Girls savour challenge and freedom of sport

Their head scarves kept slipping with every high kick. Their toes and knuckles scraped the concrete floor during warm-up stretches. Their lungs and muscles, unused to any exercise, tired easily.

"Try to take as much pain as you can stand,'' urged Mahbooba Rezahi, 17, the instructor of the only martial arts class for girls in the Afghan capital.

There were only nine students in Rezahi's tae kwon do class at the Afghan Youth Club this morning – a fraction of the 300 boys who attend its martial arts classes in the evenings.

There were 13 girls participating until last week, when police came and locked the clubhouse doors twice, unnerving some of the teenage students and their parents.

Vigorous exercise, long an unquestioned staple of education for young people of both sexes in the West and in much of the developing world, is still controversial for girls in Afghanistan. After a decade of conservative rule, a concept as daring and exotic as girls' martial arts is especially suspect.

"All my friends advised me not to come here. They said it was dangerous and not something girls should do,'' said Shugufa Sarwali, 17, a member of the club. "But this is fun, and it makes me feel stronger. If we don't take the first steps, we will never be equal to men in Afghanistan.''

Perhaps not surprisingly, the impetus for the club has come from Afghan refugees who recently returned from long exile in Iran, a country where girls and women have far more opportunities for self-development.

Rezahi, the instructor, lived most of her life in Iran; so did the club's male founder, Sayed Jawad Hussaini, 31, who returned from Iran last year.

It is not only the promotion of girls' sports, however, that has conservative groups and local police forces up in arms against the Afghan Youth Club.

Hussaini and his associates, mostly ethnic minority Hazaras, have been challenging Kabul's conservative establishment on a variety of fronts, and without mincing words. "The police came here last month and beat us even before we had opened our building,'' Hussaini said.

Most police officers in Kabul are former members of the militias that defeated the Taliban in 2001, but are almost as conservative in their views toward women and on other issues.

The Afghan Youth Club has received promotional support from the Information and Culture Ministry and from AINA, an internationally funded media and culture centre here.

Last week, Rezahi and several of her students performed some basic martial arts moves at an outdoor show organised by AINA, a risque spectacle by Afghan standards despite the students' bulky belted robes and head scarves.

Even official support, though, carries relatively little weight in the intense social and cultural struggle that has engulfed the country in the past two years as it attempts to find a balance between traditional values and 21st-century opportunities.

©Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service