18 Nov 2025 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, Letters from Afghan Women, News
Roma Ayuobi once had a promising career. Then the Taliban came back to power. Now she is jobless. She lives in Kabul, with her husband and young child. Her house is cold and her son is unwell. She’s worried that she can’t pay for the help he needs.
We asked Ayuobi to write about what it means to be an Afghan woman today as part of our new project, Letters from Afghan Women, where we offer a platform to women from inside the country to speak freely on whatever they feel those outside need to know. She said that writing this article was one of the best moments for her recently.
What is clear, and history bears witness to, is that life under the Taliban passes in hardship and anguish. Their second rule has brought endless trouble for all, but none more so than for the brave women and girls who dare to resist. Now we live in a time heavy with sorrow, with no light of hope ahead – for Afghan women have been pushed out of both public and private life, denied a full education, their once vibrant presence erased, their colours drained from the tapestry of society. The girls who once dreamed of shaping a brighter future instead live beneath a dark roof – a roof that has sealed away their light for 1,800 days and counting.
Is this what remains for us – Afghan women and girls – to stand outside the circle of our own rights, unseen in the world we helped build?
The courageous Afghan women, who have fought for their rights throughout history, struggle to even step outside their homes to earn a piece of bread for their displaced families. Because of their struggle, many have been arrested and subjected to brutal torture. Some have lost their lives; others have been forced to flee the country illegally, carrying nothing but their pain, surviving in the margins of foreign lands.
Even beyond Afghanistan’s borders, in neighbouring countries, safety remains an illusion. One Afghan woman activist was even recently attacked in Europe [in Germany] by those who cannot bear her voice.
For Afghan women, danger has never ended, it only changes its shape. What we are witnessing is not just a step back in time, but a calculated effort to erase women from every corner of public life.
These restrictions could have disastrous consequences for women with no mahram (‘male guardians’). Because the presence of women in a society is life-giving.
The obliteration of education stands as the Taliban’s most cruel and symbolic act – their war on knowledge, their battle against women. They cloak their prohibitions in the shadow of Sharia, but nowhere in true faith is there a command that strips women and girls of the right to learn or to work. Even the sacred texts speak of knowledge as a light meant for all, men and women alike.
They have chained women to darkness, to a life without knowledge, without voice.
Among all these injustices, women’s health stands on the edge of catastrophe. So many women are at risk, yet even the doctors who could save them are forbidden to work. Those who wish to travel into perilous, remote villages to reach suffering women are stopped – for they cannot move without a male guardian. And so, what might have been life-saving care becomes silence, and too often, becomes death. Indeed the deaths of mothers and children, once heartbreakingly common, is multiplying again.
What unfolds in Afghanistan is more than tragedy; it is a warning to the world. For a nation that silences its women silences its own future – leaving only darkness where hope once lived.
They may erase women from sight, but can they ever silence their voices? No, they can never silence the voice of a grieving mother whose cries echo across the world.
Even under such crushing silence, the fire of Afghan women has not gone out. In hidden rooms and secret schools, they still learn, dreaming of a day when life will be theirs again.
Afghan women cannot wait for the hands that oppress them to also deliver justice; their rights will not be handed down by corruption but reclaimed through their own courage.
They must take up the struggle themselves and reclaim what is theirs. But whenever they cry out, countless women and girls are struck – in body and spirit. Their families, too, suffer reprisals.
When women and girls step outside their homes, simply to walk, to breathe, even then, they cannot draw an easy breath. From every direction, harsh voices shout: “Where is your hijab? Why is your hair showing? Where is your mahram? You have no right to be here!”
If a girl dares to answer back to such words, she risks brutal violence – and defending herself only brings greater danger.
These very restrictions have forced many girls into early and arranged marriages, because continuing life under such conditions has become unbearable. Forced marriage is a deep wound in the lives of many girls in this sleeping land.
If we look closely, women make up half the body of humanity, yet throughout history, their rights have been trampled underfoot.
I wanted to hear from some of the anguished women and girls of this country whose voices have been silenced. A young woman, who always dreamt of serving her community as a capable doctor, says:
“Life feels unbearably heavy. Each day I ask myself: why have we become dimmed lamps in our own country? We are not even allowed to study unless a man shadows us. When the world turned against me, I had no choice but to work on the streets, earning what little I can to feed my family. Without a guardian, even my right to exist now belongs to them.”
