As a teenager, Anjuman rallied with other local women and began attending an underground educational circle called the Golden Needle Sewing School, organized by the young women and mentored by Herat University professor Muhammad Ali Rahyab in 1996. Members of the Golden Needle School would gather three times a week under the guise of learning how to sew (a practice approved by the Taliban government), while in actuality the meetings enabled them to hear lectures from Herat University professors and lead discussions on literature. If caught, the likely punishment was imprisonment, torture, and possibly hanging. In order to protect themselves, the attendants had their children play outside the building and act as lookouts. They would alert the women of approaching religious police, at which point the students would hide their books and take up needlework. The program continued through the entirety of the Taliban governmental rule.