R Robina Jalali ran for her life at a very young age. In the hills near Kabul, she trains barefoot or in sandals. When she began sprint competitions, alone among boys, the Taliban dropped threat letters in front of her house. “I cried and asked: Why can’t I be like the men?” Even as a child, the Afghan sprinter told her father: “Do not look at me as a woman. Treat me like a son.”
Robina Jalali is lucky. Her father, a liberal businessman, teaches his seven daughters at home in secret during the first Taliban rule. Robina Jalali later recalls growing up as a girl under the Taliban: “You could not go to school, could not play, could not do anything. You were just at home all the time.” She attends a school only at 16, after the Islamists’ downfall. And at 17, in 2004, she takes part in the Olympics with judoka Friba Razayee as the first Afghan woman.
Jalali becomes the poster girl of the oft-quoted Olympic spirit, where it is not about winning but about taking part. In the 100 meters, she finishes second-to-last in 14.14 seconds in 2004; at her second Olympic appearance in 2008 she finishes last. “My main goal was not victory. I wanted to show girls that there is a world beyond their misery.”
Jalali competes with a hijab and loose long trousers, and under the surname Muqimyar instead of her family name. “I did not want the Islamists to stain my dream by criticizing me for my clothing choices,” she explained later about the conservative outfit. She still receives a lot of hate, for example because she travels abroad as a woman. “I had no public support.”
Candidacy for the Afghan Parliament
Unlike other athletes, Robina Jalali decides to stay in the homeland. “I lived with fear every day. If I give in to the fear and leave the country, what happens to all the Afghans who remain behind? What kind of role model would I be?” After her athletic career she works for Kabul Bank, then chooses another unusual path: At only 25, Jalali runs in 2010 as an independent for the Afghan Parliament; she is primarily driven by women’s rights.
Again she receives death threats. “At night I hang up my posters and in the morning they’re gone,” she tells the BBC. Rumors spread daily that she has been murdered. The window of her car is smashed. Outside the city center she cannot appear for security reasons. Robina Jalali is also criticized by activists. She is said to be an opportunist with no political experience. And part of the corrupt US-backed nomenklatura around President Hamid Karzai — whose brother owns the bank where Jalali works.
In 2010 Robina Jalali was not elected, but in 2018 she enters Parliament. In the same year she becomes Vice President of Afghanistan’s Olympic National Committee and in January 2020 head of the Afghan Athletics Federation. Jalali remains unmarried. And fearless. “The Taliban’s threats do not bother me, I am used to them,” she once said. The former sprinter belongs to those who advocate a compromise with the Taliban: as long as they accept the constitution and grant women the right to work, sport and education, she has no problem with them.
Perhaps that is naive. Even under the disastrous US occupation, many Afghan men advocate corporal punishment and the murder of supposedly promiscuous women. In August 2021, during the chaotic troop withdrawal, the Taliban immediately regain power. Since then, there has been no trace of Robina Jalali.
