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

The Taliban has issued yet another decree imposing further restrictions on Afghan ladies, and criminalising their clothing.

Whereas the Taliban have all the time imposed restrictions to govern the bodies of Afghan women, the decree is the first for this regime where prison punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for ladies.

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

The ministry, in an announcement, recognized the chadori (the blue-coloured Afghan burqa or full-body veil) because the “finest hijab” of alternative.

Additionally acceptable as a hijab, the statement declared, is a protracted black veil overlaying a girl from head to toe.

The ministry statement offered an outline: “Any garment overlaying the physique of a girl is taken into account a hijab, provided that it is not too tight to represent the body parts nor is it thin enough to disclose the body.”

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

“If a woman is caught and not using a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) can be warned. The second time, the guardian will likely 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 authorities workers who violate the hijab rule can be fired.

And male guardians found guilty of repeated offences “will likely be sent to the court for further punishment”, he said.

The new decree is the latest in a collection of edicts proscribing women’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan final summer time. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan women and activists.

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

The professor’s title has been modified to protect her id, as she fears Taliban repercussions for expressing her views publicly.

“I'm a training Muslim and value what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim males, they have a problem with my hijab, then they need to observe their own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she said.

“Why should we be treated like third-class residents as a result of they can't follow Islam and management their sexual desires?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried woman who takes care of her mom, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm single, and my father died very long ago, and I look after my mother,” she mentioned.

“The Taliban killed my brother, my only 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 university, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids ladies from travelling alone.

“They regularly cease the taxi I am in, asking the place my mahram is,” Marzia said.

“When I attempt to clarify I don’t have one, they received’t listen. It doesn’t matter that I am a respected professor; they present no dignity and order the taxi drivers to desert me on the roads,” she mentioned.

“I've had to walk several kilometres to residence or my lessons on more than one occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by girls’s rights activists primarily based in Afghanistan and outdoors the country.

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

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules haven't any authorized basis, and ship a unsuitable message to the young girls of this technology in Afghanistan, lowering their identity to their garments,” mentioned Khamosh, who urged Afghan ladies to raise their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she mentioned.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are more than just the fitting to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh stated, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that focused solely on the correct to marriage, but did not handle issues of work and schooling for women.

“Ladies have dignity and agency over their lives,” she stated.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] isn't insignificant progress to lose overnight. We gained this on our personal may, preventing the patriarchal society, and nobody can remove us from the group.”

The activists also mentioned they'd predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and positioned equal blame on the international group for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

Samira Hamidi, an Afghan activist and senior researcher at Amnesty Worldwide, said that even after the Taliban’s take over final August, Afghan women continued to insist that the worldwide group keep girls’s rights as “a non-negotiable component of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

But the worldwide neighborhood had failed Afghan girls but once more, Hamidi said.

“For a decade Afghan girls have been warning all actors involved in peace negotiations about what returning the Taliban to energy will means to women,” she said.

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

“It is a blatant violation of the correct to freedom of choice and motion, and the Taliban got the area and time [by the international community] to impose extra reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi said.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a whole generation with their silence,” she mentioned.

“It is a crime towards humanity to permit a country to show into a prison for half its population,” she said, including that repercussions from the ongoing state of affairs in Afghanistan can be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared the same sense of disappointment.

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

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

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