Afghanistan’s Taliban government has introduced a new rule prohibiting women from reciting the Quran aloud, even in the company of other women. This move intensifies the already stringent curbs on Afghan women, who have been systematically silenced since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
The rule, framed by Taliban minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, is an extension of the prohibition against women calling the takbir (God is Great) or the athan (Islamic call to prayer). A woman’s voice is considered awrah, something private and forbidden to be heard by others, even by other women.
The new rule adds to a spate of measures targeting Afghan women’s visibility in society, including a recent mandate requiring them to cover their entire bodies, including their faces, in public. These edicts, approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, are presented as safeguards to prevent “vice and temptation,” transforming women’s voices, clothing, and very presence into potential moral hazards. Human rights experts and Afghan women fear that this latest diktat could extend far beyond prayer, limiting even private conversations and further erasing women’s social presence.
The restrictions have grown so severe that Afghan women are now forbidden to make eye contact with men who are not close family, and taxi drivers face penalties if they transport a woman unaccompanied by a male relative. Any woman or girl who fails to comply with these rules risks detention and punishment, as Taliban officials enforce the strict new codes.
The global community, especially women’s rights advocates, is voicing alarm, with the United Nations’ special representative for Afghanistan condemning the growing list of restrictions as “intolerable.” Women remain visible in small numbers on the streets of cities like Kabul, but almost all are now shrouded from head to toe in loose black garments or dark blue burqas, with their faces covered and only their eyes showing.
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Source: Money Control
