My plan for today’s assembly is to talk about an issue of discrimination and oppression. This has been our stated objective throughout Resilience for a Better Tomorrow and I wouldn’t want to let the side down or disappoint you. I shall, however, approach it circuitously and through poetry – as is idiomatic. To get to the poetry with no further ado, I offer you a stanza from my favourite poet, W.B. Yeats and his Fiddler of Dooney:
The good are always the merry
Save by an evil chance
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance.
I think that this thesis doesn’t stand up to sociological or philosophical interrogation but it’s poetry rather than social science and poetically I love the idea that joy, merriment is not just good in itself, but is an outward sign of goodness and, I think, a propagator of goodness: sharing of innocent pleasure is fun, those who delight in it are likely to value that which delights others, and in sharing we come together, recognise and value each other’s humanity.
The good are always the merry and for merriment we go to Iceland, the westernmost and least-densely populated country in Europe. It has the oldest surviving parliament in the world, originally located at Thingvellir, an acoustically convenient location in the rift valley formed by the separation of European and American tectonic plates. It has a beach made from Tunisian sand with water warmed geothermally – in fact, it has so much geothermal energy that its economy feels upside down – its isolated so importing is expensive, but electricity is almost free: growing tomatoes in an artificial greenhouse on the arctic circle is cheaper than bringing them from Spain. Iceland has a democratically elected government led by Katrin Jacobsdottir, comes second in the world on strength of democratic institutions, has a phone directory ordered by first name, a set of MPs, 48% of whom are female (the global average is 16%), and a literacy rate of 99%.
They have a long poetic history, including a series of medieval sagas, one of which begins with the story of Fiddle Mord: There was a man named Mord and his surname was Fiddle and he dwelt in the Rangrivervales. He was a mighty chief, and so great a lawyer that no judgments were thought lawful unless he had a hand in them. He had an only daughter, named Unna. She was a fair, courteous and gifted woman.I love both that Fiddle Mord’s greatness is based in his skill as a lawyer and that his daughter is an important part of his story.
Iceland also have a cricket team, whose account I follow on BlueSky – they are a complete joy and too pure for Musk’s Twitter. They first played in 2018, a match they won against Switzerland and they plan, one day, to have associate membership of the International Cricket Council which doesn’t seem outside the realms of possibility since there are 96 such countries including, most recently, Cambodia, Cote D’Ivoire and Uzbekistan. I guess they’ll have to brush the snow off the pitch first. Associate members have limited voting rights and don’t play Test Matches – to do that you need to be a full member, of which there are only 12, the most recent being Afghanistan and Ireland.
Cricket in Afghanistan is a really interesting success story – an attempt to bring the country into the international community. It became popular in the 1990s among Afghan refugees in Pakistan who brought it back with them when they returned home in 2001. The refugees were fleeing the Soviet occupation which started in 1979 but whose origins date back to the 19th century and the Great Game in which the British and Russian empires were in competition to control central Asia of which Afghanistan is at the heart – long before the Soviet invasion there were three Anglo-Afghan wars, the first of which, in 1842, saw the massacre of the British army as it retreated from Kabul, the last stand at Gandamak recorded in an 1898 painting, just one survivor making it back to Jallabad. You might, by the way, have expected the British to introduce cricket to Afghanistan whilst they were there. The officers did play, they just didn’t teach it to anyone.
Over the last few decades, however, it’s really taken off – it’s an exception to the Taliban ruling against recreational activities. Afghanistan became an affiliate member of the ICC in 2001 (the distinction between affiliate and associate membership has since been eliminated). They beat Namibia in 2009 and became an official One Day International country; they competed in the World Cup in 2015, beating Scotland by one wicket and coming second in their other matches; in 2017 they gained test status, playing against India in 2018 – again coming second; and in the 2023 World Cup they beat England for the first time. Cricket is for many in Afghanistan the only thing that makes them happy, light in a country of dust, violence and religious extremism.
The religious extremism overlaps with the cricket when it comes to the national women’s team – they were founded in 2010 and were allowed to play in one tournament before being disbanded. They were refounded in 2020 but before they could play any matches the Taliban took control of the country and banned women’s sport. There is a women’s team but the members, like the women who represented Afghanistan at the Paris Olympics, are refugees who have fled their homeland – the cricket team are based in Melbourne, Australia. In Afghanistan itself the ban on sport is almost the least of the ways in which female life is restricted.
