Senior Taliban official hits out at own group’s policies towards women
Share:
Deputy foreign minister says ‘there is no excuse’ for shutting schools for girls and women. A senior Taliban official has called on the militant group to open schools for women and girls, a rare sign of internal divisions around one of the flagship policies of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers.
Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, the Taliban’s acting deputy foreign minister, said the edict forbidding girls and women from schools was not in line with Sharia law as claimed. “We request the leaders of the Islamic Emirate to open the doors of education,” he said, claiming that “there is no excuse for this and never will be”. “In the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the doors of knowledge were open to both men and women,” the Taliban minister said at a Madrassa graduation ceremony in Khost province.
The 62-year-old UN-sanctioned official said his own leaders were “committing injustice against 20 million people”, referring to the women who make up roughly half of the Afghan population. “We have deprived them of all their rights; they have no inheritance rights, no share in determining their husband’s rights, they are sacrificed in forced marriages, they are not allowed to study, they cannot go to mosques, the doors of universities and schools are closed to them, and they are not allowed in religious schools either,” the acting deputy foreign minister said.
After taking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban pledged to govern the country based on a moderate interpretation of Sharia law, and to maintain many of the rights and freedoms enjoyed by women under the previous Western-backed government. Yet within months they had shut classes for girls beyond grade six, and colleges were closed to female students at the end of 2022. In some cases students were sent home at gun-point.
