Afghan women deplore Taliban’s new order to cover faces in public | Taliban Information

The Taliban has issued one more decree imposing additional restrictions on Afghan girls, and criminalising their clothing.

Whereas the Taliban have at all times imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the primary for this regime the place criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the gown code for girls.

The Taliban’s lately reinstated Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice announced on Saturday that it is “required for all respectable Afghan girls to put on a hijab”, or scarf.

The ministry, in a press release, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) as the “finest hijab” of selection.

Additionally acceptable as a hijab, the assertion declared, is an extended black veil protecting a girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement offered a description: “Any garment masking the physique of a lady is considered a hijab, offered that it is not too tight to signify the body elements neither is it skinny enough to reveal the physique.”

Punishment was also detailed: Male guardians of offending women will obtain a warning, and for repeated offences they are going to be imprisoned.

“If a lady is caught with no hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will likely be warned. The second time, the guardian will probably be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian will probably be imprisoned for 3 days,” in line with the statement.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, mentioned that government staff who violate the hijab rule will probably be fired.

And male guardians found responsible of repeated offences “will be sent to the courtroom for additional punishment”, he stated.

The brand new decree is the latest in a series of edicts proscribing ladies’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized power in Afghanistan final summer time. News of the decree was received with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

“Why have they lowered ladies to [an] object that is being sexualised?” asked Marzia, a 50-year-old university professor from Kabul.

The professor’s identify has been changed to guard her id, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

“I'm a practicing Muslim and worth what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they've a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she stated.

“Why ought to we be treated like third-class citizens as a result of they can not apply Islam and control their sexual wishes?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried girl who takes care of her mother, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small household.

“I am single, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mother,” she stated.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my solely mahram, in an attack 18 years in the past. Would they now have me borrow a mahram for them [to] punish me next time?” she asked.

Marzia has repeatedly been stopped by the Taliban whereas travelling on her own to work in her college, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids women from travelling alone.

“They repeatedly stop the taxi I am in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

“When I try to clarify I don’t have one, they gained’t hear. It doesn’t matter that I'm a revered professor; they present no dignity and order the taxi drivers to abandon me on the roads,” she mentioned.

“I have had to walk several kilometres to residence or my lessons on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by ladies’s rights activists based in Afghanistan and outside the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a pacesetter in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that occurred after the Taliban takeover final summer time. She evaded arrest throughout a Taliban crackdown on female protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a convention in Norway, demanding that they release her fellow feminine protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed guidelines have no authorized basis, and send a mistaken message to the younger girls of this era in Afghanistan, reducing their identity to their clothes,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan ladies to raise their voices.

“Never be silent,” she said.

“The rights granted to a lady [in Islam] are extra than just the fitting to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh mentioned, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted only on the fitting to marriage, but did not handle issues of labor and education for women.

“Girls have dignity and company over their lives,” she stated.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] isn't insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We received this on our own would possibly, fighting the patriarchal society, and nobody can remove us from the neighborhood.”

The activists also mentioned that they had predicted the present developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty International, mentioned that even after the Taliban’s take over final August, Afghan girls continued to insist that the international group hold girls’s rights as “a non-negotiable element of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the international neighborhood had failed Afghan ladies yet once more, Hamidi mentioned.

“For a decade Afghan ladies have been warning all actors concerned in peace negotiations about what returning the Taliban to power will means to ladies,” she stated.

The current situation has resulted from flawed insurance policies and the international community’s lack of “understanding on how serious ladies’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she stated.

“It's a blatant violation of the appropriate to freedom of alternative and movement, and the Taliban were given the space and time [by the international community] to impose extra reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a complete era with their silence,” she said.

“It's a crime against humanity to permit a country to turn into a prison for half its population,” she said, adding that repercussions from the continued scenario in Afghanistan will be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared a similar sense of disappointment.

“We are a rustic that has produced some of the most brilliant girls leaders. I used to show my students the worth of respecting and supporting ladies,” she stated.

“I gave hope to so many young girls and all of that has been thrown in [the] trash as meaningless,” she said.

“My coronary heart breaks into items with each new ‘regulation’ and decrees they situation that contradicts our Islamic and Afghan values.”