Homeira Qaderi: ‘We are not going back to the dark ages’

The best-selling author of "Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son" on the Taliban’s brutal return to power, and what she hopes for future generations of Afghan girls and women.

Afghan girls walking in the mountains near Chagcharan, Aug. 25, 2012 (iStock)

By Homeira Qaderi

The women of Afghanistan are the victims of wars fought by domestic male warriors supported by foreign male warriors.

For four decades, Afghan women have agonized under the dark shadow of warriors and warlords. For them, life is defined by death, demise and destruction. They move on from one ruined home to the next, only to see more ruins. They have lost their husbands, fathers and brothers, and have repeatedly ended up shouldering the burden of rebuilding their ruined lives.

Since the fall of Kabul and the exit of U.S. troops, the world community knows that these days, as in the past, the women of Afghanistan suffer in fear, shock and confusion as the dark shadow of the Taliban and their darker thoughts lurk in the background. But in the fogged perception of the world community with its attention deficit, these news flashes hardly register for more than a few seconds.

“When I was a teenager, th…