Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have banned women from raising their voices and showing their faces without makeup in public under new laws passed by the supreme leader to combat vice and promote virtue.
The laws were passed on Wednesday after being approved by supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, a government spokesman said. The Taliban had set up a ministry to “spread virtue and prevent vice” after seizing power in 2021.
The ministry published its laws on vices and virtues on Wednesday, covering aspects of everyday life such as public transport, music, shaving and partying.
They are laid out in a 114-page, 35-article document obtained by The Associated Press, the first formal declaration of laws on vice and virtue in Afghanistan since the takeover.
“Inshallah, we assure you that this Islamic law will be of great help in promoting virtue and eliminating vice,” ministry spokesman Maulvi Abdul Ghafar Farooq said on Thursday.
The laws empower the ministry to take a leading role in regulating personal conduct and to impose penalties such as warnings or arrests when law enforcement officials find Afghans to be violating the law.
Article 13 concerns women. It states that women must always wear a veil in public and that face covering is essential to avoid temptation and not to tempt others. Clothing should not be thin, tight or short.
Women are required to cover themselves in front of non-Muslim men and women to avoid being corrupted. A woman’s voice is considered intimate and should therefore not be heard while singing, reciting or reading aloud in public. Women are forbidden to look at men to whom they are not related by blood or marriage and vice versa.
Article 17 prohibits the publication of images of living beings, threatening the already fragile Afghan media landscape.
Article 19 prohibits the playing of music, the carriage of women travelling alone and contact between men and women who are not related to each other. The law also requires passengers and drivers to pray at certain times.
According to the ministry’s website, promoting virtue includes prayer, aligning Muslims’ character and behavior with Islamic law, encouraging women to wear hijab, and urging people to follow the five pillars of Islam. It also says that eliminating vice involves forbidding people from doing things that are prohibited in Islamic law.
Last month, a UN report said the ministry was contributing to a climate of fear and intimidation among Afghans through its decrees and the methods it uses to enforce them.
It said the ministry’s role would be expanded to other areas of public life, including media monitoring and drug addiction eradication.
“Given the numerous problems described in the report, the position expressed by the de facto authorities that this oversight will increase and expand is a matter of great concern for all Afghans, especially women and girls,” said Fiona Frazer, head of the human rights service at the UN Mission in Afghanistan.
The Taliban rejected the UN report.
