Afghanistan’s Taliban have banned women from speaking in public or showing their faces outside their homes.
The laws were confirmed by a number of news outlets, including the Guardian, which noted that these latest dictates from the Taliban were published in a list of new “vice and virtue” laws last week that are designed to keep the public’s morality in line with the regime’s strict interpretation of Islamic law.
Supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada approved the new laws that insist women must completely cover their entire bodies, faces included, in heavy clothing that reveals nothing and that will prevent men from being tempted by the female form.
Women’s voices are not wanted in the public square and the laws ban women from speaking anywhere in public. They are not even supposed to be heard singing or reading out loud, even if they are safely cloistered at home.
“Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body,” the new laws state. Men are not entirely exempt from the new laws; they must now cover up from the knees to the navel if outside the privacy of home.
Women are not even permitted to look at men who are not their blood relatives or their husbands. Taxi drivers cannot drive a woman to any destination if she wants to go alone without the company of a man.
Failure to comply with these laws will result in detention and punishment in accordance with whatever the Taliban officials decide that is.
The restrictions have been condemned by Roza Otunbayeva, the special UN’s representative for Afghanistan, who said this is just more of the “intolerable restrictions” on the rights of women and girls that females have experienced since the Taliban seized power in August 2021 after the debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“It is a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future, where moral inspectors have discretionary powers to threaten and detain anyone based on broad and sometimes vague lists of infractions,” she said on Sunday. “It extends the already intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls, with even the sound of a female voice outside the home apparently deemed a moral violation.”
Champion swimmer Riley Gaines noted on X:
“Yesterday the Taliban passed a law banning women from:
- speaking in public
- showing ANY skin
- looking at men they aren't related to
Where is the outrage? No protests on college campuses. No statement from the White House. & guess who's funding this? We are.”
The Taliban recently fired hundreds of men from its security detail because they were beardless. The regime has actually outlawed barbers in some parts of the country from shaving or trimming beards, saying the dictate is part of Sharia law. This week, the leadership staged a massive parade of military hardware left by US forces during President Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Kabul in 2021. Women living in the ultra-Islamic regime can only travel if they’re married.
