‘The Sisters'

Arzu Kaya Uranlı

I have followed the 58th session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations for the last two weeks. This year's theme was “Challenges and achievements in the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals for women and girls.” Women and girls' access to and participation in education, training, science and technology, including the promotion of women's equal access to full employment, were discussed in several meetings and side events.

I've been attending these meetings for 14 years now. In 2000, at the UN Millennium Summit, world leaders set ambitious goals to be achieved by 2015. They aimed for universal primary education, the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. I remember then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calling on businessmen to invest in the education of women as if it were yesterday.

This year there were many side events, and one of them was the Journalists and Writers Foundation's (GYV) panel on the topic of the education of Afghan girls on March 18.

The panel was dedicated to Afghanistan's struggle and progress towards educating its girls. Moderator and former UN Reuters correspondent Irwin Arieff, panelists Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Program Advisor for the Afghan Ministry of Education Dr. Attaullah Wahidyar, Permanent Representative of Afghanistan to the UN Dr. Zahir Tanin, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Sweden to the UN Marten Grunditz, top United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative on gender and human rights Anju Malhotra, and Dr. Semiha Topal, an associate professor in the department of sociology at Fatih University, talked about global political efforts to improve the education of girls and how public and private institutions might enable these girls to pursue and complete their education.

It was very enlightening to be informed about the current challenges to girls' education in Afghanistan. Malhotra talked about how they are giving crash courses to train female educators (because parents won't let their daughters go to school if there is a male teacher) and how they have built community-based education and mobile education options because in some parts of Afghanistan it is physically impossible to open school buildings.

Also, Dr. Topal, who had stayed in Afghanistan to do research on Turkish schools there, told us how these schools were succeeding in achieving an important role in Afghan education. After the program, I had a chance to talk to Dr. Topal. I was curious about those heroes, the unnamed female Turkish teachers.

Dr. Topal informed me that in Kandahar there are 10 Turkish families. Only four of these women are teachers, while the rest are there to take care of the families. Their everyday lives are very tough. When these women need to go out, they wear a long black dress from head to toe and a face veil. Even though their husbands are with them, they are still uncomfortable about the potential danger they could be faced with at any moment when they are out, because it is not acceptable in Kandahar to see women on the street. There is a serious shortage of electricity and they have electricity only five hours a day, while the rest of the time they are without power.

Nevertheless, these families have dared to raise their own kids in Kandahar with very basic living standards just to help the community, show a good example and change this wrong interpretation of the Islamic approach to educating girls.

I knew how active women are in the Hizmet movement, as they hold many wonderful events in the US, but the exceptional stories Dr. Topal shared with me about their selflessness, devotion and virtues were more than I could imagine.

Then I realized why the Turkish prime minister is so afraid of the women of the Hizmet movement, our sisters. During his election campaign he has repeatedly spoken about them in a hostile tone. I was heartbroken to hear the prime minister say, “The sisters will come to your doors to convince you to vote for others. Kick them away from your door." Being a feminist at heart, it is unbearable for me to hear his hate speech against them. Also, I sincerely believe that their mentality was not set on such an action. They wouldn't go door-to-door for political reasons, but they go to distribute aşüre desserts or invitations to a friendship dinner or social gathering to make the world a better place. All they do is pray for goodness.

I now understand better why the sisters are threatening to him. They are sensitive and caring in feeling someone else's pain and hearing their struggle. The sisters are also unbreakable because they are strong, persistent and patient. Worst of all, they do not care for the material world. No one can stop them because they do not do anything hoping for a reward and they do not care about recognition. They do whatever they can just to serve humankind and receive divine bliss. Humanity needs their devoted hearts to fight back against the heartless cruelty of others.

So Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has to accept that he is wrong. The sisters don't deserve to be kicked away from our doors but to be carried on our shoulders.

Published on Today's Zaman, 22 March 2014, Saturday