By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan - Screened from male scrutiny by the leafy canopies of almond or apricot trees, women could once go to the old Kabul Women’s Garden as they pleased, dare to wriggle naked toes in fountain water or just gossip without the veil.

Now this oasis of freedom for women, surrounded by the misogynist desert of the capital city, is undergoing a remarkable rebirth.

As with so much happening today in Afghanistan, the midwives are foreigners, the gestation is troubled and the parents are hopeful.

Some say this fabled 3.2-hectare enclosure in the Shahrara neighborhood of Kabul goes back to the 1500s. More reliably it is dated to the 1940s or ‘50s, when King Zahir Shah was said to have bequeathed it to the state.

For the past three years, Karima Salik has managed the garden, which is now in the midst of a $500,000 face-lift supported by the United States Agency for International Development and CARE International Women on construction projects are almost unheard of in Afghanistan, but the United States Agency for International Development program requires that at least 25 percent of the work force be female. Here they are 50 percent of it.

Ms. Salik’s childhood in the 1970s witnessed one of the most liberated periods for women in Afghan history, when the communist government took over in 1978 and enforced equality, banned the burqa and mandated education for girls.

The revolt of the mujahedeen, led by conservative, rural warlords, wiped that all out in a few years’ time. People desperate for fuel felled the garden’s trees for firewood. Militiamen held cockfights within the walls. Women dared not go near the place.

In the Taliban era, the city was more peaceful but women were confined to their homes. The northeast end of the garden was appropriated by the mosque next door. A warlord who came over to the Taliban was rewarded with the southwest corner for a construction project. The rest, renamed the Springtime Garden, became a public dump.

When Ms. Salik and the Ministry of Women’s Affairs took over three years ago, “We hauled 45 truckloads of trash out.”

Now, inside the gates are those rarest of public employees: female police officers. They are reinforced by five female intelligence officers, whose main job is to look for suicide bombers who might hide explosives under the burqa.

Mostly the burqas come off once inside the gate, and many of the women change into modern clothes, putting on makeup and high heels.

Then, unheard-of things happen here. The women themselves have raised funds for a tiny mosque, with religious instruction given by a woman ? one of only a handful of such places in a city where at least 1.5 million female Muslims live.

A consortium of European Union aid groups built a spacious gym. The Italians started the Always Spring Restaurant, featuring something else unknown in Kabul, female pizza chefs.

Between the compound’s outer and inner walls, a shopping arcade of little, female-run businesses grew up.

There are other such businesses in Kabul, but none are run by women. Some come here for opportunity, many for refuge of one sort or another. Fairly often, women who have run away from abusive husbands, or from fathers who threaten to commit a so-called honor killing, wind up here.

All of this did not happen without a fight. Ms. Salik called in the police over the mosque’s encroachment, and the mullah led a noisy demonstration of male neighbors in protest. “I used religious arguments against him,” she said, “and pointed out it was a sin to use stolen land for prayers.”

They compromised on a new wall, but the mullah, Abdul Rahim, is still seething. “I don’t care what the hell they do,” he said. “But inside the garden they get all dressed up and do their makeup and they have other intentions.”

The face-lift is due to finish in early July . Every 40 days a new crew of female laborers is brought in, giving new people an opportunity to earn money and learn skills.

In a broad sense, the success of the Kabul Women’s Garden is an admission of failure. Women simply cannot go to other parks in Kabul unless chaperoned by male relatives, and often not even then.

“You can’t change people’s ideas overnight,” Ms. Salik said. “So we need to address the immediate needs.”

Ms. Salik would like to see a program that would take women on brief trips to other countries, perhaps for job training, but really, she said, just to see how women live in lands where there are no women’s gardens.


The Kabul Women’s Garden is undergoing a $500,000 renovation. Women and children take a tae kwon do class. / CHRISTOPH BANGERT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES