The Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice banned women from Band-e-Amir National Park this weekend – one of Afghanistan’s largest and most beautiful parks – on the grounds that some women had worn hijab inappropriately and that “sightseeing is not a must for women.”
The ban from the national park follows Taliban terrorists issuing similar edicts outlawing the presence of women in public parks while men are present, and the presence of women at all times at amusement parks, gyms, schools above the primary level, and virtually all jobs. In July, the Taliban also cracked down on women-only spaces, banning beauty salons – a major source of income for many women in Afghanistan.
An Afghan beautician applies makeup to a client at a beauty salon in Mazar-i-Sharif on July 5, 2023. Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities have ordered beauty parlours across the country to shut within a month, the Vice Ministry confirmed July 4, the latest curb to squeeze women out of public life (ATIF ARYAN/AFP via Getty Images).
Following their conquest of the country in 2021, top spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid announced that the jihadist terrorist group had banned women from public in general, claiming it would soon rescind the call to “stay at home for the moment” when they successfully taught their rank-and-file fighters “how to deal with women.”
Women have regularly defied these edicts with street protests, particularly in the capital of Kabul but have few resources to use against the uncontested rulers of the country.
The ban from Band-e-Amir National Park was necessary, Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice Mohammad Khaled Hanafi said on Saturday, because women were violating the Taliban’s radical fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law, in the park by not wearing sufficiently restrictive clothing.
“Women and our sisters cannot go to Band-e-Amir until we agree on a principle. The security agencies, elders and the inspectors should take action in this regard. Going for sightseeing is not obligatory,” Hanafi said, according to the Afghan network Tolo News.
The Taliban terrorists warned that they would use “security forces” to ban women from entering the park.
Last week, shortly before the national park ban, a spokesman for the Vice and Virtue Ministry lamented publicly that seeing women “is very bad” and that women faced the threat of declining in “value” if anyone sees their face.
“It is very bad to see women in some areas, and our scholars also agree that women’s faces should be hidden,” Molvi Mohammad Sadiq Akif told the Associated Press. “It’s not that her face will be harmed or damaged. A woman has her own value and that value decreases by men looking at her. Allah gives respect to females in hijab and there is value in this.”
Akif said the nation was overrun with jihadis tasked with intimidating civilians in “marks, public places, universities, schools, madrasas [Islamic schools], and mosques.”
“They visit all these places and watch people. They also speak with them and educate them. We monitor them and people also cooperate with and inform us,” he said.
Tolo News reported that locals in Bamiyan, where the park is located, expressed lament at the new rules and insisted that local women were not violating the fundamentalist clothing restrictions.
“There are complaints about the lack of hijab or bad hijab, these are not Bamiyan residents. They come here from other places, from other provinces or outside of Afghanistan,” Sayed Nasrullah Waezi, head of the Bamiyan Shia Ulema Council, told Tolo News.
Women in the country complained that the Taliban offered no rational explanation for how women existing in the park violated Islamic law and lamented that the restriction is the latest in a mounting set of policies meant to erase them from society.
“We are witnessing an increasing restriction on women. We hope the Islamic Emirate would have a motive for why women are banned from Band-e-Amir National Park,” women’s rights activist Tafseer Siah Posh told Tolo News.
“As long as we see, the restrictions have been increasing on a daily basis. We call on the Islamic Emirate to bring facilities for the women,” another Afghan woman identified only as Safa said.
The national park is one of Afghanistan’s few large-scale tourist attractions. It joins a long list of places where the Taliban has made it illegal to be a woman. In November, an edict from the terrorist group declared that women could no longer enter parks and gyms on the grounds that “the orders were not obeyed and the rules were violated,” meaning hijab rules. A month later, an edict banned women from seeking post-primary education and kicked them out of the vast majority of jobs, including working with international organizations such as the United Nations.
The ban on beauty parlors – indoor places that men do not visit, so no hijab edict should apply – came into effect in July. This last outrage prompted significant protests led by women activists, who faced tasers and firearms as they attempted to demonstrate in public.
Taliban fighters fired into the air as they dispersed a rare rally by women (Nava Jamshidi/Getty Images).
“The Islamic Emirate is committed to the rights of women within the framework of Sharia. Our sisters, our men have the same rights; they will be able to benefit from their rights,” Mujahid, the top spokesman, had said in his first press conference following the Taliban takeover in 2021. “They are going to be working with us, shoulder to shoulder with us.”
Mujahid gave the Qatari network Al Jazeera exclusive access to his work for a report marking the two-year anniversary of the conquest in which he addresses a women’s rights activist. Asked to legalize the right of women and girls to go to school, Mujahid claims Taliban terrorists cannot do so out of fear of radical Islamic clerics:
“Your concerns for girls’ education are justified. But if school girls go against the government, it could destabilize Afghan society,” Mujahid told the activist. “The conflicts of the last 40 years showed us this. Now, Taliban leaders are afraid that if we don’t unite the [Islamic] scholars with the government, then it could bring down the government.”