Unsung Hero: The Courage of Khan Mohammad

I keep a folder on my computer of attacks against girls' education in Afghanistan. It's full of stories of gas poisonings of girls' schools, murdered teachers, beheaded principles, arson of school buildings, acid attacks, and threats and 'night letters' warning communities to not send their daughters to school. It's a bulging folder.

Yesterday I added a new article, a story of less than 500 words in The Guardian reporting the murder of Khan Mohammad, a local man who headed the Porak Girls' School in Logar province. There are sparse details about Khan's life or the exact circumstances of his death, other than to mention that he was shot near his home and his son was injured in the attack. The rest of the article gives very basic background on the Taliban and discusses the findings of an unnamed February report on girls' education in Afghanistan (it's this report), as if to bulk up the story for lack of more to say.

It's tempting to file it away without further thought, just one more tragic story out of Afghanistan, for which there is never any shortage.

But Khan Mohammad's story was a triumph before it was a tragedy. Only the triumphant part was untold and unexamined by news audiences more hungry for blood and sorrow, or for the idolization of celebrity foreigners followed by scandal and swift tumbles from grace.

Khan Mohammad was doing something extraordinary with his life and likely no one beyond his rural province in eastern Afghanistan knew about it. He likely wasn't rich, he likely held no delusions of grandeur, and he likely faced opposition from more than just the Taliban for what he was doing. Running schools in Afghanistan in insecure, rural areas is no picnic. If the schools have a building, they usually lack the most basic of infrastructure like latrines, electrical power, heating, or science labs. The teachers are usually untrained and it's next to impossible to find female teachers to teach girls, especially for the secondary level. Teachers often go unpaid for months as they face delays getting their salaries from the Ministry of Education; and even then, teaching is hardly a lucrative career, at US$120/month for a certified, experienced teacher. Families are often loathe to send their girls to school for a variety of reasons, from insecurity to cultural constraints to the long distances between school and home in areas where girls' schools are sparse. Making girls' education accessible in these circumstances is very much an uphill battle. Then throw in the Taliban.

The Guardian article does tell us that Khan Mohammad had repeatedly been threatened by the Taliban. According to Logar's education director, "Mohammad had received several death threats from the Taliban warning him not to teach girls." The Taliban tend to make good on their threats.

But Khan Mohammad ran the school anyways. He thought the girls' school should stay open and so he kept it open, a decision that cost him his life. It was a risk he would have been well aware of.

He received no international prizes, no visits from Anjelina Jolie, no donations from abroad, no glowing newspaper interviews. He just quietly disappeared from this earth one day, for the reason that he believed girls had a right to go to school.

All across Afghanistan there are other Khan Mohammads. They are men and women born with a streak of courage, willing to go against the grain and to be positive deviants. They often pay dearly for their persistence in doing the thing that seems right if unpopular, from attracting stigma in communities where the norm is for girls to stay at home and be groomed for a sole destiny of child-bearing, to giving their life in a violent, unacknowledged end. Their murders are usually barely noted, unreported in the outside media, who prefer instead to focus on another kind of deviant, the Taliban, as if it were this minority of sociopathic militant extremists who best represented who the Afghans are.

But Khan Mohammad tells us that we might find something far more fascinating in the hidden pockets of Afghanistan's rugged terrain than our fixation on the Taliban and their ilk. If we care to look, we might find something ultimately more powerful and more significant, and that is those individuals who selflessly and independently fight the nihilistic ideology of the Taliban in isolated villages and towns, fueled by nothing other than a penetrating sense of right and wrong and a conviction of the power of education to make things better.

At the Porak Girls' Schools, an uncertain future confronts a group of girls who have lost their champion for their right to go to school. But Khan Mohammad also leaves in his wake a legacy that may prove to be just enough impetus to give at least some of those girls the courage to continue his fight.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.