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

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

Whereas the Taliban have always imposed restrictions to control the bodies of Afghan girls, the decree is the primary for this regime the place criminal punishment is assigned for violation of the dress code for girls.

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

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

Also acceptable as a hijab, the statement declared, is an extended black veil protecting a lady from head to toe.

The ministry statement supplied an outline: “Any garment protecting the physique of a girl is taken into account a hijab, offered that it isn't too tight to signify the body elements neither is it thin sufficient to reveal the body.”

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

“If a lady is caught and not using a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) shall be warned. The second time, the guardian might be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian shall be imprisoned for three days,” in keeping with the assertion.

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

And male guardians discovered guilty of repeated offences “might be sent to the court docket for additional punishment”, he mentioned.

The new decree is the most recent in a collection of edicts limiting girls’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer time. Information of the decree was received with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan women and activists.

“Why have they lowered girls to [an] object that's being sexualised?” asked Marzia, a 50-year-old college professor from Kabul.

The professor’s name has been modified to protect her identity, 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 men, they have an issue with my hijab, then they need to observe their own hijab and decrease their gaze,” she said.

“Why should we be handled like third-class residents because they can't practice Islam and control their sexual needs?” the professor requested, anger evident in her voice.

As an single lady who looks after her mother, Marzia doesn't have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small household.

“I'm unmarried, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mom,” 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 subsequent time?” she asked.

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

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

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

“I've needed to stroll a number of kilometres to dwelling or my courses on a couple of event.”

Marzia’s sentiments have been echoed by ladies’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and out of doors the nation.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that passed off after the Taliban takeover final summer. She evaded arrest throughout a Taliban crackdown on female protestors in February. Later, Khamosh confronted Taliban leaders at a conference in Norway, demanding that they launch her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules don't have any authorized foundation, and send a mistaken message to the young ladies of this generation in Afghanistan, reducing their id to their garments,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to boost their voices.

“Never be silent,” she said.

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

“Women have dignity and company over their lives,” she mentioned.

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

The activists additionally said they'd predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide community for not recognising the urgency of the state of affairs.

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

However the worldwide neighborhood had failed Afghan women yet once more, Hamidi stated.

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

The present situation has resulted from flawed policies and the worldwide neighborhood’s lack of “understanding on how severe women’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she said.

“It's a blatant violation of the correct to freedom of alternative and motion, and the Taliban got the house and time [by the international community] to impose extra reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi stated.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying an entire generation with their silence,” she stated.

“It's a crime against humanity to allow a rustic to turn into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, including that repercussions from the ongoing scenario in Afghanistan might be felt globally.

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

“We are a country that has produced a number of the most brilliant women leaders. I used to teach my students the worth of respecting and supporting women,” she stated.

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

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