For millions of us around the world, driving a car is a simple, everyday thing.
But in very conservative Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, a woman behind the wheel is unseemly to many, downright obscene to some. Disapproval is strong and public reaction can run from crude to threatening. Women aren't encouraged to take the wheel and, as a result, their movements are limited.
That's where Shakila Naderi comes in...
'I'm not scared of them'
As Naderi told Miriam Arghandiwal, writing for Reuters, the morning after the Taliban fell she asked her taxi-driver husband to teach her to drive:
Now Kabul's only female driving instructor, she teaches women a rare skill that confronts harsh opposition in ultra-conservative, Muslim Afghanistan. “It bothers men when women drive," Naderi, 45, said from behind her desk in her four-room driving school near Kabul's city centre, decorated with traffic signs and instructions in her native Dari. "But I wasn't scared of them then and I am not scared of them now"...
Unlike Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan permits women to drive. But there's a lot of opposition. Naderi's own daughters are forbidden to drive by their husbands' families.
Passengers no more
Business at the Naderi Driving School was slow at first. But now she teaches classes of up to 80 women, and record numbers of driving licences are being issued to women. One middle-aged client described what driving means to her:
The mother of two teen daughters has a disabled husband and cannot afford to take taxis with fares of 300 Afghani ($5.50) per ride. She walks for hours around Kabul every day dropping her kids off at school and buying food. "I never opened a book in my life besides the holy Koran, I never entered through the doors of a school," said Obedi, who is illiterate like most Afghan women. "I got married and felt imprisoned, but now I can control things and I feel like I've been set free."
Naderi says men still harass her sometimes, but she knows how to deal with it: "I react to them as men would... Once I got out of my car, yelled back and slapped one so hard he bled. Then I got back into the car to teach the girls."
Further viewing: Watch this 2006 BBC documentary about the first driving school in Afghanistan to teach women after the fall of the Taliban.
