Tahmina Taham, a young Afghan feminist activist, feels like she is in prison after the Taliban announced that women must now cover their bodies and faces fully in public, and avoid leaving their homes.
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The government issued a decree on Saturday, endorsed by the Supreme Leader of the Taliban and Afghanistan, Hibatullah Akhundzada, making it compulsory for women to wear the full veil in public.
The Taliban have clarified that their preference was for the burqa, this integral veil most often blue and meshed at eye level, but that other types of veil revealing only the eyes would be tolerated.
They also felt that unless the women had a pressing reason to go out, it was “better for them to stay at home”.
When she learned of the contents of this decree, the first relating to the way of dressing of the women promulgated at the national level, Tahmina “felt badly”.
“I had the impression of being imprisoned, because all my social life is controlled by the Taliban”, explains to AFP this former government employee who lost her job when the Taliban came to power in August .
“I was deprived of my freedoms as a human being, not just a woman,” adds the one whose sister had to stop her studies because her university refused to enroll her in a mixed class.
In his eyes, Saturday’s decision “will have very negative consequences on the personal and professional lives of women”.
Sunday, this decree did not seem immediately followed by effect in Kabul, many women continuing to walk in the streets of the capital without masking their face.
The Taliban have justified the fact that women have to hide their face when they are in the company of a man not belonging to their immediate family by the need to avoid any “provocation”, in accordance with their ultra-rigorous interpretation Sharia, Islamic law.
But for Azita Habibi, a midwife in a hospital in the large city of Herat (west), Islam does not require the wearing of a full veil.
“Why do we have to cover our face and hands?” she asks. “Where is it written that women’s hands and faces should be covered?”
These new restrictions, denounced in particular by the UN and the United States, confirm the radicalization of the Taliban, who had initially tried to show a more open face than during their previous passage to power between 1996 and 2001.
They had then deprived women of almost all their rights, in particular imposing on them the wearing of the burqa.
But the Islamists quickly reneged on their commitments, largely excluding women from public employment, denying them access to secondary school or even restricting their right to move.
To implement their latest decree, the Taliban took care not to punish the women themselves, so as not to further shock the international community, but to place the burden of this social control on their families.
The heads of families who do not enforce the wearing of the full veil first incur three days in prison, then higher penalties.
“I came to the conclusion that I should wear the hijab, because I don’t want the men in my family to be punished and disgraced,” says Laila Sahar (not her real name), a former NGO worker. living in Kabul.
Hoda Khamosh, an activist now based in Norway, believes women are likely to be forced to accept full-face veils because “the Taliban are very cleverly using (their) weak spot,” along with their families.
But she thinks the women, some of whom demonstrated for their rights in recent months before their movement was suppressed by the Taliban, “will not agree to stay at home or stop working”.
Over the past two decades, Afghan women had acquired new freedoms, returning to school or applying for jobs in all sectors of activity, even if the country remained socially conservative.
Fatima Rezaie, a resident of Herat, also wants to believe that women will not be dictated to.
“Women are not the same as 20 years ago”, when they were systematically forced to do things against their will, she argues. Today, they are “ready to stand up to defend their rights”.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca