The name matters, although Shakespeare believes that rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Name, which identifies the existence of a person, is a symbol of her/his individuality. The name also demands some rights in its favour. It’s mandatory to mention parents’ names in a birth certificate because it establishes their relationship with the child. But, all these reflect the thought of a modern progressive society.
Things are different in a society which is not ready to accept ‘modernity’. And Afghanistan is such a country. The Afghan society is yet to come out from the shadow of long Taliban regime. As a result, the majority of Afghan people have no idea about right, freedom or liberty.

In the war-ravaged South Asian country, women are never referred to by their names in public. A ban on the use of female names in birth certificates, wedding invitations and other important papers has been imposed in order to protect women from ‘perverse’ ideas, like liberty or freedom. Their only ‘genuine identity’ is: they are either mother (of the son’s and not daughter’s) or the wife of anybody or the daughter.
Recently, women’s rights activists have started staging protests against the ancient tradition and launched a new online campaign with the hashtag #WhereIsMyName to challenge this practice.
Indeed, it’s a giant step towards awareness about gender identity among girls. The campaign shows that Afghan women have felt the pain of not having the name (read identity). It seems that the Afghan women are determined to win their right by waging a war against the society.

Interestingly, the Afghan women don’t get any satisfaction from the hashtag #WhereIsMyName. Rather, it encourages them to fight against the evil. Bahar Sohaili, one of the supporters of the campaign, said that they have launched the social media campaign in order to change the age-old custom. She expressed hope that the campaign would help women reclaim their most basic identity by breaking the deep-rooted taboo, which prevents men from mentioning their female relatives’ names in public.
Sohaili stressed: “This is just a spark – the posing of a question mostly to the Afghan women about why their identity is denied. The reality is that women also remain silent – they don’t protest this.”

Farhad Darya, one of the most renowned Afghan singers, has thanked members of the Parliament, top government officials and artists for supporting the campaign and publicly declaring the identities of the female members of their families. On Facebook, Darya wrote: “On many occasions in front of a crowd that doesn’t have family relations to me, I have noticed how the foreheads of men sour by what they see as my cowardice in mentioning the name of my mother or my wife.” He added: “They stare at me in such a way as if I am the leader of all of the world’s cowards and I know nothing of ‘Afghan honour and traditions’.”
Sohaili, Darya and their friends are fighting for the day when a woman’s name and her identity will no longer be shameful in Afghanistan. And the whole world is with them.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das