The diminutive 22-year-old may be hard to see behind the tinted windows of the massive car but three years ago she had to be completely shrouded in an all-encompassing blue burqa even to leave the house.

“The most joyful moments of my life are when I’m driving -- I love it,” Shireen says, the excitement visible on her face as she finally gets to do what the country’s male motorists take for granted.

High school student Shireen is taking part at the first ever-driving course in Herat, Afghanistan’s most prosperous city, which was launched in early February by the traffic department, under the auspices of the new governor.

Until September last year, Herat was under the thumb of Ismael Khan, a military strongman whose views of women were only marginally more liberal than those of the fundamentalist Islamic Taleban.

Under Khan’s hardline rule, women were just about allowed to attend school but the motoring lessons by an Afghan non-governmental organisation proved unacceptable.

“The women’s driving course was opened last year but we got order at the time from former governor to shut it down,” said Basir Bigzad, one of the organizers in Herat traffic department told AFP.

“The course was closed three days after it was opened,” he added.

Slow development of gender awareness…

Khan, a former anti-Soviet fighter, was slammed for curbing the political and economic rights of women during his three-year tenure before he was dismissed by President Hamid Karzai last year amid violent riots.

He is now Afghanistan’s minister of energy.

His replacement as governor was the more urbane Sayed Mohammad Khairkhwa, a technocrat and former ambassador to Ukraine, as well as an aide of Karzai.

“It’s the right of a woman to drive,” the governor, who wears dark western suits in contrast to his his turbanned predecessor, told AFP.

“If you limit the activities of women you have limited the activities of half of the community. I wouldn’t do that.”

His attitude belies the agonisingly slow development of gender awareness in Afghanistan, where the treatment of women has largely regressed over the past two and a half decades of Soviet occupation, civil war and religious rule.

The country has recently named its first ever-female provincial governor and President Karzai has a record three women in his new cabinet, but rights and empowerment are still foreign concepts to the majority of Afghan women.

During the three-week course, the students, now numbering 25, learn how to manoeuvre the car, observe traffic rules and change punctured tyres -- a likely hazard on the donkey cart and jeep-clogged streets of Herat.

“Women were not allowed to attend driving school under Ismael Khan,” said one of Shireen’s fellow students in a huge classroom decorated with road signs printed on paper and pinned on the wall.

“When a man can drive why should a woman not -- the constitution assures us equal rights with man,” she said.

Driving is not without its potholes for Afghan women, because although the Taleban’s feared religious police are gone female motorists still face discrimination in the male-dominated conservative Islamic country.

US-led forces ousted the Taleban in late 2001.

“We don’t have a problem with the authorities now but people on the streets taunt us when they see us driving -- that is very annoying,” said another learner driver, Mahsooma Sadiqi.

Sadiqi said it wouldn’t stop her though. “It was my dream to drive even I was a kid,” the 23-year-old told AFP.