In Face Of Taliban’s New Rules Forbidding Women’s Voices In Public, Women Sing In Defiance

An Afghan woman, clad in black from head to toe, with even her face completely covered records a video of her singing. It’s a song in defiance. It’s a song sung in protest. “You made me a prisoner in my home for the crime of being a woman… Your stomach is full, but you cut off my bread and water.”

On the streets of Kabul, another video recorded by another woman, singing in protest as she records the world around her, that’s forgotten her, even when she’s visible. She’s been made to be invisible by the Taliban, now they don’t want her to he heard either.

Last week, the Taliban codified a new set of rules for women under ‘Law on the Promotion of Virtue & Prevention of Vice’. Taliban’s new rules now forbid women’s voices in public. Women inside and outside Afghanistan are singing in protest against this. Under the new rules, the Taliban want to wear attire that fully covers their bodies, faces too. Women won’t be allowed to travel without a male guardian. Women are ‘prohibited’ from looking at men to whom they are not related by blood or marriage.

Speaking to Reuters from Oslo in Norway, Afghan social activist Hoda Khamosh said, “During these three years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, they’ve had many plans to eliminate women, starting with closing the schools and universities, then taking work away from women. Now that the world does not officially recognise them, they are pressuring women. They want the world to recognise them by forcing women to adapt to their plans.”

Since the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, women have been subjected to more than 70 directives, decrees. Each new set of rules ‘governing morality’ have imposed new restrictions on women. UN Women data shows these restrictions have severely crippled lives of women, girls in Afghanistan.

The Taliban claims they respect women’s rights as per Islamic law.