They Were Never in the Headlines. They Were in the Stitch.

The hidden heroines of Afghanistan, and what their embroidery still asks of us.

For decades, the world spoke of Afghanistan as wreckage. In a quiet gallery in London, the work of unnamed women and girls says otherwise. They stitched through war. They kept beauty, identity, and dignity in the cloth when almost everything else was taken. This is what their embroidery still teaches us – at SOAS Gallery, until 19 September 2026.

Embroidery Traditions of Afghanistan, SOAS Gallery. A small space, tightly curated.

There is a moment, just inside the SOAS Gallery, when the headlines fall away.

You stand under the title wall. Behind the words hangs a vast dark veil, stitched with geometry, metal, and light. The room goes quiet. That silence is the first honest thing the exhibition asks of you. Not pity. Attention.

I visited as Founder of Global Path Connections, whose work sits at the meeting point of culture, heritage, and purposeful growth. I am not a textile historian. I know enough of this field to recognise when an institution has done the difficult work well: when selection is disciplined, when makers are treated as artists, and when a nation’s inner life is allowed to speak in its own materials. This exhibition does that work.

It remains on display until 19 September 2026. Admission is free. I have asked my colleagues to see it while the threads are still in the room.

The women were never a footnote

Around one hundred pieces. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most from the collection of Karun Thakar, developed in collaboration with the V&A. Two years of preparation. The first exhibition in the Gallery’s history, it opened in 1996, devoted solely to Afghanistan.

The official language is precise, and it should be repeated: these complex patterns were created by highly skilled women and girls. Silk and wool. Chain stitch and cross stitch. Beads, coins, mirrors, metal thread. Khamak. Couching. Blanket stitch. Work made at home for marriage, for prayer, for everyday wear, for a child’s garment, for a man’s coat, for a rifle cover, for a bicycle seat, for the wrapping of bread.

That list matters. It refuses the idea that Afghan women existed only as symbols in someone else’s war. They designed identity into cloth. They marked region, status, age, faith, and protection. They recycled the embroidered heart of a dress so the next generation could wear it. They kept techniques alive while borders moved and empires broke.

Empowerment, here, is not a word applied afterwards. It is already in the stitch.

A woman who can make beauty while a country is being rewritten by force is not waiting to be rescued by our gaze. She is already a hidden heroine. The exhibition’s gift is that it finally lets her work stand in the light.

What the objects say, if you stay long enough

Walk the rooms slowly. The Gallery is not large. Every piece had to earn its wall.

The title veil is the right beginning. Karun Thakar first encountered this type of Afghan garment in the mid-1980s among refugees who had crossed into north-west Pakistan after the Soviet invasion. Dealers had come out of Kabul to Peshawar carrying textiles with them. He has lived with these objects for more than forty years. His duty, as he now frames it, is to let audiences see the creativity that existed, and still exists, rather than seeing Afghanistan only as a place in constant turmoil.

The black Mangal coats, gold and yellow rising off dark wool and velvet, stop people. They have presence. They were made for the body, and they still command the room as if the wearer had only just stepped away.

The cream garments with red and white stitchwork hang with a different authority: bridal, ceremonial, intimate. One cape-like piece opens like a map of a woman’s world-repeated motifs falling in columns, small hanging elements at the hem. You do not need the label to feel that this was not decoration. It was speech.

The Pashai cuffs, laid in a case, are heavy with coins. Cotton, silk, metal. Wealth worn on the wrist. Sound as well as sight. A girl’s movement would have announced her before she spoke.

The striped shirts have grey-white grounds and V-shaped panels finished with red pompoms. Rarely displayed work. Spare, rhythmic, exact. Three of them on one wall, like a family of voices.

Then the covers and panels: Lakai felt, Katawaz colour, mirrors catching gallery light, sunburst medallions, a purple and white geometric field so disciplined it looks mathematical. Hanging from the ceiling, embroidered chests and sleeves of garments that were once cut and saved- the valuable part kept when the rest of the cloth was gone. Even survival had an aesthetic.