A mother, who struggles to provide for her children, says:
“I work in a private office, but since the Taliban came to power, security has worsened. They dismissed many women from their jobs, and even those who remain have not received their salaries for months. Life has become twice as hard. Even as I scrub the floors, my mind wanders home – wondering what waits for me there?”
One more woman speaks, her voice carrying the weight of lost dreams, dreams she once held before this rule began:
“My pen was meant to fight for other women and girls. I always dreamed of being a voice for the voiceless, of carrying their silence to every institution that would listen. But with the arrival of this dark regime – a reality too painful even to imagine – all those dreams were buried alive. These endless horrors have doubled the hardship of my life. I have lost so much – even my home and belongings were taken from me because I was a woman who wrote and spoke in the media. I am no longer allowed to travel from one province to another without a male guardian. And the words that echo endlessly in my mind are always the same: ‘Where is your guardian? You are not allowed outside. Go back inside.’ They have locked the doors of life itself and with them, the end of my dreams.”
And so it is for many women, caught in the unending struggle of hardship and survival.
Is this the life we are meant to live, where even outside our homes we cannot witness life itself? Oh, this dark roof – it has smothered the air, choking the last traces of humanity!
Still we hold onto the hope that one day our country will break free from the chains of Taliban rule, and once again, its women will stand, fight and build a brighter, more progressive Afghanistan.
Translated from Dari by Shukria Rezaei
17 Nov 2025 | Asia and Pacific, India, News
For years, many of the world’s most polluted cities were in China. I was in Beijing during the “airpocalyse” peak and it felt like living in an ashtray. Everyone could see the problem. Except not everyone could talk about it. The US Embassy’s popular and trusted air quality data feed – a constant source of irritation for the authorities, contradicting as it did the government’s own data – was sporadically blocked, including in 2014 during the Apec summit. Viral jokes, memes and photos posted on particularly bad days were frequently removed.
Then in 2015 a documentary was produced. Under the Dome challenged the government’s inadequate response and confronted head on the line that what citizens were experiencing was simply fog. The film was initially endorsed by Beijing and within days of its release it had been viewed by hundreds of millions. Except its success was its flaw. One week in and the film was taken offline.
The thing about air though is that it largely doesn’t discriminate. Yes, the wealthy can buy top-of-the-range air filtration systems but eventually everyone needs to go outside. And so as much as the Chinese Communist Party might have felt uncomfortable by the popularity of the film, they felt more uncomfortable about the shoddy quality of the air. They acted. Today air quality in China is seismically better than a decade prior.
There’s a sense of déjà vu looking at India today. In Delhi, where pollution now kills more people than obesity or diabetes, residents are frustrated that they might not be getting the full truth – allegations have even been made that the BJP tamper with the city’s pollution data, claims they have denied. And the population is frustrated that the government is doing little to deal with the issue. So last weekend a protest was planned. A striking poster for it read “We Rise While We Choke”, accompanied by a picture of a two people in heavy-duty masks embracing. The protest didn’t go as planned. In the days leading up to it, Delhi police made hundreds of calls and home visits to those who were galvanising crowds. On the day itself, the police shut down India Gate, the meeting point, and detained close to 100 protesters. The next day, a police case was filed against the organisers.
One of the main organisers of Sunday’s protest, Saurav Das, told Index that the police’s actions were “completely uncalled for”.
India has form more broadly when it comes to threatening people speaking out on the climate. In Tamil Nadu in 2018 police fired into crowds of protesters who were opposing the expansion of a copper smelting plant, killing 13. In 2021 Disha Ravi, a founder of Fridays for Future India, was arrested and accused of sedition. These are just two examples in a pattern of increasingly hostile and dangerous conditions for environmental defenders under Narendra Modi.
For Das, Sunday’s protest “was a small act of resistance against the taking away of their democratic spaces”.
Free speech should not be a luxury. Nor should clean air. The sooner Indian politicians realise this the better.
13 Nov 2025 | Americas, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, India, News, Singapore, United States, Volume 54.03 Autumn 2025
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 3 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Truth, trust and tricksters: Free expression in the age of AI, published on 30 September 2025. Read more about the issue here.
