The political and cultural position of women in Afghanistan under the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban government has gone from bad to worse. This week the ruling government set down new laws requiring women to be completely veiled in public and to ban them from allowing their voices to be heard in public.
The “supreme leader” Hibatullah Akhundzada signed off on the laws, drafted by the vice ministry, a group set up in 2021 for the “propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice.” The language is familiar in patriarchal fundamentalist Muslim countries; vice equates to women exercising any freedom of expression or movement.
The new rules are exacting and specific, referring to areas of life from riding on public buses to music, personal grooming, and celebratory parties. They’re part of a document 114 pages long. According to the Associated Press, the new “modesty” rules are the first virtue/vice laws codified in Afghanistan since the extremist Taliban took over the country in 2021.
Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. withdrew troops from Afghanistan three years ago in a botched operation that left 13 American service members dead and helped the extremist and misogynist Taliban government to take control.
Ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq said “this Islamic law” will go far in promoting virtue and squashing vice. That goal will be put into practice by ministry police, who will be empowered to arrest or otherwise punish those who break the new laws.
The personal and public conduct the ministry now claims the authority to regulate knows few bounds, especially for women. Article 13 of the news laws says women must veil themselves completely, including their faces, in public, so as to prevent “temptation.” Women are also not to wear tight fitting clothing.
Even more extremely, women’s voices are deemed to be corrupting, and women are barred from reciting, signing, or reading out loud in public. Both men and women are forbidden from looking at each other unless they are related by blood or marriage. It is unclear how this could be accomplished.
Want to watch television? Think again. Article 17 outlaws images of any living creature. Feel like dancing? Article 19 says music is banned.