John Hollingworth walked me through these choices. The space forced rigour. The public answered anyway. In the university’s summer quiet, people still came. Brochures had to be reprinted. The visitors’ book filled. Fashion students stood beside older guests and stayed. He called it the Gallery’s most successful exhibition of the year so far. Standing there, you understand why. The work does not shout. It holds.

Mariam Amhaz with John Hollingworth at the title wall, SOAS Gallery, September 2026.

A community, then a country

It is tempting to say “Afghan embroidery” as if it were one language. The exhibition will not allow that.

QANDAHAR · PASHAI · PASHTUN · TAJIK · HAZARA · TURKMEN · UZBEK · MANGAL · LAKAI · ARABACHI · KATAWAZ

Different mountains, different stitches. Shared across them is the presence of women at the needle, and the use of cloth as archive.

Some pieces carry faith in plain view: Hazara cloths made to protect the clay tablet used in Shia prayer; a mosque drawn in thread; a hand that may remember Abbas. A rare green Qandahari face veil in khamak, satin stitch traditionally worked in the colour of the ground, may speak of a family that claimed descent from the Prophet. Most such veils are white. Green is uncommon. The exception is the point.

Attributing every object to one group is not always possible. People moved. Techniques crossed. Historically, there were few hard borders. Uzbek and Turkmen families carried their embroideries with them. The cloth is more honest than the map.

That honesty is the exhibition’s quiet political act. After decades of war, the world became fluent in Afghan suffering and illiterate in Afghan making. These rooms reverse the habit. They do not deny the war. They refuse to let the war be the only story a woman, a community, or a nation is allowed to tell.

Every image in this exhibition holds more than a textile. It holds a woman. Then her household. Then her people. Then a country that suffered for decades and still knew how to beautify the world.

What respect looks like in practice

At Global Path Connections, we work with organisations on culture, heritage, and growth that has purpose. We say that a society reveals itself by what it chooses to keep visible.

SOAS Gallery, the V&A, and Karun Thakar chose visibility. They gave Afghan women’s work the conditions of art: light, space, scholarship, and time. They made disappearing techniques harder to disappear. They opened a path for further study through the Karun Thakar Fund for Asian and African textiles and dress, next offered in spring 2028.

That is practical respect.

Sympathy is easy and often useless. Respect is slower. It looks like two years of curation in a small room. It looks like keeping a garment intact so the rest of its information is not lost. It looks like a gallery on a university campus discovering that the outside public will come, in numbers, for Afghan stitchwork if you present it without condescension.

I left with a clearer standard for our own work. Do not reduce a people to their worst decade. Do not use heritage as decoration for someone else’s narrative. If you claim to care about women’s empowerment, start by taking seriously the intelligence already present in what women have made.

The hidden heroines in these rooms did not ask to be called heroines. They sat with cloth in their laps and made something that outlasted the noise around them. That is the lesson. Finish the work in front of you. Make it beautiful enough to survive. Leave a record that cannot be erased by a headline.

Go while it is still hanging

Embroidery Traditions of Afghanistan remains at SOAS Gallery, Russell Square, until 19 September 2026. Tuesday to Saturday, 10:30am to 5pm; Thursdays until 8pm. Admission is free.

Stand in front of the title veil. Then walk. Give one object more than thirty seconds. Ask who sat with that cloth in her lap, in which valley, for which occasion, under what sky. You will not get every name. You will get something rarer: proof that a country the world keeps describing as ruined has been, all along, a place of makers.

The women stitched through war. The least we can do is look with the same endurance.

Visit the exhibition
SOAS Gallery’s Embroidery Traditions of Afghanistan exhibition.

Mariam Amhaz
Founder & Managing Director, Global Path Connections Ltd
Written as a practitioner in culture and heritage, and as a visitor who was taught, in these rooms, to look more carefully.

From the exhibition

Hanging coats and embroidered chests in air

All works: Karun Thakar Collection, developed in collaboration with the V&A.
Photographs: Global Path Connections.