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a crazy ban on women from Afghanistan to attend the universities of that country has generated a unanimous repudiation in the world; Significantly, governments that rigidly apply Islamic precepts to secular life, such as those of the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, have joined the rejection of this cavernous, misogynistic and clearly violating measure of human rights.
Despite the international isolation caused by the decision of its Ministry of Education, days later the Taliban regime imposed a new ban on the female population: that of working for civil organizations, both national and international. This recent atrocity led four of these groups – Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE – to suspend their operations in the Central Asian country, which will aggravate the already deplorable living conditions in which they subsist. many afghans.
It must be remembered that the mistreatment, marginalization and discrimination suffered by Afghans by the Taliban power have no religious and legal basis in Islamic culture. The Sharia law, used as a justification by the Afghan authorities –and, to a lesser extent, also by the Iranians– to subject the female gender to different forms of oppression and violence, is not law
Muslim, but a set of religious codes and political, commercial and family practices that vary between the different schools and currents of Islam and that believers can apply in their personal conduct to different degrees and with different interpretations.
On the other hand, as with theological texts, the sharia versions derived from ancient interpretations of the Qur’an – the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shi’a, the Ja’fari, the Shafi’i, the Wahhabi and the Salafi, for example – are riddled with anachronisms and barbaric and currently inapplicable practices, such as provisions relating to slavery, corporal punishment, polygamy or genital mutilation. This is also the case of the rules on the exclusion of women from certain activities or the obligation to observe certain dress codes, as is claimed by the governments of Iran, the oil monarchies and Afghanistan itself.
In addition, it should be noted that the fundamentalist currents that advocate the establishment of ways of life similar to those of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and of Islamic states capable of imposing them constitute a rather modern phenomenon, strengthened and spread as a barbaric resistance to the barbarism of colonialism and neocolonialism practiced by the European powers and the United States in the Middle East, Africa and regions of Asia, and a result of the destruction of secular regimes by the violent interventionism of the United States and Europe in countries such as Iraq, Libya and Syria. The Taliban and Al Qaeda flourished with the support that Washington provided to fundamentalist factions to launch them against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s; the armed interventions that deposed Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi created power vacuums that were quickly filled by the Islamic State.
In short, the unjustifiable oppression that falls on the female population of Afghanistan is in no way the desire to return to traditions -female education in that country was an achievement of 1929, and since that year Afghans have been conquering their rights to work, to choose their way of dressing and to exist on a legal equal footing with men – nor an expression of Islamic culture. It is simply a form of barbarism, and as such it must be repudiated by the world.
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