Has the Taliban banned women from speaking?

Afghanistan's minister for vice and virtue announced a "bizarre new restriction" this week which appears to ban women from speaking to each other, said The Daily Telegraph. "Even when an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear," Khalid Hanafi said in an audio clip released on Monday.

He also reiterated an earlier decree forbidding women from singing, saying: "How could they be allowed to sing if they aren't even permitted to hear [each other's] voices while praying?"

The ban on women praying together joins a list of restrictions on women's speech passed in August, when Afghanistan's ruling regime banned women from speaking in public or loudly inside their homes, to prevent their voices from being heard by men.

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What did the commentators say?

Human rights activists have warned it could mean "women are effectively banned from holding conversations with one another", said The Telegraph, although Hanafi's "rambling" voice recording left exact details unclear.

"They [the Taliban] are waging an all-out war against us, and we have no one in the world to hear our voices," a former civil servant told the paper from Kabul. Now, "we cannot even hear each other's voices".

The European Court of Justice ruled this month that simply being an Afghan woman is considered "sufficient" grounds to grant asylum. In August, the regime announced Afghanistan's first vice and virtue laws, approved by the Taliban's supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. These forbid women from looking at men, speaking to men who aren't relatives, or showing their faces or bodies at all. The rules effectively eliminate women's voices from public spaces.

Women's voices are "deemed to be potential instruments of vice", said The Guardian. In this light, it's "concerning" that international organisations have been "trying to normalise relations with the Taliban", said former Afghan parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai. They are "whitewashing" the Taliban, disregarding its "widespread human rights violations".

Why would a regime that has already barred women from working, learning or travelling alone "deprive women of their voice"? asked vocal coach and author Aline Jalliet in Le Monde. "In a country where women must avoid the gaze of men, their voice was their last mark of individual identity", she wrote. Requiring women to remain silent "makes them transparent, blending into the background". In that sense, it's "easy to forget they're there".

"The voice is like the sign of life," said Afghan journalist Hamina Adam on France Culture radio channel. "It's just another way of killing us even more."

Before the August laws, small groups of Afghan women still marched in cities "demanding their rights", said the BBC's Afghanistan correspondent Yogita Limaye. Now, "even the small joys that were making life bearable are fraught with fear". Even if Taliban edicts such as the latest aren't strictly imposed or enforced, "people start self-regulating".

"We don't dare to take down our masks. We even avoid speaking among ourselves, thinking that if someone from the Taliban hears us they could stop and question us," one girl told the broadcaster. "If we can't speak, why even live? We're like dead bodies moving around."

A psychologist also warned the BBC that Afghanistan's "pandemic" of female suicide could worsen. "They feel all hope is gone and there is no point in continuing living," she said. "And it's becoming more and more difficult to counsel them."

What next?

The UN has called for the Taliban to repeal the "egregious" laws, which were an attempt to turn women into "faceless, voiceless shadows". Its mission in Afghanistan said it was considering the laws' potential impact on humanitarian assistance. In response, the Taliban said it would no longer cooperate with the UN; relations appear to have "hit a significant roadblock", said the BBC's Limaye.

Afghan women are "showing their dissent by posting videos of themselves online, their faces covered, singing songs about freedom". There are also signs of "divisions" among the Taliban regarding the ban on women's education – but the Kandahar-based leadership "has remained intransigent". The supreme leader has also vowed to start stoning women to death in public again.