In Afghanistan, a new 114-page manifesto released by the Taliban government has further tightened restrictions on women’s rights. The document codifies a range of severe prohibitions: women are barred from education beyond the sixth grade, face employment limitations, and are restricted from public spaces such as parks, gyms, and salons. They are also prohibited from traveling long distances without a male relative and must be fully covered when leaving home.
The latest decree even bans women from speaking outside the home, marking a significant escalation in the already stringent limitations imposed during the Taliban’s three years in power. Many women in Afghanistan view this as a final blow to their hopes and aspirations, feeling as though their dreams are being crushed.
While some had hoped that the Taliban might eventually reopen schools and universities for women, this document suggests otherwise, dashing such hopes. Musarat Faramarz, a 23-year-old from Baghlan Province, lamented the return to conditions reminiscent of the Taliban’s earlier rule from 1996 to 2001, expressing disappointment in what she perceives as a regression to the dark times of the past.
Since the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021, the rights of women—especially those in urban areas—have been systematically rolled back, erasing the gains made during the 20-year U.S. occupation. Afghanistan is now recognized as the most restrictive country for women globally, with the added distinction of banning high school education for girls. The release of these new regulations has also heightened fears of increased enforcement by the vice and virtue police, who patrol the streets to enforce morality laws.
The manifesto defines for the first time the enforcement mechanisms that can be used by these officers. While they have frequently issued verbal warnings, those officers are now empowered to damage people’s property or detain them for up to three days if they repeatedly violate the vice and virtue laws.
Before the announcement of the new laws, Freshta Nasimi, a 20-year-old from Badakhshan Province in northeastern Afghanistan, had clung to any hope she could find. She had held onto a rumor that the government might broadcast girls’ schooling on television, which would allow girls to learn while staying at home. However, this hope was dashed when authorities in Khost Province banned such programs earlier this year. This move indicated that similar bans could be enforced elsewhere in the country.
Now, Ms. Nasimi says, she is trapped at home. The new law barring women’s voices — they are considered an intimate part of a woman that must be covered — effectively ensures that she cannot leave the house without a male relative. She worries that no taxi driver will speak with her, for fear of being reprimanded by the Taliban, she said, and no shopkeeper will entertain her requests.
She has accepted that her aspirations of becoming an engineer — with the steady income and freedom it would bring — are finished.
“My future?” she asked, resigned. “I don’t have a future except being a housewife and raising children.”
The publication of the vice and virtue laws, analysts say, is part of a governmentwide effort to codify the workings of every ministry to ensure they adhere to the extreme vision of Shariah law institutionalized by the Taliban’s leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. The document is also, analysts say, intended to stamp out any Western principles of the U.S.-backed government that ran Afghanistan before the Taliban’s return to power.
The Taliban have forcefully rejected outside pressure to ease the restrictions on women, even as the policies have isolated Afghanistan from much of the West. Taliban officials defend the laws as rooted in the Islamic teachings that govern the country. “Afghanistan is an Islamic nation; Islamic laws are inherently applicable within its society,” the spokesman for the government, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a statement.
But the regulations have drawn widespread criticism from human rights groups and the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. The mission’s head, Roza Otunbayeva, called them “a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future” that extends the “already intolerable restrictions” on women’s rights.
Even visual cues of womanhood have been slowly scrubbed from the public realm.
Over the past three years, women’s faces have been torn from advertisements on billboards, painted over in murals on school walls and scratched off posters lining city streets. The heads of female mannequins, dressed in all-black, all-concealing abayas, are covered in tinfoil.
Even before the new manifesto, the threat of being reprimanded by the vice and virtue police lingered in the air as women were barred from more and more public places.
“I live at home like a prisoner,” said Ms. Faramarz, the woman from Baghlan. “I haven’t left the house in three months,” she added.
The reversal of rights has been perhaps the hardest for the girls who came of age in an era of opportunity for women during the U.S. occupation.
Some girls, determined to plow ahead with their education, have found ad hoc ways to do so. Underground schools for girls, often little more than a few dozen students and a tutor tucked away in people’s private homes, have cropped up across the country. Others have turned to online classes, even as the internet cuts in and out.
Mohadisa Hasani, 18, began studying again about a year after the Taliban seized power. She had talked to two former classmates who were evacuated to the United States and Canada. Hearing about what they were studying in school stoked jealousy in her at first. But then she saw opportunity, she said.
She asked those friends to spend an hour each week teaching her the lessons they were learning in physics and chemistry. She woke up for the calls at 6 a.m. and spent the days in between poring over photos of textbooks sent by the friends, Mina and Mursad.
“Some of my friends are painting, they are writing, they are doing underground taekwondo classes,” Ms. Hasani said. “Our depression is always there, but we have to be brave.”
“I love Afghanistan, I love my country. I just don’t love the government and people forcing their beliefs onto others,” she added.
The classes and artistic outlets, while informal, have given girls, especially in more progressive cities, a dose of hope and purpose. But the reach of those programs goes only so far.
Rahmani, 43, who preferred to go by only her surname for fear of retribution, said that she began taking sleeping pills every night to dampen the anxiety she feels over providing for her family.
A widow, Ms. Rahmani worked for nonprofit groups for nearly 20 years before the Taliban seized power, earning more than enough to provide for her four children. Now, she says, she not only cannot provide for them after women were barred from working for such groups — but she has also lost her sense of self.
“I miss the days when I used to be somebody, when I could work and earn a living and serve my country,” Ms. Rahmani explained. “They have erased our presence from society.”