We are right to be concerned about what artificial intelligence is doing to our present and what it might do to our future. But I am more worried about what it can do to our past.
Access to archives is becoming harder. Manuscripts are fragile, and verifying historical evidence contradicting established narratives is time-consuming. Technology makes history seem fun and exciting by enabling direct communication with historical figures and using visuals that simplify the past, but it weakens our understanding. Artificial intelligence reshapes research by digitising archives and analysing data quickly, but it poses risks. AI often lacks academic rigour, drawing from biased sources and oversimplifying complex events. It presents information with unearned authority, spreading errors rapidly. Unlike historians, AI cannot evaluate credibility, weigh accounts or identify gaps in records.
The result is that our history runs the risk of being skewed towards what’s most accessible online: mainstream narratives drawn from popular databases, digitised books, encyclopaedias, widely-read history books and even crowd-sourced portals. Marginalised voices – Indigenous people, minorities, or communities without digitised records – risk being erased further. When AI amplifies the dominant version of events, alternative interpretations fade into obscurity.
For all its potential, AI cannot replace the human historian. Critical judgment, contextual thought and insights, and the ability to navigate conflicting evidence and picking plausible theories remain essential to safeguarding the integrity of the past.
Consider a recent experiment by Indian historian Anirudh Kanisetti. A trained engineer, Kanisetti has written two engrossing books on the Chaulukyas and the Cholas, two medieval-era dynasties of southern India. Despite his background in engineering, or perhaps because of it, he is sceptical of the use of AI in history. He decided to challenge the Goliath. He sought AI assistance and then wrote about his experience on Instagram. He calls AI “language calculators, and not very good ones”. He asked Copilot, Microsoft’s AI tool which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to write an essay based on his work about a medieval regiment in India.
In its references, the tool produced a paper by an academic Kanisetti knew of, but he had never heard of this paper. He called out Copilot, and it immediately admitted it had made up the fact. Its subsequent apology was insincere. Kanisetti then posed another query, instructing Copilot to cite primary sources. This time, the bot confidently misquoted primary sources and, again, admitted the fabrication when he called it out.
Kanisetti is worried because he knows the sources and can find out when AI is lying; other users may not be that knowledgeable and may rely on AI to do the grunt work of checking citations. As he puts it: “Large language models (LLMs) are trained to seem to be helpful, so you think they have value. But they are actually faffing, lying, fabricating … Engagement generates shareholder value.”
Our information ecosystem is being destroyed, he added.
He has grasped the essence of the problem that is bothering many historians in the global south.
The future historian’s skillset
Aanchal Malhotra, who has written a fascinating history about India’s Partition, told me: “This thought of AI rewriting history is new but a terrifying one, because of the scale it can achieve.”
Doyenne of Indian history Romila Thapar told Index: “What AI can do to history is in a sense already being done by what the Hindutva-vadis [right-wing Hindu nationalists] are doing to Indian history. It is an alternative, distorted history that they are propagating. So far, professional historians are dismissing it by showing that there is no reliable evidence to provide proof of what is being stated in the Hindutva version. One can predict that with the availability of AI there can be massive forging of many documents that will be put forward as proof. So training in professional history will require the ability to recognise forged documents, especially if they are documents that are said to belong to earlier times. The historian of today has to be a multidisciplinary person, but the historian of tomorrow will also have to be trained in the technology of verifying documents and publications.”
She wonders if the techniques of historical excavation will need to change, since the authenticity of three-dimensional artefacts gathered from sites will have to be proved. As soon as an artefact is discovered, will it need to be intensively photographed and marked and documented and a tiny sample be analysed? This will make excavation absurdly expensive if the veracity of every object has to be proved, she adds. And she is concerned about how AI’s apparent ability to bring characters from the past back to life would interfere with what we know to be true.
She also worries about what AI can do to historical questioning and education. If students start asking AI to write their papers and tutorials (as many are), they will become masters at writing prompts, but not at drawing their own analysis. They will know how to use a machine, but truth will elude them. “They won’t know why they have written what they have,” she said.
History abounds with examples of misinterpretations, such as the figurine of a horse in Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, which suggested that the horse had been domesticated as early as the second millennium BC.
Peter Frankopan, who teaches history at Oxford, told Index: “The skill of a historian is to be able to deal with complex materials… The idea of lots of forgeries is as old as writing systems. Information has always been used and manipulated to embed hierarchies, to spread falsehoods and to manipulate people – whether literate or otherwise. So training historians in the present and future simply requires the right skills to be learned, and the discipline of asking the right questions. Clearly, we have some challenges ahead; but there have always been such problems in the past.”
The risks heighten with the seductive charm of AI-generated visual imagery. Manu Pillai, who has written thoughtful and engrossing books on the history of southern India and, more recently, about the making of modern Hindu identity, told Index it was only a question of time before we find sophisticated imagery or videos generated by AI that would make the crudely written WhatsApp messages appear believable. There are twin dangers in India, he said. There is high digital access but weak digital literacy, “which means large segments of people are likely to be misled. We also live in a time when more and more people have an appetite for conspiracy theories and for ‘alt’ facts, and many therefore would be predisposed to swallow some of the material that comes their way”.
AI for good…occasionally
AI does provide notable benefits, such as drawing patterns from vast amounts of data and deciphering handwriting. It helps restore and better understand complex historical texts. The Arolsen Archives use AI to catalogue documents related to Nazi persecution victims. Yad Vashem uses AI to identify unknown Holocaust victims. The USC Shoah Foundation and Illinois Holocaust Museum use AI-driven holographic displays, voice recognition and virtual reality to create transparent, immersive experiences for remembrance and education.
AI’s inability to separate truth from lies is the real danger. As an aggregator, if it finds a particular version of a story cited more often, it is trained to assume it is part of the mainstream discourse. It overemphasises the dominant narrative over alternative views, which reinforces misinterpretations and falsehoods.
Manila-based Singaporean historian Thum Ping Tjin (better known as PJ Thum) is wary. The founder of New Naratif notes that throughout human history, tools have emerged to make our communication and information exchange quicker, and these tools have raised alarms. They have inevitably been co-opted by those with money and power in order to get more money and power. “They have used those tools to present versions of history to further their own goals,” Thum said.
“In many cases, the worst-case scenario you fear already exists,” he told Index. “Southeast Asian governments have long used their resources to fabricate, censor and present their own version of history and their power to enforce it. Singapore has had an entire industrial complex of official historians repeating the ‘official’ version of history. Professional historians who seek to correct the record are treated as public enemies.”
Thum himself underwent hours of gruelling questioning by government officials when he critiqued Singapore’s official interpretation of how it got separated from Malaysia, and the government introduced a new law intended to attack disinformation but which in effect ensured that the dominant, state-approved narrative would prevail.
Alarmed by the attacks on crucial aspects of American history, primarily dealing with race, the American Historical Association Council has issued guidelines based on principles that reinforce the need for historical thinking, reminding us that AI produces texts, images, audio and video, but not truth. It also warned about AI’s tendency to hallucinate and introduce false certainties.
AI’s biggest impact on history is deepfake technology. Erasing inconvenient truths or spreading lies isn’t new – Joseph Stalin famously airbrushed Leon Trotsky out of photos. In the late 1990s, a Malaysian newspaper altered photos to remove Anwar Ibrahim after he fell out with prime minister Mahathir Mohammed.
The problem of AI fakes
Forged documents have long confused historians; for example, Nazi era expert Hugh Trevor-Roper believed the fake Hitler diaries were genuine because of their voluminous content. The fabricated 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion fuelled antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Recently, AI-generated deepfake videos, such as one of US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which depicted her in Congress arguing that a jeans ad featuring Sydney Sweeney was racist, have gone viral, highlighting new dangers in disinformation.
Kanisetti points out that many Indians consume historical materials now through videos. These don’t claim authenticity, but to the untrained mind the realistic-looking videos appear to be well-researched. “The right wing has no incentive to doctor primary sources yet, because the general public is already uninterested in the ambiguities of evidence-based history,” he said. Many viewers want affirmation of their beliefs; they no longer care if what they are seeing is accurate.
In What is History?, EH Carr wrote: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” The selection of facts is integral to historical research. Good historians must be aware of their personal biases and the context of their work. Only humans have the capability to understand the emotions involved and the ethical choices that need to be made; it is why at universities, history is part of the humanities department and not in a scientific lab.
