Today’s New Verse News: UNIVERSITY WOMAN
by Tamam Kahn
Female students are stopped by Taliban security at a university in Kabul, on 21 December 2022 (AFP via Middle East Eye)
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We the Taliban will make you go quiet. We want an empty blackboard. We the Taliban are erasing the rights of each one with breasts and a vagina and a clitoris. Each girl-student and female professor splashes silenced outrage into a ruptured world, zig-zags suspense back and forth across her mind, hides a spaded heart raw with hiccups. Each one cracks open a brain-leak of stories and poems, stashed backpacks of notebooks filled with foundational work, knowledge, science— all soon to be academic ditch-litter.
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Tamam Kahn is the author two books on women of early Islam. Untold, A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, (Monkfish Books, 2010), and Fatima’s Touch, (Ruhaniat Press, 2016). Both won International Book Awards. Tamam believes that sharing the lives of women, famous or in difficulty, helps bring awareness and change into today’s difficult times. She lives near San Francisco, California.