Do you remember, dear reader, August 2021? When the Taliban returned to power? Do you remember the “moderate Taliban” that was on everyone’s lips? The political and media complacency that wanted to believe, against all logic, that it was possible for the Taliban to agree to let Afghan women live? Do you remember my anger, which had not waited for the criminal measures taken against women to express itself? A moderate Taliban! A joke for the West that is lazy, lulled by the stubborn and childish desire not to engage further in the criticism of Islamist totalitarianism, out of fear, weakness, and the illusion of peace.
In three years, Afghan women have been stripped, one after the other, of all their freedoms, their primitive freedoms, their basic freedoms: strict segregation between the sexes is in place, which means that women are banned from studying from the age of 12, that they are unable to buy a plane ticket, and therefore to flee, much less to travel without a male guardian, and in fact they can no longer leave their homes without a guardian (until August 21, they could still venture 78 kilometers from home without a guardian). There you have it. And I remind you of the principle that the burqa is mandatory (but that’s almost cute compared to the rest). They are excluded from public employment, and recently from all jobs. And then they no longer have the right to access gymnasiums, because “their trainers were men and some of the rooms were mixed.”
They are also no longer allowed to go to hammams (which have never been mixed in Afghanistan), supposedly because “currently every house has a bathroom, so this ban does not pose any problem for women”. Whether this is false, that is to say that many houses do not have a bathroom, it does not matter, women are no longer allowed to wash themselves. Women are no longer allowed to go to public parks and gardens either, they could get ideas while walking in the open air, and the Taliban do not like ideas at all. The Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, which is apparently the only ministry that functions properly, is keeping a close eye on things. What kind of society thinks that the priority is to slowly kill women rather than to lift a country out of poverty? A country where the average wage is less than $2 a day, and where little girls who have not yet reached puberty are sold daily to much, much older men for an average of $3,000 – which allows their family to live for at least a year, but that doesn’t matter to the Taliban, because what matters is that each girl, each woman has a guardian who authorizes the transaction.
Women no longer exist in Afghanistan
The Taliban have just taken a new measure against women, against their voices. That they are physically erased from public space was not enough, they must also be forbidden to speak. They could no longer sing, no one has the right to sing in Afghanistan anymore, now they can no longer speak in public. The sound of a woman’s voice in public space is forbidden. Women’s voices are criminalized in Afghanistan, women no longer exist in Afghanistan.
Yet, no one in France seems to be moved by the abject fate of Afghan women, just as everyone in France seems to have already forgotten the beauty and courage of the Iranian women who stood up, hand in hand with the Iranians, against the “mullahchy”. As if these women, these women from elsewhere were not women like the others, did not even deserve indignation – this passive reflex so easy elsewhere. As if cultural relativism had been permanently installed, refusing to be moved, to protest, to condemn and even less to commit to defending women born elsewhere, under other skies, victims of feudal cultures that break them. This is one illustration among many others of the crisis of universalism, of empathy that is dying, of humanism that is dying. If, as a Westerner, we can only defend Western women, who are doing very well for themselves, feminism is also dying before our eyes in the walling up of Afghan women.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed to fighting against identity obsession, is a writer and journalist
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