Historians are quick to caution. One of the biggest risks is Holocaust denial and revisionism. Unesco published a report last year with the World Jewish Congress, which showed how hate groups could use AI to deny the Holocaust, including by fabricated testimonies and altered historical records. The Historical Figures app allows users to ‘chat’ with prominent Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and it falsely claims that Goebbels (for example) was not intentionally involved in the Holocaust and had tried to prevent violence against Jews. Unesco has its own recommendations for ethics in AI, which it urges governments to follow. It has also asked tech companies to improve their standards and act responsibly.
But governments have neither the capacity nor, in some cases, the willingness to prevent disinformation from spreading widely. Can states be trusted? Can corporations, which are incentivised by maximising shareholder value? Open-source algorithms, digital watermarking and community-based content moderation are all necessary potential solutions, but none is sufficient. Educating the public, particularly young people, on how to critically evaluate information and recognise misinformation is crucial to combat the negative impacts.
Thum told me: “The only defence against this is by educating ourselves to be more sceptical and information-literate; by democratising the tools and skills of history; and by teaching people to be more sceptical and critical of those with information and power, so that we are less likely to be tricked by AI or whatever the next technology is.”
In 1987, I interviewed Salman Rushdie in Bombay, as the city was then known, when he had completed writing The Satanic Verses. Other than his editors, few knew what the novel was about.
When I asked him, he said: “It is about angels and devils and how it is very difficult to establish ideas of morality in a world which has become so uncertain that it is difficult to even agree on what is happening. When one can’t agree on a description of reality, it is very hard to agree on whether that reality is good or evil, right or wrong. When one can’t say what is actually the case, it is difficult to proceed from that to an ethical position. Angels and devils are becoming confused ideas … It is an attempt to come to grips with that sense of a crumbling moral fabric or, at least, a need for the reconstruction of old simplicities.”
AI makes us believe in simplicities, that truth is easy to access, and that answers to complex questions are just one click away. It is the product in our age of instant gratification. Reality, like history, is more nuanced. The challenge lies in our not being condemned to repeat it.
10 Nov 2025 | Asia and Pacific, China, Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom
Last week was a bad press week for Sheffield Hallam University after it was revealed they paused research into human rights abuses in Xinjiang because of a run-in with Beijing. Following research by Professor Laura Murphy on Uyghur forced labour, the university experienced threats against its China-based staff and blocked access in China. The university’s insurer pulled back and then university administrators barred her from continuing the work, at which stage Murphy threatened legal action for violation of academic freedom. The university has reversed its decision, albeit only after an unnecessary struggle. A shocking story for some, but not for us, and indeed the many other UK academics who came forward this week with similar stories.
People often ask me about “cancel culture” on campus. My usual response is: yes, it’s a problem but you know what’s also problematic and not talked about nearly as much? Chinese influence. We’ve been shouting about this for ages, and have dug deep via reports, follow-ups and panel discussions. As was the case with Sheffield Hallam, the influence is usually exerted through stick and carrot: the stick = harassment of students and staff, the carrot = access to China’s lucrative market. Given the growing number of Chinese students in the UK and the proliferation of UK joint institutes in China, we urgently need to address this problem. China is an incredibly important story. It can’t be airbrushed.
Questions about academic freedom aren’t confined to China-related issues or to cancel culture, as another academic freedom story from this week reminded us. This one concerns SOAS, who next June plan to host a conference by a group called Brismes, a well-respected UK-based organisation within the field of Middle Eastern studies. SOAS isn’t just renting a space to Brismes. They’ve issued the call for submissions on their own site too. As part of that call, participants are asked to declare whether their university is “built on captured land”. Several organisations that campaign for academic freedom have accused them of breaking free speech rules. They’re right to make the accusation. It’s a thinly veiled attempt to exclude Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian academics, who either might not support the framing or might find themselves in jeopardy if they do.
I have issue with compelled speech, as I’ve written about. It mirrors the tactics of authoritarian regimes, not open democracies. And in a university environment, it’s especially problematic. They should be about dialogue not dogma. Sadly such ideological purity tests (as one academic I spoke about this story called it) aren’t unique to SOAS or to this specific issue, which I reference to provide context not justification.
Of course there are usually other universities people can speak at, just as there might be other universities one can research China’s human rights abuses. But is that the point? Any university closing its doors to academics – whether out of fear of losing funding or because of demands for thought conformity – is bad, made all the worse because it’s part of a broader pattern.
