by Freshta Ghani and Mahtab Safi*
The Taliban’s edict banning women’s beauty salons was so shocking for Nargis* that she collapsed the day after religious police visited her salon and ordered her to cease her operations. She’d previously experienced occasional nervous collapses when she got upset, so her sister, Shafiqa*, thought this was another brief nervous episode. It wasn’t. “It was 5:20 p.m. when she had the attack,” Shafiqa tells Zan Times. “By the time we got her to the hospital, it was 6:00 p.m. The doctors neither took a report from me nor started a [medical file] for my sister. After 20-25 minutes, they said she had had a stroke and passed away.”
Nargis had hoped the Taliban would reverse their ban on beauty salons. She also thought she might be able to secretly continue her beautician work. But on July 3, Taliban religious police visited women’s beauty salons, including Nargis’s, in the fifth district of Kabul. They reiterated the Taliban’s edict on the ban on women working in beauty salons, warning Nargis and other beauticians that they had just 20 days to gather their belongings and shut down the salons. Nargis, who heads a family of six, told the officer that she and her children wouldn’t have food to eat if she had to shut her salon. The officer became angry and told her there would be no change in the given edict and she must comply.
Nargis took make-up training at the Afghanistan Chamber of Artistans after realizing that her husband was a drug addict and she needed to provide for her four children. Since then, her two younger sisters joined her at the business and she was doing well enough to hire two new apprentices, who got a share of the revenues from each wedding they worked on. In addition, she paid private school fees for her two daughters and younger son.
Since Nargis’s death, her children have gone to live with her younger sister, Shafiaq. But life was suddenly very precarious, she explained to Zan Times in an interview that took place before the Taliban edict took effect. “My profession is also as a makeup artist. I’m still working at the salon and trying to fulfill my sister’s wish, but if the Taliban doesn’t allow me to work, I can’t have an income and feed these children,” she worries. “Women’s voices are not being heard.”
The Taliban ban on women’s beauty salons took effect on August 3, 2003. After then, the licenses and contracts for those salons were nullified, effectively closing the business of more than 60,000 women. A source from the Afghanistan Chamber of Artisans, where beauty salons are registered, says that 12,000 beauty salons across the country have been closed due to the new Taliban decree, of which 3,200 were in Kabul. “If we consider that each woman supports an average of five people, then, with the closure of these salons, 300,000 women and children will be deprived of income,” the source, who asked for anonymity, tells Zan Times.
Twelve days after announcing the edict, Mohammad Sadiq Akef, the spokesperson for the Taliban’s ministry of virtue and vice, explained the Taliban’s reasoning in a video clip: “In this dire economic situation, there was much extravagance and excess. Families of the groom were charged more. Secondly, from a sharia perspective, it’s not permissible to attach another person’s hair for beauty. There, women had extensions added. Thirdly, women’s eyebrows were plucked, which is in clear violation of sharia. They used things that, after performing ablution, weren’t religiously permissible and water wouldn’t reach those parts [of the decorated body].”
To see the impact of the new decree, Zan Times talked with 19 female beauticians and hairdressers from seven provinces of Afghanistan – Kabul, Mazar, Herat, Sar-e-Pul, Ghor, Jowzjan, and Kandahar – who all explained that their salons were the only source of income for their families. With no other means of income, they fear their future will be bleak.
One of those beauticians who talked with Zan Times is Sahar*, 37, who was forced to close four beauty salons in Kabul. She’d started her business after she escaped domestic violence – she was a victim of forced underage marriage during the Taliban’s first regime. She separated from her husband when she was 20 and moved from Logar province to Kabul with her four children. There, she went back to school and learned cosmetology from a foreign NGO, before opening her first salon.
Now, she’s adding up the financial toll, which she says is more than US$50,000, and wonders how she’ll support her children. It will also impact the taxes collected by the local and national government. “I’ve invested a lot in my beauty salons, plus I paid the tax to the local government which used to be 10,000 afghani annually. This year they took 18,000 afghani from us,” she explains. “Last year’s annual tax was 60,000 afghani; this year they took 80,000 afghani from us.”
On July 19, 2023, as the decree deadline loomed, tens of female beauticians and salon employees protested at four locations in Kabul. After an hour, the Taliban dispersed the protesting women by firing into the air, spraying them with contaminated water, and using tear gas and electroshock.
Some of those who protested tell Zan Times that the Taliban called them shameless and prostitutes. As well, three sources say that the Taliban beat several protesters and arrested at least four beauticians, including Zainab*, 22, and her sister Navida*, 19.
Zainab tells Zan Times that she was using a loudspeaker to chant the slogan “Bread, Work, Freedom”, when she and her sister were arrested by women affiliated with the Taliban’s morality police. “Four women emerged from among the protestors and pulled me towards a Taliban Ranger vehicle. These women initially chanted slogans with us, but later it became evident that they were associated with the Taliban,” Zainab explains.
The sisters were finally released on bail that evening after their father and brother came to the jail. “One of the Taliban told me to pledge never to participate in any protests or demonstrations again, to close my beauty salon, and to stay at home,” Zainab says. “Otherwise, they would arrest me and send me to a place from which I could never see sunlight.”
One of the women assaulted by the Taliban during those protests in Kabul is Lima*, a 42-year-old head of a five-member family. “One of the Taliban members kicked my thigh three times and slapped me and two other women several times. I was in so much pain that evening that I had to see a doctor and take painkillers,” she tells Zan Times.
She says that no matter what, they will continue to raise their voices because most women are, like her, the heads of their families. They are also fearless, she says. “Most of us are the heads of our families. We can’t watch our children die from hunger.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Mahtab Safi is the pseudonym of a Zan Times journalist in Afghanistan.
