The Taliban, a group of radical Islamists that has again been in control of Afghanistan since August 2021, continue with their oppressive policies against women. After shutting down schools for girls, they have now decided that women in Afghanistan won’t be eligible for driving licences!
As far as women are concerned, the Taliban’s attitude hasn’t changed over the last two decades. Their policies during their first reign and the latest one continue to push women of Afghanistan to subjugation, resulting in a major humanitarian crisis.
The Taliban’s attitude towards women largely means that the gains secured by women and girls in Afghanistan over the last 20 years would be lost. Since regaining control of Afghanistan, Taliban representatives are using their power to oppress women and girls.
Taliban authorities have put severe restrictions on where women and girls can go in their community. The women cannot go to work or travel without a male guardian; girls over the age of 12 have been prohibited from attending school. Men and women have been segregated in universities. Women professionals are no more allowed to work in the media and entertainment fields in Afghanistan.
In October 2021, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres criticised the Taliban for breaking their commitments related to the protection of women’s rights in Afghanistan.
United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is an inter-governmental body within the United Nations system made up of 47 States responsible for the promotion and protection of all human rights around the globe. On 17 January 2022, the Council quoting the independent human rights experts expressed its concern in a statement: “Taliban leaders in Afghanistan are institutionalising large-scale and systematic gender-based discrimination and violence against women and girls.”
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“The Taliban, who became de facto rulers of Afghanistan after taking the capital Kabul (in August 2021), also continue to deny the fundamental right to secondary and tertiary education, arguing that women and men must be segregated and that female students have to abide by a specific dress code. As a result, most girls’ secondary schools remain closed. The vast majority of girls who should be attending grades 7-12 are being denied access to school, based solely on their gender,” said the UN Human Rights Council.
It further added, “The experts denounce an ‘attempt to steadily erase women and girls from public life’, pointing out the closure of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the occupation of the premises of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. According to them, various service providers supporting survivors of gender-based violence have shut down for fear of retribution. The same happened with many women’s shelters. Specialised courts and prosecution units — responsible for enforcing the 2009 Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women — have also been discontinued, and many women and social workers are being prevented from working.”
The world only woke up to the Taliban’s gender policies after they captured Kabul in 1996 (for the first time). The UN could not avoid ignoring the issue after the massive international media coverage of the Taliban's hanging of former President Najibullah and the treatment of Kabul's women. Protest statements from world leaders such as then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the then heads of UNICEF, UNESCO, UNHCR and the European Commissioner for Human Rights met with no Taliban response. Beauty, hair and make-up salons were shut down in Kabul, as were women's bathhouses — the only place where hot water was available. Tailors were ordered not to measure women for clothes, but learned to keep the measurements of their regular customers in their heads. Fashion magazines were destroyed. “Paint your nails, take a snapshot of a friend, blow a flute, clap to a beat, invite a foreigner over for tea and you have broken a Taliban edict,” wrote an American reporter, according to Ahmed Rashid, one of the most authentic chroniclers of the Taliban in The Taliban Story (pp113).
Rashid explained the Taliban’s attitude toward women after they captured Kabul in 1996: “Forty percent of Kabul's women worked, both under the communist regime and the post-1992 Mujaheddin government. Women with even a smattering of education and a job exchanged their traditional clothes for skirts, high heels and make-up. They went to the movies, played sports and danced and sang at weddings. Common sense alone should have dictated that to win hearts and minds, the Taliban would have to relax their gender policy according to the prevalent realities in the areas they took control of. Instead they viewed Kabul as a den of iniquity, a Sodom and Gomorrah where women had to be beaten into conforming with Taliban standards of behaviour. And they viewed the northerners as impure Muslims who had to be forcibly re-Islamicised.”
He continued, “The Taliban's uncompromising attitude was also shaped by their own internal political dynamic and the nature of their recruiting base. Their recruits — the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proleteriat from the war and the refugee camps — had been brought up in a totally male society. In the madrassa milieu, control over women and their virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation of the students’ commitment to jihad. Denying a role for women gave the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy amongst these elements. ‘This conflict against women is rooted in the political beliefs and ideologies, not in Islam or the cultural norms. The Taliban are a new generation of Muslim males who are products of a war culture, who have spent much of their adult lives in complete segregation from their own communities. In Afghan society, women have traditionally been used as instruments to regulate social behaviour, and as such are powerful symbols in Afghan culture,’ said Simi Wali, the head of an Afghan NGO.”
Rashid gave a first-hand account of his experience about the Taliban’s gender policies immediately after their 1996 victory: “Nobody ever wants to see the inside of Maulvi Qalamuddin's sparse office in the centre of Kabul. Half the population never will anyway, because the Maulvi does not allow women to even enter the building. A huge Pashtun tribesman with enormous feet and hands, a long thick nose, black eyes and a bushy black beard that touches his desk while he talks, Qalamuddin's physique and name generate fear across the city. As head of the Taliban's religious police, the stream of regulations he issues from this office has dramatically changed the lifestyle of Kabul's once easy-going population and forced Afghan women to disappear entirely from public view. Maulvi Qalamuddin runs the Amar Bil Maroof Wa Nahi An al-Munkar, or the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. He himself prefers the translation as Department of Religious Observances.”
