Taliban returns to ‘Stone Age Islamism’ in Afghanistan

“With a single decision, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have crushed the dreams of a generation of women,” said The Washington Post. On 20 December, the Islamist regime announced that women would be barred from attending universities. That followed earlier decrees banning girls from secondary schools.

Taliban officials say the ban is “necessary to prevent the mixing of genders in universities”, and claim that some subjects being taught violate the principles of Islam. “Balderdash.”

In reality, this ban is just another sign that hardliners within the Taliban, the ones “with the harshest Pashtun village mores”, have triumphed. The more moderate voices heard when the Taliban regained power in 2021, those that had promised that this time the Taliban regime would be more liberal, have been vanquished. The Taliban’s university ban “feels like a point of no return” for millions of women.

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Taliban leaders view “complete gender segregation” as a recipe for a “truly Islamic system”, said Sultan Barakat on Al Jazeera (Doha). They couldn’t be more wrong. Not only is the right of women to an education “enshrined in Islam”, it is essential to the functioning of society. How can women be cared for by female doctors, say, if no women are allowed to take medical degrees?

Women are paying a high price for such bigotry, said Zahra Joya in The Guardian. Child marriages are rife; women’s suicide rates are on the rise. Some girls are bravely attending secret classes to continue their education, but how will they ever prosper in a state that bans women from setting foot in parks and walking streets without a male companion? It even bans them from begging.

Taliban’s ‘anti-women hatred’

Yet the Taliban doesn’t seem to care, said Valérie Toranian in Le Point (Paris). Days after announcing its university ban, it ordered national and international NGOs to stop employing women, at a stroke denying thousands of Afghans both a valuable source of income and “a window into life”. You’d have thought this “anti-women hatred” would set off “a tsunami of retaliatory measures” from foreign powers; yet all they do is protest “politely and softly”.

Alas, there’s little else to do, said Christian Böhme in Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin). True, Afghanistan is well on the way to “Stone Age Islamism”, but to respond by cutting humanitarian aid, as some suggest, would be disastrous in a country where most people go hungry and up to 97% could be living below the poverty line. However appalling the Taliban’s war on women, the West owes it to those worst affected to keep the aid flowing.