Perhaps the worst impositions in a litany of abuse are the restrictions on healthcare. From December women have been banned from training in nursing and midwifery – in a country that has 620 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The figure in Iceland is 2.7 – at least partly due to the number of well-trained and literate midwives.
As well as the claim that the restrictions are placed on women to avoid exciting men – an argument that rests on a very negative view of men – the Taliban say that they have these laws to protect women. It’s not my main point, but when this protection is provided by a regime that supports sexual violence, rape and torture of women in prisons, of marital rape and of execution of those who break the rules we can be pretty sure that there’s no way things would be worse if the protection were removed.
To be fair to the Taliban – and there’s plenty of space to be fair whilst also wholeheartedly condemning their intolerance and abuse – to be fair, this isn’t an issue that they introduced to Afghanistan: the official abuse of women can be traced back at least to the Durrani empire of the 18th century and probably further back as far as you like to look. There have been ups and downs, there are girls schools currently closed that were named in honour of Ayesha Durrani, an 18th century poet who wrote “At dusk prayer, I saw the sunset in the sky like a scarlet tulip but they killed the sun, blood spread covering her robe.” I think that’s just a beautiful poetic reflection on sunset, but it resonates with a reflection on the value the world places on female life. It’s a rare society, culture or religion that doesn’t have a history of denying women equal rights whether to protect them, avoid causing undue excitement, or simply because they were not considered capable of performing complex tasks such as might require the ownership of a penis. Patriarchy is the traditional cultural and religious way and we should, whilst we condemn the Taliban, reflect on our own position – we’ve had equal voting rights in this country for less than a hundred years and in the Church of England – the religious foundation behind the Abbey we’re in now – women gained the right to be priests during my lifetime and bishops during yours.
Seeking to control and constrain is a common human failing – imposing our values on others rather than celebrating difference and inviting them to dance, and I don’t think we have to accept it as part of the British Value of religious tolerance: being free to worship in your own way doesn’t mean being free to impose that way on others whether you do it socially, morally, legislatively or violently. We can look at cultures, societies and religions where the patriarchy remains and where women don’t have the same rights and freedoms as men and we can call out the sexism – although I would urge us all to do so sensitively and particularly to be scrupulous, to reflect on our own ways in preference to railing against others. Have I done that today? Fair question – feel free to drop me an email with your thoughts.
So where does this leave us? Maybe with the thought that the work of Resilience for a Better Tomorrow is not yet done, maybe with the fear that it never will be – that there will always be those who want to impose control on others, and always groups that lack the strength to resist. Maybe it leaves us with uncomfortable reflections on our own views and lives, maybe with the resolution that if we can’t fight the Taliban directly then we can fight the patriarchy, we can resist restrictions that societies place on women. Maybe we see hypocrisy in the ICC allowing Afghan men to compete in tests when the women are restricted, or in the England men who will play against them, but maybe we see hope that cricket will bring merriment to Afghanistan and that with merriment will come good.
And maybe we just want to hear another poem from an Afghan woman – this time from the 17th century, Nazo Ana, the mother of the Afghan nation.
Dew drops from an early dawn narcissus
As a tear drops from a melancholy eye;
O beauty, I asked, what makes you cry?
Life is too short for me, it answered,
My beauty blooms and withers in a moment,
As a smile which comes and forever fades away.
Poets writing of early dawn narcissus and sunset like a scarlet tulip; cricketers taking refuge in Australia and looking for opponents; midwives working in secrecy to reduce maternal death rates. Don’t go away thinking that the women of Afghanistan are powerless, faceless, characterless – although that’s what I fear the laws are trying to make them – they are people with dreams and skills and minds and bodies like you and me; searching for the resilience to face what today brings, hoping for a better tomorrow.
Footnotes
1. William Butler Yeats is enough of a favourite to be quoted extensively, but Kindred Spirits includes a selection of his brilliance.
2. The Iceland cricket team skeet as @icelandcricket.bsky.social.
3. Both Resilience for a Better Tomorrow and Afghanistan get a mention in Amar Sonar Bangla, but whilst the former is an annual fixture, this is the first assembly to engage extensively with the latter.