Strength in Numbers
The story of Afghanistan's cyclists is a vital lesson in taking up space
Throughout my lifetime, western politicians and media patronized Afghan women by portraying them as helpless and oppressed. My first memory of Afghan women is the photo of Steve McCurry’s ‘Afghan Girl.’ I was probably ten years old when I saw the face of an Afghan refugee, not much younger than myself, on the cover of the iconic yellow-bordered magazine in my parent’s house. Her image is known globally decades later, but not her name. I would even see her face recreated as paintings inside school classrooms in Kabul. Her photo, while hauntingly beautiful, reinforced an idea of Afghan girls and the life they endured. Poverty, oppression, hardship.
I was forty-one when the world finally learned her name. But Sharbat Gula never gave permission for her photo to be taken and never received any money for making a white, western, man a wealthy, sought-after photographer and household name off her nameless image. Sharbat was a refugee. She was a victim of the US-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan. Her story was not one of an oppressed victim of Afghan society. Those stories would come later after the Taliban took control; those stories would have no haunting eyes. They would be faceless, covered by blue burqas. Still nameless, though. They would cement the mythology of Afghanistan as an oppressive culture that despised women’sfreedoms because they are Muslim and, therefore, must be taught how to respect women by the West. Never mind that the U.S. was erasing women's rights at home while bombing Afghanistan in the name of feminism. The propaganda worked. We were occupying Afghanistan to save the women.
Afghan women in the '60s were not much different than American women. But we need to flip that sentence for more accuracy. American women were not that different than Afghan women. In the 60s, Afghan women had more rights than American women, and unlike in the United States, their rights were protected constitutionally. Afghan women gained the right to vote in 1919—a year before white women in the U.S. and decades before Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and other women of color who had to wait until the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
When the Taliban came to power in the 90s, Afghan women lost everything. They lost the right to vote, the right to go to school, to work, to leave the house without a male escort, and a hundred other rules, enforced by beatings, public stonings, jail, and death. Afghan women had precisely twenty years to rebuild their rights and foundational institutions before the Taliban seized control again. It only took days before they went into hiding and started destroying or hiding their identities, and within months, the Taliban had erased their rights again. Today, just three and a half years later, the sound of Afghan women’s voices is banned in public. That’s how quickly you can be erased by your government.
A decade earlier, young women like Fereshta* challenged the gender barrier keeping her and her peers off bikes. She was among the first of her generation to ride bike and teach other girls to ride. Like the bike-riding suffragettes in my country a century before, their actions opened the door for a generation of girls to ride. The Afghan National Women's Team became National Geographic Adventurers of the Year in 2015. They were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the same year. They were subjects of international documentary films, museum exhibitions, international marketing campaigns, and numerous books and magazine articles in multiple languages. They saw little of it themselves in Afghanistan, but the world saw them and celebrated their bravery. Afghan teenagers changed their communities and culture, their families, and their country on two wheels. They rode despite the open threats, the harassment, and the knowledge that they risked dishonor for their entire family.
I didn't just witness the development of women's cycling in Afghanistan; I rode alongside it. I trained with the first Afghan Women's National Cycling Team on clogged, dusty highways north of Kabul, and I rode with the first women's club on the serene rural roads in the mountain of Bamyan. I championed the resistance and the revolution and interrogated the parallels to the U.S. and UK suffragette movements a century earlier that took place on bicycles. It was a privilege to watch and support these young women as they built a right-to-ride movement.
When I first began working in Afghanistan in 2008, I saw bicycles everywhere. They were weaving through the congested traffic of Kabul. They cruised down empty, dusty, rural roads in the Panjshir mountains. They hugged the side of the highways as brightly painted "jingle trucks" vied for space with the army of white Corollas and motorcycles. Kids chased each other through alleyways. Old and young riding to work, market sellers pulling wooden trailers of vegetables and fruit, students riding to school. Bikes were everywhere. Unless you were born a girl.