He continued, “In the streets, people just call the department's thousands of young zealots, who walk around with whips, long sticks and kalashnikovs, the religious police and even more derogatory names. The day I visited him for a rare interview in the summer of 1997, he had just issued new regulations which banned women from wearing high heels, making a noise with their shoes while they walked or wearing make-up. ‘Stylish dress and decoration of women in hospitals is forbidden. Women are duty-bound to behave with dignity, to walk calmly and refrain from hitting their shoes on the ground, which makes noises,’ the edict read. How the zealots could even see women's make-up or their shoes, considering that all women were now garbed in the head to toe burkha was mystifying...”
“The new edict formalised previous restrictions on disallowing women from working, but it now also banned them from working for Western humanitarian aid agencies, except in the medical sector. ‘Women are not allowed to work in any field except the medical sector. Women working in the medical sector should not sit in the seat next to the driver. No Afghan woman has the right to be transported in the same car as foreigners,’ the edict continued. Education for boys is also at a standstill in Kabul because most of the teachers are women, who now cannot work. An entire generation of Afghan children are growing up without any education. Thousands of educated families have fled Kabul for Pakistan simply because their children can no longer receive an education. I nervously asked Qalamuddin what justified the Taliban's ban on women from working and going to school. ‘We will be blamed by our people if we don't educate women and we will provide education for them eventually, but for now we have serious problems,’ he replied.”
“Like so many mullahs and despite his size, he is surprisingly soft-spoken and I strained to catch his words. ‘There are security problems. There are no provisions for separate transport, separate school buildings and facilities to educate women for the moment. Women must be completely segregated from men. And within us we have those men who cannot behave properly with women. We lost two million people in the war against the Soviets because we had no Sharia law. We fought for Sharia and now this is the organisation that will implement it. I will implement it come what may,’ Qalamuddin said emphatically.”
“When the Taliban first entered Kabul, the religious police beat men and women in public for not having long enough beards or not wearing the burkha properly. ‘We advise our staff not to beat people on the streets. We only advise people how to behave according to the Sharia. For example, if a person is about to reverse his car into another car, then we just warn you not to reverse now,’ Qalamuddin said with a broad grin on his face, obviously pleased with his modern metaphor. The Department is modelled on a similar government organisation in Saudi Arabia and it has recruited thousands of young men, many of them with only a minimum madrassa education from Pakistan. The department is also the Taliban's most effective intelligence agency — a bizarre throwback to KHAD, the enormous intelligence agency run by the communist regime in the 1980s. KHAD, which later changed its name to WAD, employed 15,000 to 30,000 professional spies as well having 100,000 paid informers.”
“Qalamuddin admitted that he has thousands of informers in the army, government ministries, hospitals and Western aid agencies. ‘Our staff all have experience in religious issues. And we are an independent organization and we don't take advice from the Justice Ministry or the Supreme Court as to what we should implement. We obey the orders of Amir Mullah Mohammed Omar.’ Qalamuddin's edicts are broadcast regularly on Radio Shariat (formerly Radio Kabul) and cover every aspect of social behaviour for the population. One addresses public attendance at sports events, which the Taliban had initially banned. ‘All onlookers, while encouraging the sportsmen, are asked to chant Allah-o-Akbar [God is Great] and refrain from clapping. In case the game coincides with prayer time, the game should be interrupted. Both the players and spectators should offer prayers in congregation,’ said the edict. Kite-flying, once a favourite pastime in the spring for Kabulis, is still banned as are all sports for women.”
“For the Taliban anyone questioning these edicts, which have no validity in the Koran, is tantamount to questioning Islam itself, even though the Prophet Mohammed's first task was to emancipate women. ‘The supreme, unmistakable test of Islam was the emancipation of women, first beginning to be proclaimed, then — more slowly — on the way to be achieved,’ said Ferdinand Braudel. But the Taliban did not allow even Muslim reporters to question these edicts or to discuss interpretations of the Koran. To foreign aid-workers they simply said, ‘You are not Muslim so you have no right to discuss Islam.’ The Taliban were right, their interpretation of Islam was right and everything else was wrong and an expression of human weakness and a lack of piety. ‘The Constitution is the Sharia so we don't need a constitution. People love Islam and that is why they all support the Taliban and appreciate what we are doing,’ said Attorney General Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizada.”
The situation for women remains as bad in the Taliban’s new regime since August 2021 as it was in the earlier regime from 1996 to 2001. According to a ‘Gender Alert’ issued by United Nations in December 2021 violence against women and girls has increased substantially in Afghanistan since August 2021 after Taliban took over; women are increasingly confined to their homes, schools are shut for women and girls, civil society activists are hounded and women are not getting any access to health, education and basic civil liberties.
According to a report in international journal The Diplomat, “In an already misogynistic social construct, the growing Taliban influence and control is likely to further exacerbate inequalities against women, who make up 48.7 percent of Afghanistan’s population. This is despite seeing an improvement in women’s role in the country in the past, with more women gaining access to education and careers. Under Taliban rule, women are more prone to being subjected to a renewed set of restrictions, violence, and injustices and are vulnerable to being displaced, trafficked and even attacked.”
Incidentally, Taliban, after capturing power in August 2021, had not only dismantled the Ministry for Women’s Affairs, but ensured that it was replaced with the Ministry for Vice and Virtue. This new ministry is the name for the feared religious police known for their public beatings of women who went out without a male relative or were dressed in something other than a burqa during their earlier regime.
This is a very potent indication of the way things are turning out against women and how the Taliban are trying to subjugate them. It remains to be seen what the rest of the world and the UN can do about it. So far except a few statements, nothing concrete is visible and the hopelessness has been increasing day by day when it comes to status of women in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime
The writer, an author and columnist, has written several books. His latest book is ‘Taliban: War and Religion in Afghanistan’. Views expressed are personal.
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