The Taliban has taken a harsh new step, banning women from hearing one another’s voices and severing one of their last means of connection. This measure builds on an August decree forbidding women from speaking or showing their faces in public, an attempt to erase them entirely from public life.
Meryl Streep recently spoke on behalf of women and girls in Afghanistan, sharing “A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today because the public parks have been closed to women and girls by the Taliban.” Since the Taliban took control in August 2021, in just three years, women and girls have seen their rights and freedoms systematically stripped away.
In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to look at men who they aren’t related to by blood or marriage, their faces, and bodies must be completely covered before they leave their homes, and they’re prohibited from going to schools, gyms, parks, or sports clubs. They are barred from most forms of paid employment.
Women’s full participation and equality in society is a fundamental human right that is essential for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. / femalequotient insta
The latest ban
Khalid Hanafi, the Taliban’s minister for virtue, has said it was forbidden for adult women to allow their voices to be heard, according to The Associated Press.
During an event in eastern Logar province on Sunday, Vice and Virtue Minister Khalid Hanafi said: “It is prohibited for a grown woman to recite Quranic verses or perform recitations in front of another grown woman. Even chants of takbir (Allahu Akbar) are not permitted.”
He said that uttering similar expressions like ‘Subhanallah’, another word central to the Islamic faith, was also not allowed. A woman was not permitted to perform the call to prayer, he told the gathering. “So, there is certainly no permission for singing.”
According to the minister, a woman’s voice is awrah, which means it needs to be covered and should not be heard in public, not even by other women.
The audio of Hanafi’s remarks was shared on the Ministry’s social media platforms but was later deleted.
Human rights activists in Afghanistan have cautioned that it might essentially forbid women from speaking to one another. -firstpost / photo: CTV news
