This isn’t a dystopia. This is the reality of 2025.
In the soft morning light of Kabul, a young girl ties a piece of cloth across her left eye. It is not an accident. It is not a game. It is not a choice. She is not shielding her eye from dust, nor recovering from an injury. She is obeying. She is obeying a world that has told her: one eye is enough. One eye is all she deserves.
And as she lowers the veil, the world narrows. The sky collapses into a half-circle. Her sister’s face dissolves into a blur. The books she cannot read anyway vanish into darkness. The road beneath her feet feels longer, more dangerous, more jagged. She is not only half-blind. She is half-erased.
“One eye is enough to see.” That is what women are now told — officially, shamelessly — by a regime that has built its power on the systematic erasure of the female body, voice, and now, even vision. Women under the Taliban are no longer just veiled. They are being told to blind themselves.
And the most devastating part? The world has not stopped turning. Flights take off. Schools open. Social media scrolls on. And somewhere, a girl is learning how to live with only half a gaze.
And as a woman — even one oceans away — I feel it in my chest like a bruise I didn’t earn but carry anyway.
the Eye is Power
The eye has always been more than flesh. It has always been more than cornea and iris, more than pigment and pupil. The eye is memory. The eye is truth. The eye is witness. To see is not only to perceive light — it is to recognize injustice, to resist erasure, to remember what was stolen.
A woman’s glance has always been powerful. It is the quiet rebellion of looking when told to lower her gaze. It is the tenderness of mothers who teach through looks when words are forbidden. It is the boldness of lovers who find each other’s eyes in rooms filled with silence.
Telling a woman, she can look only through one eye is not an instruction. It is not fabric. It is not cloth. It is a verdict. A punishment disguised as decree. A mutilation of sight before the body is even touched. It is a statement whispered with violence:
You are not allowed to perceive the world fully.
You are not allowed to bear witness to its truth.
You are not allowed to live in your wholeness.
But the body — oh, the body is stubborn. The body remembers wholeness even when wholeness is forbidden. The body aches for what it once knew, and it mourns in silence for what it has lost. It mourns the horizon it can no longer meet. It mourns the faces blurred into half-darkness. It mourns the books it can no longer read, the path it cannot walk with confidence, the self it cannot recognize in the mirror.
One eye is survival. Two eyes are freedom. And freedom is what terrifies them.
And yet — the soul resists. The soul does not forget. The soul is louder than the patch, louder than the burqa, louder than the decree that attempts to blind it. Even under layers of fabric, even behind sewn-shut curtains of fear, even in silence where language itself is dangerous — the soul screams. It screams in the pitch of memory, in the timbre of rage, in the echo of longing.
And that scream — invisible, inaudible, unstoppable — is the very thing they cannot control. For no matter how many eyes they cover, the soul has always known how to see
This Is Not About Religion. This Is About Control.
It is always easy — dangerously easy — for outsiders to point at violence against women and shrug it off as religion. But that is the laziest lie. Islam, in its truest essence, has never asked women to blind themselves. The Prophet’s wives were not shadows; they were scholars, warriors, entrepreneurs, thinkers — women who stood in the marketplace, who carried knowledge across generations, who spoke and were listened to. Islam gave women inheritance when Europe treated them as property. Islam gave women consent when the rest of the world gave them silence. Islam gave women leadership when patriarchy gave them nothing but chains.
No, this isn’t faith. This is theft. This is faith stolen, gutted, hollowed, and then draped like a mask over the face of control. This is not piety — it is piety weaponized. It is patriarchy wrapped in scripture like barbed wire, sharp enough to wound, holy enough to silence dissent. This is a regime so fragile in its masculinity, so terrified of the gaze of women, that it cannot bear the idea of being looked at.
The veil — once meant to be a personal act of modesty, privacy, intimacy with God — has been twisted into a mechanism of disappearance. It is no longer a choice, no longer devotion. It is erasure.
It is not enough, they believe, to silence a woman’s voice. She must also be unseen.
It is not enough to deny her education, her laughter, her name in the streets. Now, even her gaze must be punished, as if two open eyes are an act of revolution too great to permit.
And so the question hangs heavy: What else is left to take when even the act of looking is forbidden?
What Kind of Fear Must ONE Feel to Police a Gaze?
There is something disturbingly poetic about the Taliban’s fear of the eye. Something almost tragic about how much weight they give to a woman’s glance. For them, the eye is too sharp, too dangerous, too alive. They see it as a weapon. A rebellion. A storm contained in a single look.
To them, a woman looking is threat. A woman seeing is revolt. A woman noticing is too much power in the hands of someone they have reduced to an object.
But here is where their cruelty betrays them: they do not understand the nature of sight. They do not understand that when a woman sees, she also remembers. And memory is a form of resistance no decree can extinguish.
A woman who has once seen freedom, once tasted light, once recognized her own face in the mirror, will never fully belong to her captors again. You can cover her eyes, but you cannot erase the landscapes etched in her memory. You can blind her with fabric, but you cannot unteach her how to want.
And a woman who wants — who burns with the memory of wholeness — is already dangerous. Already unstoppable. Already freer than the men who try to own her.
The Slow Death of Identity
Imagine this: you are born a girl in Kabul. You take your first steps with laughter, your bare feet meeting dust, your hair untamed by the laws that have yet to catch you. You run through courtyards chasing shadows, you learn to recognize the shape of your mother’s smile, you hold books with the wide-eyed hunger of a child who has not yet been told that curiosity is a crime.
