By Masoodul Hasan,
The condition of Afghan women today represents one of the most tragic human rights catastrophes of our time.
Under the iron fist of the Taliban, women and girls have been effectively erased from public life — silenced, confined, and stripped of even the most basic freedoms.
Afghanistan, once home to resilient, educated, and independent women, has been turned into a vast prison where half the population is condemned to invisibility.
Since its birth as an Islamist militia in 1994, the Taliban has waged a relentless war against women. Their ideology, steeped in medieval interpretations of religion, has always sought to erase women from education, employment, and social participation.
During their first regime between 1996 and 2001, they banned women from working and barred girls from attending schools. Women were flogged in public for venturing out without a mahram — a male guardian — or for not conforming to the
Taliban’s draconian dress code. Women were forced into shapeless burqas, forbidden to wear shoes that made sound, and beaten in the streets by the so-called “religious police” for imagined acts of “immodesty.”
More than two decades later, nothing has changed — except that the brutality has become even more systematized.
During his recent week-long visit to India, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi faced difficult questions from women journalists in New Delhi about the plight of Afghan women.
His response — a dismissive smile and a vague assurance that “women’s education is not haram” — reflected the regime’s hollow hypocrisy.
For four years, Afghan women have been banned from schools, universities, and most jobs, yet the Taliban leadership continues to cloak oppression under religious rhetoric.
Reports suggest that Afghan women themselves are angered by the red-carpet treatment extended to Muttaqi during his visits to Delhi and Deoband.
Women’s rights groups have urged the United Nations not to recognize the Taliban’s government — a demand that has found resonance worldwide. Except for Russia, no country has formally recognized the regime in Kabul.
Prominent voices in India, too, have condemned the warm reception given to the Taliban envoy.
Screenwriter and lyricist Javed Akhtar expressed his outrage, writing on X, “I hang my head in shame when I see the kind of respect and reception given to the representative of the world’s worst terrorist group, the Taliban, by those who claim to oppose terrorism.”
He also criticized the Darul Uloom Deoband for giving a “reverent welcome” to Muttaqi, calling it a “shameful” endorsement of those who have completely banned girls’ education.
The truth, however, needs no embellishment — the Taliban’s treatment of women speaks for itself.
Zahra Nadar, the editor of the Canada-based human rights platform Zan Times, paints a devastating picture. Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban have waged a systematic campaign to erase women from Afghan society.
In their first week, they banned women from public employment. Within a month, they closed schools for girls beyond grade six. By the fourth month, they prohibited women from traveling without a mahram.
Each passing day brought a new decree — another restriction, another blow to women’s freedom.
Then, in August 2024, came one of the most shocking edicts yet — the Taliban banned women’s voices from being heard in public, declaring that a woman’s voice itself was aurat, something that must be hidden.
This effectively criminalized women speaking in public or even talking to strangers, reducing them to voiceless shadows in their own homeland.
The Taliban’s obsession with control goes beyond dress codes or education. Their self-proclaimed “vice and virtue” laws prohibit photographs, videos, and even depictions of living beings.
Their leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, refuses to have his picture taken, railing against what he calls the “sins of modernity.”
Yet, in grotesque irony, Taliban officials freely appear on camera for propaganda purposes — a glaring hypocrisy that exposes internal contradictions within their rule.
Some analysts have speculated about a so-called “moderate faction” within the Taliban — a group that could, perhaps, steer the movement toward a more inclusive and pragmatic direction.
But this hope, as Zahra Nadar rightly notes, is an illusion.
The Taliban, despite minor internal differences, remain ideologically united in their goal: to establish a totalitarian theocracy that denies women their humanity and seeks to extinguish all traces of modern education, science, and equality.
To assume that the Afghan people are destined to live under this mullahcracy is to deny them their dignity and agency.
Such fatalism only strengthens the Taliban’s hand and weakens the resistance of those brave Afghan women who continue, often at great personal risk, to teach, to write, to organize, and to keep the flame of freedom alive.
Zan Times and other human rights groups have documented countless acts of courage — secret schools run in basements, clandestine gatherings of women who refuse to give up their voice, and anonymous journalists who continue to report on the Taliban’s atrocities.
As Zahra Nadar puts it, “We must cherish and strengthen the creative and dynamic ways our people have used to defy the Taliban and keep hope alive.”
The Taliban’s system is built on disenfranchisement — a rigid hierarchy where power flows only from the supreme leader, and the people remain silent subjects.
It is a governance model that crushes dissent, criminalizes knowledge, and enslaves women in the name of faith.
As the world observes another International Women’s Day, it must remember the women of Afghanistan — silenced but unbroken.
Their suffering is not just an Afghan tragedy; it is a global shame. Misogyny, religious extremism, and authoritarianism are on the rise across the world. If we fail to defend women’s rights in Afghanistan, we fail the very ideals of equality and democracy everywhere.
The women of Afghanistan deserve more than sympathy; they deserve solidarity, support, and the world’s unrelenting pressure on their oppressors. Their fight is not merely for education or employment — it is for their very right to exist as human beings.
Only when the Afghan people, led by their courageous women, reclaim their destiny and build a secular, democratic, and peaceful nation, will the long night of Taliban tyranny finally end. Until then, the world must not look away.
(By Masoodul Hasan, Former Chief of Bureau, Hindustan Times, Lucknow)
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