KABUL, AFGHANISTAN Today, Tuesday, exactly two years have passed since the extremist Islamist Taliban movement took power in Afghanistan and began severely restricting the rights of women and girls.
The Taliban is pushing through a cultural revolution, says a researcher who knows Afghanistan well Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam in a phone interview for .
According to him, the Taliban’s purpose is to destroy all traces of the 20 years in which the Western countries that fought in Afghanistan pursued women’s rights.
– The Taliban has its own flawed way of protecting women. They cut off the interaction between women and men, thinking that this will keep women safe from sexual harassment. But at the same time, it limits women’s lives a lot, says Azarbaijani-Moghaddam.
The researcher has followed the development of women’s status in Afghanistan for 25 years. He has been working in the country for years and last visited a month ago. He is currently writing a dissertation on the ideology of the Taliban for the Department of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in the UK.
According to Azarbaijani-Moghaddam, the Taliban’s attitude towards women is complicated. It is often unclear whether the Taliban actually banned something. It follows that many people limit their own activities.
– Sometimes there is an order from the Taliban, sometimes there are nothing but rumors.
With the help of Azarbaijani-Moghaddam, we put together 12 questions and answers for this article about what women are currently allowed to do in Afghanistan.
1. Are women allowed to work?
Going to work is not unequivocally prohibited.
On the public side, most of the women have been sent home, even though their wages are running. Exceptions are female doctors and nurses in hospitals, teachers in girls’ primary schools and women working in the security inspection of ministries. There are also female police officers working in the Ministry of the Interior.
In the private sector, there are still women as journalists and entrepreneurs, for example.
Last December The Taliban refused the work of Afghan women in international and Afghan organizations. In April, also UN female employees were told to stay home.
2. Are women allowed to move outside the home?
Many women can be seen on the streets of the capital, Kabul, often without male family members. Supreme leader of the Taliban Haibatullah Akhundzada however, has instructed that women should best not to leave home for no good reason.
Outside the cities, in the very old areas of Afghanistan, women don’t move much outside their homes anyway due to culture.
The position of women in old Afghanistan was weak even before the Taliban. However, the previous administration was at least in principle committed to women’s rights, although in practice the progress was often superficial.
3. How does the Taliban regulate women’s clothing?
The Taliban leader has ordered women to cover their faces and wear full-body clothing and scarves. A burqa covering the eyes with a net is not required, and the Dress Code does not apply to elderly women or children.
In Kabul, most women wear a long robe-like abaya and cover their hair with a scarf. Many also cover their faces with a corona mask. Some women move around bare-faced, and the Taliban doesn’t always intervene.
Before the Taliban came to power, women in Kabul usually wore a headscarf and a knee-length jacket. You can see the burka on the streets of Kabul now, roughly the same as before the Taliban. The burqa is worn especially by women living in poorer areas.
4. Are women allowed to drive?
The Taliban has not directly banned women from driving. For example, a news agency However, AFP reports a year ago that the Taliban had verbally ordered driving schools in the western city of Herat to stop issuing driving licenses to women.
In Afghanistan, women are rarely seen behind the wheel, but in larger cities it is not completely unusual.
5. Are girls allowed to go to school?
Only girls of primary school age are allowed to attend school. Schooling for girls in the seventh grade and older was already interrupted two years ago.
6. Are women allowed to study at university?
The Taliban prevented women from studying at the university last December, after it had already allowed women back to study once.
The Taliban claim the ban is temporary. However, women have also been prevented from participating in university entrance exams.
Women still get to study vocational training to become midwives and nurses.
7. Does the Taliban allow women to see a male doctor?
At least the Taliban does not seem to have officially banned women from seeing a male doctor. However, people’s fear plays a role. Based on the experiences of the Taliban’s previous reign, many fear that the Taliban might come and punish people.
Often the families themselves also want the women to see a female doctor. The reason is old gender concepts.
There is a shortage of female doctors in Afghanistan, and new ones cannot be trained as long as women do not go to university.
8. Can women use contraception?
British newspaper The Guardian reports in February that pharmacists in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif had said the Taliban had banned them from selling birth control pills. However, the Taliban denied that they had banned contraception.
to appear in the United Arab Emirates As reported by The National international organizations, clinics and pharmacies in Kabul knew nothing of the ban.
Birth control pills are still available.
9. Can women travel alone?
According to the Taliban’s order, a woman must be accompanied by a male relative, or mahram on journeys of more than 72 kilometers.
However, the rule is often applied in different ways in different parts of the country. Outside of Kabul, the Taliban may intervene even on shorter journeys.
10. Can women participate in politics?
Not a single woman has been appointed to the Taliban administration. Women couldn’t either attend a large meeting of religious and tribal leadersorganized by the Taliban a year ago in July.
During the previous administration, women participated in politics. Before the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, there were two female ministers, and there were female parliamentarians 27 percent.
11. Can women spend their free time outside the home?
From last November since then, women are no longer allowed to visit parks in Kabul. Public baths are also closed to women.
Women are still allowed to visit restaurants, cafes, shopping centers and bazaars, for example. In Kabul, women are still seen in them, but outside the capital the situation varies a lot.
12. Are women allowed to wear makeup?
The Taliban has not officially banned make-up. Instead, the beauty salons were closed at the end of July. According to the Taliban, the salons offered un-Islamic services.
Many of the beauty salon owners and employees were single mothers or women who were otherwise solely responsible for their family’s livelihood.
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