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

The Taliban has issued yet one more decree imposing further restrictions on Afghan ladies, and criminalising their clothes.

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

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

The ministry, in a statement, 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 a long black veil overlaying a woman from head to toe.

The ministry assertion provided a description: “Any garment overlaying the physique of a woman is considered a hijab, supplied that it's not too tight to symbolize the physique 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 are going to be imprisoned.

“If a lady is caught and not using a hijab, her mahram (a male guardian) will likely be warned. The second time, the guardian shall be summoned [by Taliban officials], and after repeated summons, her guardian can be imprisoned for 3 days,” according to the assertion.

Akif Muhajir, a spokesman for the ministry, mentioned that authorities staff who violate the hijab rule shall be fired.

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

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

“Why have they reduced girls 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 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 men, they've a problem with my hijab, then they should observe their own hijab and lower their gaze,” she mentioned.

“Why ought to we be handled like third-class residents because they can not follow Islam and management their sexual needs?” the professor asked, anger evident in her voice.

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

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

“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 requested.

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 ladies from travelling alone.

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

“When I attempt to explain I don’t have one, they won’t pay attention. It doesn’t matter that I am a revered professor; they show no dignity and order the taxi drivers to desert me on the roads,” she mentioned.

“I have had to stroll a number of kilometres to dwelling or my courses on multiple occasion.”

Marzia’s sentiments were echoed by ladies’s rights activists based mostly in Afghanistan and out of doors the country.

Activist Huda Khamosh was a leader in the women-led demonstrations in Kabul that came about after the Taliban takeover last summer season. 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 release her fellow female protestors held in Kabul.

“The Taliban regime was imposed on us, and their self-imposed rules don't have any legal foundation, and ship a unsuitable message to the young girls of this technology in Afghanistan, decreasing their identity to their clothes,” said Khamosh, who urged Afghan girls to boost their voices.

“Never be silent,” she mentioned.

“The rights granted to a woman [in Islam] are extra than simply the precise to choose one’s husband and get married,” Khamosh mentioned, referring to a Taliban decree on rights that targeted solely on the correct to marriage, but didn't tackle points of labor and training for women.

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

“Twenty years [of gains made by Afghan women] isn't insignificant progress to lose in a single day. We gained this on our own may, combating the patriarchal society, and no one can remove us from the neighborhood.”

The activists additionally stated that they had predicted the current developments in Afghanistan, and placed equal blame on the worldwide neighborhood for not recognising the urgency of the situation.

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 hold women’s rights as “a non-negotiable element of their engagement and negotiations with the Taliban”.

However the international community had failed Afghan women yet once more, Hamidi mentioned.

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

The current state of affairs has resulted from flawed insurance policies and the worldwide neighborhood’s lack of “understanding on how serious girls’s rights violations” are in Afghanistan, she stated.

“It's a blatant violation of the precise to freedom of choice and movement, and the Taliban got the house and time [by the international community] to impose further reprisals and systematic discrimination,” Hamidi mentioned.

Khamosh, the activist, agrees.

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

“It is a crime in opposition to humanity to allow a rustic to turn into a prison for half its inhabitants,” she mentioned, including that repercussions from the ongoing scenario in Afghanistan will probably be felt globally.

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

“We're a rustic that has produced a number of the most good ladies leaders. I used to teach my college students the value of respecting and supporting women,” she stated.

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

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