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

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

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

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 “best hijab” of selection.

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

The ministry assertion provided a description: “Any garment masking the body of a woman is taken into account a hijab, provided that it's not too tight to characterize the physique parts nor is it thin enough to disclose the body.”

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

“If a lady is caught with out a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) might be warned. The second time, the guardian might be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian might be imprisoned for three days,” based on the statement.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, said that authorities employees who violate the hijab rule will likely be fired.

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

The brand new decree is the newest in a sequence of edicts restricting girls’s freedoms imposed for the reason that Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan last summer. News of the decree was acquired with widespread condemnation and outrage by Afghan ladies and activists.

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

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

“I am a working towards Muslim and worth what Islam has taught me. If, as Muslim men, they've an issue with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she stated.

“Why should we be handled like third-class residents as a result of they can not apply Islam and management their sexual desires?” the professor requested, anger evident in her voice.

As an unmarried lady who looks after her mom, Marzia does not have a mahram. She is the only real breadwinner in her small family.

“I'm single, and my father died very long ago, and I take care of my mother,” she said.

“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 college, which is a violation of an earlier edict that forbids girls from travelling alone.

“They commonly stop the taxi I'm in, asking where my mahram is,” Marzia stated.

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

“I've needed to stroll several kilometres to residence or my lessons on a couple of event.”

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

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

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed guidelines don't have any legal basis, and send a fallacious message to the young women of this era in Afghanistan, lowering their identity to their clothes,” stated Khamosh, who urged Afghan women to raise their voices.

“By no means be silent,” she stated.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are more than just the appropriate to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh said, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted solely on the precise to marriage, but did not address points of labor and schooling for girls.

“Women have dignity and agency over their lives,” she said.

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] will not be insignificant progress to lose overnight. We won this on our personal would possibly, fighting the patriarchal society, and no one can remove us from the group.”

The activists also stated they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the international group for not recognising the urgency of the scenario.

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

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

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

The current scenario has resulted from flawed policies and the worldwide group’s lack of “understanding on how critical women’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she mentioned.

“It's a blatant violation of the suitable to freedom of selection and movement, and the Taliban were given the house and time [by the international community] to impose further reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi stated.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

“The world is betraying a complete technology with their silence,” she stated.

“It is a crime against humanity to permit a rustic to show into a jail for half its inhabitants,” she said, including that repercussions from the ongoing state of affairs in Afghanistan shall be felt globally.

Marzia, the professor, shared an analogous sense of disappointment.

“We're a country that has produced some of the most sensible girls leaders. I used to teach my college students the worth of respecting and supporting women,” she mentioned.

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

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