For a while, you are simply alive — a child like any other, unburdened by shame. But then, slowly, the walls begin to close in. They do not come all at once; they arrive like a creeping shadow at dusk, like a hand that first hovers before it presses down. They begin to carve you away, piece by piece, until you no longer recognize the fullness of the self you once inhabited.
You are told to stay inside.
You are told your voice is shameful.
You are told your laughter is dangerous.
You are told your name must never echo in public.
You are told your dreams are delusions.
What remains of you when even perception is declared a crime? What survives when vision itself is stripped away? The patch that seals one eye is not fabric, not cloth, not mere modesty. It is a state-sanctioned mutilation of selfhood, a cage stitched directly into the body. With one eye forced shut, you cannot look in the mirror and meet yourself whole. You cannot read clearly, letters bending into blur. You cannot recognize your sister’s face without hesitation. You cannot walk confidently down a path, depth and distance lost to the narrowing of sight. You cannot feel like a full person because a full person requires both vision and the right to use it.
Because to be human is to see. Seeing is not merely a physical act; it is how we learn, how we connect, how we witness, how we belong in the world. To see is to hold light, to take it in and to offer it back. The human soul is wired for vision, for clarity, for the gaze that affirms existence. And yet what they want is not human. What they want is obedience. What they want is silence. What they want is darkness — a darkness deep enough to extinguish not only sight but the very belief that sight was ever yours to claim.
For Women Everywhere, This Is a Mirror
It is easy, as a woman far away, to look at Afghanistan and feel separate. I can walk in the street. I can wear jeans. I can meet a man’s gaze without fear of punishment. I can go to school, raise my voice, choose my love. And yet, even as I hold these freedoms in my hands, I know the distance between me and that girl in Kabul is thinner than I want to believe. I know that my privileges are fragile, conditional, always negotiable in a world that still measures women by how quiet they are, how covered they are, how obedient they are.
Because control is not only exercised through bombs and decrees. Control seeps into curfews, into the length of a hemline, into the casual order to “smile more,” into the chastisement to “sit properly,” into the whispered warning not to be “too ambitious.” It is written in bosses who dismiss women’s contributions, in strangers who feel entitled to harass, in families who love but still pull their daughters back from the horizon. These are not Taliban checkpoints, but they are checkpoints all the same — invisible borders that women learn to navigate every day.
Afghanistan, then, is not an anomaly. It is the loudest scream of a truth we already know: patriarchy is global. Sometimes it shouts with brute violence, sometimes it whispers with a smile, but it is always the same song, the same tightening grip around a woman’s life. Afghan women are not “other.” They are mirrors. They show us the ugliest, loudest form of what women everywhere endure in quieter tones.
And if they are mirrors, then our reflection demands something of us. We who live far away are not powerless. But we are responsible. It is easy to feel helpless, to scroll and sigh and weep and then move on. But that moving on is itself a privilege. Silence is a luxury. Forgetting is a luxury. Afghan women do not have that luxury — their very bodies are battlegrounds, their very eyes censored. And so women everywhere have a duty to each other, not out of pity, but out of sisterhood, out of the recognition of shared survival, out of the knowledge that our freedoms are interdependent.
If one woman is chained, none of us is truly free. And so we must speak, even when it feels small. We must write, even when it feels like shouting into a storm. We must amplify Afghan voices, fund women-led organizations on the ground, protest and disrupt and demand. We must refuse to let the world look away. Because to look away is to agree.
LET HER sEE. LET HER BREATHE.
These are not requests but prayers, not soft wishes but demands written into the very marrow of what it means to be human.
To the girl in Afghanistan who ties a strip of fabric across her eye each morning — I do not know your name, though I wish I did. I do not know the exact shade of your iris, though I imagine it holds the light of a thousand untold stories. I do not know if your uncovered eye meets the mountains or only the dust that hangs heavy in the air. But I know this: I see you, even across oceans. I see you in the tremor of headlines, in the silence between words, in the weight that hangs on every photograph of a woman half-erased.
And I need you to know — you are not the shame. You are not the silence. You are not the weakness they pretend you embody. You are the story. You are the evidence. You are the living proof that fear wears a mask of power because it has nothing else. They do not fear you because you are small, they fear you because you are infinite. They fear your eye not because it falters, but because it remembers. They fear your vision not because it is dim, but because it carries the light of memory, of truth, of possibility. Even when half-blinded, you see more than they ever could — because you see the world as it should be, and they cannot bear that clarity.
One day, when the tide turns — and tides always turn, no matter how long the night holds back the sea — you will take off the patch. You will look at the horizon with both eyes open, not squinting into survival but standing in fullness. You will write your story in your own language, in your own voice, not the fractured whispers smuggled through the voices of others. And when that day comes, we will not listen with pity, for pity diminishes. We will listen with reverence, for reverence restores.
But until that day, you must know this: we are not blind. We are watching with both our eyes open. We are raging with both our hearts full. We are refusing the luxury of looking away. Your fight is not yours alone. Your scream is not contained within borders. Your future, however distant it may feel, is bound up in ours.
And no decree, no fabric, no cage disguised as modesty, no violence written into law can ever cover the truth: that you were always meant to see the whole horizon, that the sky itself bends to hold you, that light belongs to you as much as air does.
You were born not to half-exist, not to peer through slits, not to stumble through shadows, but to see everything, to claim everything, to live unbroken. And no matter what they try to stitch shut, the truth of that will outlive them.
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