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Why are the Taliban hostile to women in Afghanistan?
Yesterday the Taliban banned girls from higher education. Earlier it had prohibited girls from sixth grade and above. The de facto regime has banished girls and women from all public lives. It begs the question of why the group is so hostile toward women. The Taliban leadership who issue decrees give no explanation leaving a lot for speculation. Its spokespersons ask people not to question the move because there is something good about it that we do not know, but the leadership knows. There is an unholy alliance between the literal interpretation of Islamic texts, the Pashtun tribal code of conduct, aka Pashtunwali, and Afghan nationalism, which sees women as collective property — the three overlap regarding the ownership of female bodies.
Some passages in Muslim sacred texts seem to discriminate between women and men, but Muslims disagree about when and where. “Stay in your houses and do not flaunt your finery like the former [days of pagan] ignorance” (Ahzab, 33) calls upon Muslim women a Quranic verse. Islamic sources say this verse was revealed to the prophet after a group of Muslim women was harassed by a group of non-muslim men in those first days of Islam. However, fundamentalists believe its implication is beyond its times and context. Additionally, the female body is under the guardianship of her husband, another passage in the text tells. If a…
