There’s been remarkably little outrage over the Taliban’s latest act of misogyny. After three years in power in Afghanistan, they’ve now announced that women are banned from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes.
Even inside their homes they are not allowed to sing or read aloud or speak too loudly in case their siren voices lead men astray.
This is on top of their previous restrictions where they’ve been blocked from attending secondary schools, banned from almost every form of paid employment, prevented from walking in public parks, attending gyms or beauty salons and made to comply with strict dress codes.
Can you imagine living under these new vice and virtue restrictions? The fear in your heart as you whisper in corners, as you put on thick clothing even in the heat of summer to go outside, always wondering if the men in your lives support you or seek to condemn you.
Did you openly disagree with a brother or an uncle? Maybe over something utterly trivial like the price of a mango in the market? Woe betide you if you offended his delicate male sensibilities. His revenge will be sweeter than fruit when he tells the Taliban that your loud voice offended him.
“Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter. Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.”
That chilling quotation comes from “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini, his novel depicting the appalling lives of women in Afghanistan. It’s a book that will stay with you a long time after you’ve finished reading it, longer even than “The Kite Runner”, his best-selling debut novel.
The Taliban are not unusual in both hating women and fearing them. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set in the future in a patriarchal, totalitarian state, but is all based on real-life events.
As the author said in an interview: “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened…nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the Devil.”
The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985. Think of all the details she could add in a re-write thanks to the Taliban.
Many brave women are fighting this latest outrage in Afghan society by singing their protests and posting on social media. Meanwhile, foreign aid is pouring into the country with mealy-mouthed officials saying that maintaining contact with the Taliban does not mean endorsing their policies. No? Tell that to the women no longer allowed to speak.
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