She stands with a championship belt over one shoulder, a handful of medals in red, green and black around her neck and a pair of black boxing gloves crossed in front of her chest - and where you look for her eyes out of old habit, there is only a small mesh of blue thread.
The photographs were taken in Kabul in the autumn of 2022 by the photographer Ebrahim Noroozi.
A girl in a yellow burqa, gripping the handlebars of a green racing bike as if it could still take her somewhere. Another in green, raising her knee in a Muay Thai stance while the fabric falls down over her gloves. And an entire football team, eleven figures lined up in front of a goal with a worn net, ten in blue and one in yellow, each holding a ball the way you hold something you have no intention of giving up.
What you don't see at first is what makes the pictures true.
Most of these women did not wear the burqa in daily life. They put it on themselves for the photographs, because the Taliban had banned them from sport, and because several of them were still training in secret and did not dare be recognised.
So the garment the Taliban want women to disappear into became the only thing that made it possible for them to step forward. And let themselves be photographed.
Sport was only the beginning, and the order is worth noticing, because it is not random, once you understand what is happening inside that order.
First they took the body - sport, the parks, the gyms. Then they took the mind, when girls were denied school after sixth grade and the universities were closed to women.
In 2024 they took the voice, with a law that forbids a woman to sing or read aloud where strangers can hear her. And last year they went after what women had already thought, and removed their books from the university curriculum, including a textbook on safety in the chemistry lab.
The justification has been the same every time.
Sharia.
You do not take a Human Being all at once. You take what can be seen, then what can be thought, then what can be heard, and finally the traces of what was once written, so that no one can find the way back.
It is an order that knows exactly what it is doing, because it goes after every single place where a Human Being is SOMEONE.
I have written before that the Law can either live inside a Human Being - written on the heart, as Jeremiah says, and carried into our self-understanding by a Christianity that settled gradually over generations here.
OR you can lay the Law down over the Human Being and enforce it through outward social control, demands and punishment.
Here in Kabul it lies, quite literally, down over the Human Being - over Woman - in blue cloth, all the way down over the face. And yet there is something under the fabric that has not received the message, and that is why I cannot put these pictures down.
The hands are raised. The knee is up. The girl on the bike has not let go of the handlebars.
Because you can lay a law down over a human being. But you cannot lay it into one.
The rest of us, who have it all - the bike lanes and the sports halls and the right to say what we want, out loud, in the middle of a square, without the state taking our voice - and with the expectation that whoever threatens us for it will be punished - tend to believe that Freedom is a natural state, something that is simply there, like the air.
The pictures from Kabul say something else.
They say it can be taken from a people in stages, in as little as four years, while the rest of the world looks the other way.
I believe, personally, that the Human Being is created in an image greater than itself. That is why the face matters. And that is exactly why the Taliban went after it. And made Woman faceless.
You can take the face from a Human Being.
The image you cannot take.
And that will show itself again, sooner or later, when that order collapses under its own Lie.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Friday, friends
Photos: Ebrahim Noroozi / AP, Kabul 2022
