An Afghan girl sings in a video that reveals solely a part of her face, one in all dozens of ladies participating in a web based protest in opposition to a regulation banning girls from elevating their voices in public.
Taliban authorities introduced the regulation final week, which incorporates guidelines stating that girls’s faces, our bodies and voices should be “coated” outdoors the house, amongst 35 articles that dictate habits and life-style.
In response, Afghan girls at residence and overseas have posted movies of themselves singing on social media, together with hashtags resembling “My voice will not be forbidden” and “No to the Taliban.”
Former police officer Zala Zazai, who now lives in Poland, shared a video of herself singing a track by well-known artist Aryana Sayeed in regards to the resilience of Afghan girls.
She mentioned AFP Restrictions on Afghan girls have been “unacceptable”.
“Afghan girls have understood that misogynists can not deny our human rights within the title of faith and tradition. And our voices demanding our rights won’t ever be silenced,” she mentioned.
One other video, apparently filmed in Afghanistan, reveals a lady singing dressed from head to toe in black with a protracted veil over her face.
“You’ve gotten silenced my voice for the foreseeable future… you will have imprisoned me in my residence for the crime of being a lady,” she says.
Ladies activist teams have posted movies of themselves elevating their fists or tearing up footage of Taliban supreme chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, who guidelines by decree from the southern metropolis of Kandahar.
“A lady’s voice is the voice of justice,” sings an activist group in one other video.
The “Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice” regulation formalizes many norms already in place because the Taliban got here to energy in 2021, implementing a strict interpretation of Islamic regulation, or Sharia.
It says that girls mustn’t sing or recite loudly in public or let their voices be heard past the partitions of their houses.
“When an grownup girl has to go away her residence out of necessity, she is obliged to cowl her face, physique and voice,” she says.
The regulation refers to girls’s voices as “aurat,” a time period utilized in Sharia to designate the non-public elements of a person or girl that should be coated.
Taliban chief authorities spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid mentioned criticism of the regulation uncovered “conceitedness” and a lack of information of sharia regulation.
Ladies have borne the brunt of restrictions, together with on entry to training, public areas and sure jobs, which the United Nations has described as “gender apartheid.”
The UN and different worldwide our bodies have condemned the brand new regulation, saying it additional restricts girls’s rights.
On Tuesday (27 August 2024), the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights known as for the regulation to be repealed, calling it “completely insupportable”.
The regulation “consolidates insurance policies that utterly erase girls’s presence in public, silencing their voices and depriving them of their particular person autonomy, successfully trying to show them into faceless and unvoiced shadows,” mentioned spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani.