The gender barrier intrigued me. The taboo of bicycles was a visible parallel to the suffragettes in my country a century earlier who had used bicycles to protest for equality. When I asked Afghans why it was taboo for women to ride, I was told that riding a bike was dishonorable and obscene. As ridiculous as that may have sounded at first blush, it was the same excuse used a century earlier to keep American and British women off bikes. Women riding bikes has always been considered controversial, dishonorable, and obscene. In a country like Afghanistan that still used medical exams and hymen inspections to ‘prove’ a girl’s virginity was intact, caution won. But even these extremes were no different than other cultures that checked to see if the bride bled on her wedding night.
I began mountain biking around Afghanistan in 2009 to explore the underpinnings of the taboo myself. While implementing projects and programs inside women's prisons, with deaf education, with the new generation of photojournalists, and the first generation of graffiti artists, I spent the next three years investigating the gender barriers that prevented women from cycling. I continued to explore the country on my mountain bike, and each ride deepened my curiosity and love of the country. I wrote about it. I filmed it. I spoke about it internationally. I wondered if I would see Afghan girls ride, but all the evidence, and men,seemed to say no.
Then, in November of 2012, at a dusty petrol station on the outskirts of Kabul, I met Marjan Seddiqe. Marjan was the captain of the first Afghan National Women's Team, which had officially formed a year earlier. Marjan was 22 years old, from Kabul, and arrestingly beautiful. She worked in a beauty salon, which explained her immaculate appearance whenever I saw her. She was never without red lipstick, black eyeliner and mascara, and perfectly shaped brows that defined her face. She was married, but her husband was often away in the army, so she lived with the coach and his family. Her role as captain and assistant coach seemed to suit the serious side of her personality. She coordinated the logistics for the team and trained hard, always in front and never complaining. The men's team treated her with respect. But I caught glimpses of her humor when it was just her and the girls without the coach or the men's team around; her smile and laughter changed her face completely. She softened. I endeavored to find more reasons to allow her time to smile.
I pivoted my work to support Marjan and the national team, as well as the emerging bike clubs and provincial teams led by other young women that soon followed. Hundreds of bikes, nearly a thousand pounds of donated clothing and equipment, sponsored racing kits for the womens and mens national team, passports and visas, international racing, and media exposure to build support and help normalize cycling in Afghanistan by increasing national pride. Women's cycling had arrived in Afghanistan. Just four years after I had started asking, "Why can't girls ride bikes?"
Within one decade, what started as a handful of girls on bikes expanded into a country-wide "right-to-ride" revolution. Women and girls rode despite verbal and physical threats and the risks of dishonor to themselves and their families. They did not ride in secret; they rode proudly and publicly because there was no other choice given their chosen sport. Cycling requires the cyclist to be seen in the public space; you can't participate inside a private gymnasium or enclosed school grounds like the girls participating in football, volleyball, basketball, taekwondo, and even boxing. It makes it controversial, but it also makes it so much more than a sport. Cycling is literal mobility justice, accessibility of transportation, and equality of freedom in public space. This freedom of mobility is what has always made women on bicycles controversial. Bikes offer equality, and since their invention over a century ago, men have been trying to keep women from riding them. Afghanistan was just the latest location.
When the Taliban walked unimpeded into Kabul just one decade later, there were over 200 registered cyclists with the Afghan Cycling Federation and hundreds more riding for recreation and transportation. The women I had supported, rode with, and worked for had become known internationally in the media. They had graced the covers of magazines, been the subject of numerous TV and film documentaries, and more than one museum exhibition created about their team. Women like Marjan had raced internationally and risked their lives and honor to open the door for the next generation. When the Taliban came into Kabul, I couldn’t find her. She was in jail. The Taliban opened the jails, and she fled home to her family, which included her younger sisters, who were also cyclists. The entire family would be in danger if I didn’t get them out before the Taliban figured out who they were. These young women had pedaled through the gender barriers so that the next generation of girls could ride openly and freely. These women were all now targets, and I knew I had to do whatever I could to help them escape.
