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ISLAMABAD — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders not to “legitimize” the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan and instead to “raise their voices” and “use [their] power” against the militant group’s curbs on women and girls’ education.

“Do not legitimize them,” Yousafzai said on January 12, as she addressed the second and final day of a Muslim-led summit on girls’ education in her home country, Pakistan.

“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings. They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification,” Yousafzai, 27, told the gathering in Islamabad.

She also urged Muslim leaders and global politicians to support efforts to make what has been called “gender apartheid” a crime under international law.

The event marked a full circle for Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 by the Pakistani Taliban in the northwestern valley of Swat because she had campaigned for girls’ education.

Following the conference, organizers released a 17-point “Islamabad Declaration,” including an agreement “emphasizing that girls’ education is not only a religious obligation but also an urgent societal necessity.”

“It is a fundamental right safeguarded by divine laws, mandated by Islamic teaching, reinforced by international chargers and well-established by national constitutions,” it said.

The rights of girls and women – especially access to education – is often a controversial subject in conservative Islamic nations. Domestic activists and international organizations have pressed leaders to promote and protect such rights, and observers in recent years have noted improvements in many, but not all, countries.

Some 47 Muslim-majority nations and organizations sent representatives to the event, but it was shunned by the Afghan Taliban, whom activists say are among the world’s leading violators of the rights of women and girls.

Ahead of the gathering, Yousafzai said she would focus her speech on Afghanistan — which is now the only nation among the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that bans women’s education. The ban has been widely assailed by the international community and many people inside Afghanistan.

“I will speak about protecting rights for all girls to go to school, and why leaders must hold the Taliban accountable for their crimes against Afghan women & girls,” she wrote on X.

The attack on Yousafzai, who had become a target for her campaign for girls’ education, sent shock waves across Pakistan and provoked international outrage.

Yousafzai, who was 15 at the time, survived after months of treatment at home and abroad and became an international figure, winning 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.

Roza Otunbayeva, head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), urged leaders of Islamic nations to protect the rights of Afghan girls.

“I really call on all these ministers…who came from all over the world, to offer scholarships, to have online education, to have all sorts of education for them. This is the task of the day,” she said during a panel discussion.

‘Crime Against Humanity’

Yousafzai’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, criticized Muslim countries for what he described as being “either silent, complicit, or apologetic” toward the Taliban’s curtailing of Afghan women’s rights.

Echoing condemnations by the United Nations, which has labeled the Taliban’s treatment of women “gender apartheid,” Ziauddin Yousafzai told RFE/RL that “the international community, especially Muslim countries, should call the [government in Kabul] an apartheid regime.”

He said the Taliban-led administration’s curb on girls and women’s rights is a “crime against humanity.”

No Taliban representatives were present among participants of the two-day conference that brought together ministers and education officials from dozens of Muslim-majority countries, backed by the Muslim World League.

A senior Taliban diplomat in Islamabad told RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal that “so far, Kabul has not told us anything about this event.”

Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, Pakistan’s education minister, said, “No one from the Afghan government was at the conference,” but that Taliban leaders were formally invited to the event.

The Taliban government banned teenage girls from education soon after returning to power in August 2021.

Since then, the Islamist group has imposed draconian bans on women’s work, education, and mobility despite domestic opposition and a global outcry.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in his opening statement that preventing girls from receiving an education is “tantamount to denying their voice” and restricting their choices.

“The Muslim world, including Pakistan, faces significant challenges in ensuring equitable access to education for girls,” Sharif said.

Muhammad al-Issa, a Saudi cleric and secretary-general of the Muslim World League, who organized the event with the Pakistani government, said, “The entire Muslim world has agreed that girls’ education is important.”

“Those who say that girls’ education is un-Islamic are wrong,” he added.

With reporting by AFP