Afghan women banned from hearing other women’s voices

Kabul: The Taliban have imposed a new, oppressive rule that silences Afghan women’s voices even further, the latest step banned them from hearing each other’s voices to erase “women entirely from public life and society,” reported the New York Post.

The Talibani Minister for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Khalid Hanafi, banned Afghani women from hearing each other’s voices.

“Even when an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear,” he said in his message, as reported by NY Post.

A woman’s voice is considered “awrah” – meaning that which must be covered and shouldn’t be heard in public – Hanafi said, as per NY Post.

“When women are not permitted to call takbir or athan [Islamic call to prayer], they certainly cannot sing songs or [make] music,” NY Post quoted Hanafi as saying. “How could they be allowed to sing if they aren’t even permitted to hear (each other’s) voices while praying, let alone for anything else.”

Further details of the Taliban’s ruling are not clear, as per NY Post. Hanafi said it “will be gradually implemented, and God will be helping us in each step we take”.

Human rights activists from the country and around the world have criticized the move, claiming it would mean that Afghan women would be banned from holding conversations with one another.

“It is hard to imagine the situation getting worse after the Taliban banned women’s voices and faces in public last month, but with this latest decree, we have seen that the Taliban’s capacity to inflict harm on women has no limits,” Zohal Azra, from the Australian Hazara Advocacy Network, told news.com.au. “Since returning to power in Afghanistan the Taliban has effectively erased women and girls from public life in a methodical, and systematic approach involving over 105 decrees, edicts, and orders that are enforced violently and arbitrarily, including through detention, sexual abuse, torture and cruel, inhuman, or other degrading treatment and punishment such stoning and whipping women and girls,” she added, as per NY Post.

“The situation is so dire that it requires urgent global intervention to support women in Afghanistan. Through these decrees the Taliban has established a system of gender apartheid,” Amnesty International Australia’s Strategic Refugee Rights Campaigner, Zaki Haidari, told news.com.au. She added that the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is “growing darker by the day”, NY Post reported.

“The Taliban is methodically punishing women, seemingly testing how far they can push before the world responds,” Haidari, who is of Hazara background, said.

Earlier, on September 29. United Nations Chief Antonio Guterres expressed deep concern over the situation in Afghanistan, likening it to some of the most egregious systems of oppression in recent history.

Notably, the Taliban have attempted to partially defend their new laws by claiming they are intended to safeguard women.

Long before the Taliban came to power, Afghanistan granted women the right to vote in 1919, a year before the United States. It opened its first schools for girls in 1921, according to The Washington Post.

(ANI)