No Women Allowed: Part 1
Five grades of primary school and a life spent behind the walls of the home — that is how the hard core of the Afghan Taliban see the role of women. Despite its initial promises and pressure from the international community and parts of the Islamic world, the movement’s actions are a throwback to the brutal 1990s. And, with the assistance of Russia and China, it is tightening the screws even further.
The wind blows from Kandahar
Sadaf, a 22-year-old Islamic studies student from northern Afghanistan, got into trouble over accusations that she had spoken to a young man who was not a ‘mahram’, i.e. not part of her family. But the case, reported on the website of Qatar’s Al Jazeera television, has become a little more complicated. The journalists changed the girl’s name. And they did not mention anything that could lead to the identification of her family, even though the criticism has been widely disliked and severely punished by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban movement.
“About a month ago, a local Taliban leader stopped me on my way home from university and wanted to know why I had turned down a marriage proposal from his son,” Sadaf says. In fact, the man had already visited her father several times, as is customary in Afghan society, where weddings are often arranged first between the parents of the bride and groom. “But we turned them down because I am simply not going to marry a Taliban,” the girl explains.
“I told him that I know well the women’s rights contained in Islam, and if I don’t want his son, no one can force me to do it. This made him very angry and he started cursing me,” Sadaf recounts. The Taliban leader then denounced the student for talking to a man who was not related to her, which is a moral crime in contemporary Afghanistan. “It was a taxi driver whose car he saw me get out of,” the girl explains.
Thirty lashes
“We didn’t know what the punishment would be, and people in my neighbourhood were afraid they might kill me,” she says. “And I myself was afraid they would kill our whole family,” she adds. The trial was governed by Sharia law and, to a large extent, local custom. Sadaf did not have a lawyer, and it was unclear how and on what evidence the judges would assess her guilt and reach a verdict.
The flogging to which the girl was sentenced is not only a physical ordeal, but also a stigma that will mark the reputation of the victim and her entire family for many years to come.
But Sadaf only learned of it shortly before it was to be carried out. It was called “30 lashes”. The Taliban offered that by marrying the son of its leader, the student could escape punishment. “My mother tried to convince me, but my father said it was better to die like this than to die every day afterwards,” Sadaf recalls.
The night before the sentence was carried out, the family read prayers and verses from the Koran. “I hugged my siblings, kissed my mother and asked her for forgiveness. And I told my father that if anything happened to me, to stay strong and leave this province,” Sadaf describes the seconds before the actual flogging. A crowd of people then gathered around her at the mosque, tied her hands and forbade her to shout because a woman’s voice should not be heard by a stranger.
“I don’t know how long we’ll be on the run, but we had to disappear. Afghanistan has become one big prison where the Taliban can punish anyone as they please,” Sadaf commented on her story, which is not unique in the country’s current situation. And since flogging was last practiced in our country in the Middle Ages, it does not occur to us that this punishment is not only a physical torture but also a stigma that will mark the reputation of the victim and her entire family for many years.
Sunken islands of freedom
With each passing month of rule, the Taliban tighten the screws and impose new restrictions. This is despite the fact that in late summer 2021, shortly after taking power, he promised not to behave dogmatically as he did during his last reign from 1995–2001 and to guarantee basic rights and freedoms for all, especially women.
“I thought that Afghan society could not go back to before 2001, when the country was occupied by the Western allies and they started to rebuild it in cooperation with the Afghans. But now I’m starting to have my doubts,” Thomas, an aid worker for a Western organisation who does not want his last name published, tells to Voxpot (Czech independent media). “I don’t think we can do it completely, because in the age of ubiquitous social media, you can’t keep people in the dark. But increasingly strong repression and bans can do a lot,” he says.
Among the series of restrictions is one that bans women from NGOs from going to work. Economy Minister Muhammad Hanif justified this on the grounds that he had received “serious complaints” about women “not following the rules on head coverings”. The Taliban were bothered that they were removing their burqas and chadors in the office, car or in the field so that their faces and hair were visible. “The NGO environment is a kind of island of freedom and no one is forcing anyone to cover up, but women work here voluntarily,” Thomas comments.
Retaining women in employment has been one of the NGOs’ basic conditions for continuing to operate in the country since the Taliban came to power last summer. According to aid workers interviewed, this is all about gender equality. This is hard to enforce for women in the world’s most discriminatory society. But there are also practical aspects, because again, only women can work with women in the field.
In early December, the Taliban resumed the tradition of public executions from the first period of their rule.
Some, mainly foreign organisations, including the Czech People in Need, have suspended their activities because of the ban. And the UN has also announced a temporary freeze on certain programmes. Although the latter is not directly affected by the restriction, its partners are. “The ban on women’s humanitarian work has immediate life-threatening consequences for all Afghans,” said a joint statement by the heads of UN agencies and several humanitarian organisations.
The Taliban have taken a number of steps recently that grossly restrict the status of women in particular. They also show some similarities with the measures taken by the Nazis against Jews, Roma and other inconvenient peoples and minorities. Four days before the ban on non-government work, the radicals closed colleges and universities to women. It bothered them that the two sexes attended lectures and seminars together and did not study separately. Some female students refused to respect the ban on teaching, so the Taliban posted guards at the entrances of universities to keep women out.
In Kabul and Jalalabad, female students gathered courage and took to the streets to demonstrate. However, the Taliban are repressing the protests and arresting those who participate. Muslim countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also criticised the ban. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoglu said it was “neither Islamic nor humane”. “Astonishment and regret” were expressed by the foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia, which until recently also had extensive restrictions on women, over the ban.
In early December, the Taliban resumed the tradition of public executions from the first period of its rule. Public floggings for minor offences — from theft to illicitly talking to a stranger in the street, as experienced by student Sadaf — have also returned.
Since November, women have also been banned from Kabul’s parks and sports grounds. The Taliban were bothered by the fact that they would sometimes remove the headscarf from their faces and that they would now and then come across male trainers in the fitness centre. Shortly before that, public baths were also on the radicals’ restricted list, even though they strictly separate women from men. Earlier, the Taliban had thrown all women out of government jobs and ordered them to bring in male relatives to replace them, while paying them only a fraction of their salary as compensation.
Then, last March, the Taliban ordered the closure of secondary schools for girls and, despite promises, never resumed teaching. Women are also forbidden to travel more than 72 kilometres independently, and of course to communicate with men unless they are related.
…End of Part 1
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