The Scheherazade Foundation Mini Podcast

"Girls, if they're silent when they're being married, that counts as consent... Even if in fear they don't say anything, it's considered consent." It's a detail Stephanie Sinclair shares early in this conversation — one small example of how the architecture of child marriage in Afghanistan works, and how silence itself can be turned into a weapon against the people forced into it. Sinclair is a Pu...

"Yes, we have war, yes we have conflict — but what you're seeing is not our culture. We have so much beyond that." — Tamanna Easar In this episode, Tahir Shah speaks with two remarkable women about Afghan women's voices, their resilience, and the power of telling their own stories. Lucy Hannah is a British writer who lived in Afghanistan in the 2000s and founded Untold Narratives — an organisation...

Marina Legree spent five years in Afghanistan before founding Ascend Athletics — a nonprofit that used mountaineering to develop leadership and self-confidence in young Afghan women. After the Taliban takeover in 2021, she helped relocate more than 130 Ascend alumni to safety. She knows what Afghan women are capable of. And she knows what they've been forced to find other ways to reach. In this co...

Andrea Morris is a New Zealander who decided she couldn't simply watch from the other side of the world. Through Noor Women for Afghanistan, she runs clandestine schools in the north of the country — educating around thirty girls up to Grade 12 in a country where such schooling is forbidden — and the Noor embroidery project, which connects Afghan women to global markets for their traditional needl...

"Is the iron hand of the Taliban going to be capable of sustaining itself?" It's the question Tom Freston asks at the start of this conversation — and it's one that feels all the more urgent coming from someone who has known Afghanistan across five decades. Freston first travelled to Afghanistan in the early 1970s, when the country was a place of extraordinary openness: hippie trails, ancient hosp...

When we asked Afghan women what they most needed, we expected many things. What came back, clearly and consistently, was a single answer: an internet connection. In this conversation, Tahir Shah and Jason Webster — co-founders of The Scheherazade Foundation — talk about Azada Women, the Foundation's campaign to fund mobile internet access for women living under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. They di...

Safia Shah grew up with the same tales her brother Tahir did — teaching stories passed down by their father, the writer and thinker Idries Shah. Those stories, she says, work differently at every stage of a life. As a child you understand one thing. As an adult, decades later, you find something else entirely waiting inside them. In this conversation, Tahir and Safia talk about what it meant to gr...

Darya grew up in Afghanistan, became an artist, and eventually had to burn everything she had made — on a rooftop in Kabul — when the Taliban returned to power. Creating art had become a crime. She made it out. Most of the women she knows did not. Today, from Canada, Darya runs online art therapy sessions for women still living inside Afghanistan. In this conversation with Tahir Shah, she talks ab...

Steve McCurry first went to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion. He was there when the Soviets were driven out. Over decades, he fell in love with the country and its people — hospitable, funny, generous, alive. He has watched what has happened since 2021 with horror. In January 2026, the Taliban passed a law making it legal for an Afghan man to beat his wife — provided he doesn't break he...