the schools for girls and denied any instruction to her and her peers.

As a teenager, Anjuman rallied with other local women and began attending an underground educational circle called the Golden Needle Sewing School, organized by the young women and mentored by Herat University professor Muhammad Ali Rahyab in 1996. Members of the Golden Needle School would gather three times a week under the guise of learning how to sew (a practice approved by the Taliban government), while in actuality the meetings enabled them to hear lectures from Herat University professors and lead discussions on literature. If caught, the likely punishment was imprisonment, torture, and possibly hanging. In order to protect themselves, the attendants had their children play outside the building and act as lookouts. They would alert the women of approaching religious police, at which point the students would hide their books and take up needlework. The program continued through the entirety of the Taliban governmental rule.