Clara Fong and Noël James
The Taliban’s outright denial of women’s rights in Afghanistan has spurred a global push to combat gender-based oppression.
What conditions do Afghan women face under Taliban rule?
The Taliban’s 2021 return to power brought a slew of new constraints on women and girls that the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan Richard Bennett calls an “unprecedented deterioration of women’s rights.”
Since then, the Taliban have issued more than eighty edicts targeting the twenty million women and girls who make up just short of 50 percent of Afghanistan’s population. Women and girls face draconian restrictions in public life, namely, on education, employment, access to the justice system, and activities and travel outside the home. These include prohibitions on education beyond sixth grade, veiling and dress codes enforceable by the morality police, and bans on leaving the house without a mahram, a male relative chaperone. According to news reports, repressions are only deepening, and the Taliban have resumed the practice of corporal punishment, including stoning, flogging, and execution.
The Taliban justify these policies as adherence to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. They claim that removing women from public space and society demonstrates the “purity” of the regime under sharia, says Zahra Nader, an Afghan-Canadian journalist who leads the women-led, investigative newsroom Zan Times. “[Taliban leaders] feel if they give a little bit of rights to women, they might be rejected from the broader Taliban movement, which is fundamentalist,” she says.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an intergovernmental organization comprising mostly Muslim-majority countries, and other experts highlight how such restrictions are not explicitly dictated in the Quran; they argue that the Taliban has instituted a regime of gender apartheid that reflects conservative cultural biases justified by an extremist interpretation of Islamic law.