Taliban pressure women to cover up
KABUL, Afghanistan — Her mother begged her not to go to the protest, even as Maryam Hassanzada was on her way out the door.
But Hassanzada, 24, reassured her mother, then joined a dozen other women protesting a Taliban decree this month requiring Afghan women to cover themselves from head to toe.
Their faces uncovered, the women chanted “Justice! Justice!” and “Stop tyranny against women!” They protested for about 10 minutes before Taliban gunmen roughly broke up the demonstration. The protesters said they were held by Taliban security officials for two hours, questioned and berated, then released with a warning not to protest again.
Hassanzada was unbowed.
“If we don’t protest, the world won’t know how badly Afghan women are oppressed,” she said later.
These are perilous times for Afghan women. The Taliban show no sign of easing a crackdown not only on such basic rights as education and jobs for women, but on every facet of public life, from deportment to travel.
The cover-up decree, which also urged women to stay home unless they had a compelling reason to go out, followed a previous rule requiring women who travel more than about 45 miles from their homes to be accompanied by a male relative.
In August, the Taliban promised less restrictive policies toward women than during their previous rule in the late 1990s.
“There will be no violence against women, no prejudice against women,” Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters.
Instead, in a matter of months, the Taliban have imposed onerous decrees that have dragged women from the relative freedoms achieved over the past two decades to a harsh interpretation of Islamic law that smothers women’s rights.
On the streets of the capital, compliance with the decree is mixed.
In the Dasht-e-Barchi district, home to Hazaras, a predominantly Shiite Muslim minority, very few women cover their faces — except for surgical masks for COVID-19. But in nearby Karte Naw, an ethnic Pashtun area, part of the Sunni majority, most women wear hijabs, or headscarves, that cover their faces.
Some women in Kabul said that men on the street had harassed and berated them when they appeared in public with their faces uncovered.
Outside the capital, most women seem to be obeying the decree. Across the country, women say that Taliban enforcers have accosted them, sometimes violently, and ordered them to cover up.
In the northern province of Takhar, Farahnaz, a university student, said religious police had set up checkpoints to inspect rickshaws carrying women to class. Those who were not covered in all-black hijabs were roughed up and sent home, she said.
“I had a colored headscarf, but they sent me back home and said I had to wear a black hijab and niqab,” she said, referring to a garment that covers the hair and face except for the eyes.
She asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of retribution.
In Kabul, a 24-year-old university student who wore a headscarf but no face covering to a popular recreation area said that she had been struck on the head by a rifle butt wielded by a passing Taliban gunman who shouted at her to cover her face.
Taliban gunmen have pointed weapons at female protesters, sprayed them with pepper spray and called them “whores” and “puppets of the West,” Human Rights Watch has said.
Local news media reported that some female students at Kabul University had been sent home by Taliban enforcers for not complying with the hijab decree. And Human Rights Watch reported that Taliban religious police attempted to compel Afghan women working for the U.N. mission in Kabul to cover up.
Muhammad Sadiq Akif, spokesperson for the Virtue and Vice Ministry in Kabul, denied that any women had been accosted or punished. He said that ministry patrols had not forced women to cover themselves but had merely explained the decree to encourage full compliance.
And he denied that women had been compelled to wear black hijabs, saying that they could wear hijabs of any color.
“Out of respect for the sisters of our country, we do not stop, summon or punish any women,” he said in an interview at the ministry, which has replaced the previous government’s Ministry for Women’s Affairs.
“The hijab is the command of God and must be observed,” Akif said, adding that the regulation for women was “for their own protection.”