Starting August 12, 2021, I gave up three years of my life to fundraising, arranging logistics for overland evacuations, safeguarding, assisting other evacuations, finding resettlement solutions for over 150 Afghans in ten countries, and supporting cyclists in exile. Not everyone got out. It is impossible and improbable to empty a country of all its educated women, yet the alternative was condemning half a country's population overnight to lifelong house arrest. There are millions of Afghan women stuck in Afghanistan without fundamental human rights. As the school and work bans continue, the Taliban continues to build a cage around Afghan women. Beauty salons and other women-only private spaces allowed before under the Taliban in the ‘90s have been raided and shut down. Women are banned from walking in public gardens and entering national parks, effectively banning them from nature. The most recent edicts banned the sound of a woman’s voice in public. Everything women and girls had gained in the previous twenty years was erased in less than one, and it is much worse than before. Everything the international community and the Biden administration assured us of, a kinder, more tolerant Taliban 2.0 was a lie. It is stricter, harsher, and more oppressive than the first regime. And we warned them.
A Revolution on Two Wheels is told through my first-hand account of over twenty trips to Afghanistan over a decade and the harrowing conversations and messages during the evacuation. Woven throughout the narrative are the first-hand stories told through interviews with key members of the first generation of Afghan cyclists. I have interviews with original national team cyclists like Marjan, bike club founders like Fereshta*, and the co-founders of the first and only women-led bike team in Afghan history, Zahra and Zakia in Bamyan, and with Masomah Alizada, the first Afghan to compete in cycling at the Tokyo Olympics just days before Afghanistan fell. These are all transcribed from in-depth interviews from 2013-2016.
I have my own extensive photographic and film archive and have been reassembling the photographic and film materials that cyclists still have access to. Their stories began in the streets of Kabul and the hills of Bamyan. This is a story of sisterhood, friendship, camaraderie, and joy. Afghan women rarely get opportunities to publicly revel in their joy together, and these cyclists had joy in abundance - more than most. Despite the risks that came with being the first to challenge a deep-seated cultural taboo and doing so while living through an ongoing military occupation and conflict, it was joy that kept them riding, not fear.
The 2021 evacuation was not the end of their decade-long journey. Interviews are being conducted with cyclists scattered throughout the world in the wake of a traumatic evacuation. They are resettled into thirteen countries, most of which I evacuated myself. Some are still cycling, but the majority are not. Life as a refugee is difficult. The irony that these young women who risked their lives to ride bikes had more freedom to ride in Afghanistan than they do in Europe, Canada, or the United States is a condemnation of refugee resettlement.
At a time when the Taliban have erased women from public life, this project is vital to publish. The 2024 Paris Olympics showcased the Afghan cyclists for the first time in their history on three stages; two sisters, Fariba, and Yulda Hashimi, raced under the Afghan flag; Masomah Alizada, an original member of the Afghan National Women's Cycling Team, led The Olympic Refugee Team as the Chef de Mission and Amir Ansari one of the key men who assisted the development of women's cycling in Bamyan raced as a member of the Olympic Refugee Team.
Photographs and videos of Masomah shepherding the Refugee Team and welcoming diplomats with speeches in flawless French showed a young woman who had become a leader. She stood next to French President Macron, speaking in flawless French, looking like she had been brought up in a world where standing next to world leaders was the norm. That Masomah wears a hijab was a beautiful visual at a time when the French government was instituting hijab bans for its own athletes. Their resilience and bravery were on full display as the Taliban maintained their ban on women's sports inside their country. Three years after their country fell to the Taliban, Afghan women made history in Paris. They showed the world they were leaders, not the victims they are so often portrayed to be in the media.
Afghan women changed their country on two wheels and then survived the most dangerous race of their lives - the race from Kabul. This book illuminates and recenters the stories of the most internationally celebrated Afghan athletes who inspired the world. Afghan women's joy must be recorded and celebrated. Preserving their story will inspire future generations of Afghans and archive their stories in history.
As Audre Lorde wrote, "I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own."
The story of Afghan cyclists is the story of all women. As Trump begins his second term, U.S. women are discovering how quickly our rights can disappear. Rights, even those hard-fought and hard-won, can be erased with a swipe of a pen. Trans women, cis-women, Muslim women, immigrant women, and refugee women. Students. No woman is safe right now in the U.S. Afghan women lost all of their human rights and freedoms just months after the Taliban walked into Kabul. Half of the population turned invisible and invaluable overnight. No one's freedom exists in a vacuum. We must all be vigilant and vocal to protect each other and see that our humanity is borderless. Our freedom is intertwined. We are not free until all women are free.
Onwards, we ride. Together. Or not at all.