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The struggle for a secular state is the right response to the Taliban’s new retrograde law

The Taliban have introduced a new law that tightens the noose of oppression on the people of Afghanistan, especially women. It gives the Taliban morality police enormous power to invade and scrutinize citizens’ lives. The new law aims at further “Islamizing” both state and society by intensifying social oppressions and making women invisible and has sparked fury inside and outside the country.

The most outrageous part of the new Taliban law is the now notorious Article 13, which states, “Covering the entire body of a woman is obligatory. Concealing a woman’s face is necessary due to the fear of temptation. A woman’s voice is aurat. Whenever an adult woman leaves her home for a necessary purpose, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body.” The dictionary definition of the Arabic word, aurat, is “defectiveness, genitalia, and private parts”; as a religious concept, it means those parts that are “required to be covered, while in public.” 

The introduction of this law is part of the long-pursued Taliban policy to erase women from public life entirely. This dehumanization of women in Afghanistan is designed to eliminate women’s social presence in the country, which is the most important feature of an ideal Islamic society for the Taliban. 

Another prominent aspect of the law is that it grants extensive power to the vice and virtue police, enabling them to closely monitor and invade people’s lives and allows them to use coercion to enforce compliance of the emirate’s rules and laws. According to the law, the vice and virtue police can “reprimand and threaten” and “use harsh words.” They can also imprison transgressors for up to three days, or they can use “any penalty” that they “deem appropriate.” 

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Even before this law, the Taliban religious police have engaged in the arbitrary abuse and beating of women for showing their faces and of men for shaving their beards or other perceived transgressions. The new law will intensify those abuses, particularly in already oppressed and marginalized sectors of society. The law even allows the vice and virtue police to punish individuals for coming late for mass prayers and to punish whole neighbourhoods or communities for not organizing mass prayers.

The law has rightly outraged many both inside and outside the country. Groups of women are singing songs and sharing them on social media in protest of the ban on women’s voices. Many commentators have criticized it and have written condemnations of it. Many have acknowledged that the new law demonstrates that life under Taliban rule is becoming increasingly impossible, therefore, the overwhelming majority of the people seek an end to the Taliban’s reign of oppression and discrimination. 

To formulate a correct response to the Taliban decision, it is important to understand the regime’s rationale behind implementing such a retrograde law. The Taliban have declared their intention of forming an Islamic system in Afghanistan. For the Taliban, their political legitimacy emanates from the fact that they intend to build a system based on their version of sharia. To abandon the cause of building an Islamic system is to denounce their own right to rule.  

In their doctrine, the Taliban are obligated to establish an Islamic system. According to this doctrine, the people are perceived to be like cattle, and the Taliban mullahs are shepherds who are responsible for guiding and organizing all spheres of people’s lives. Therefore, it is the prime responsibility of an Islamic government to ensure people’s salvation in the afterlife.

Their worldview and understanding of the functions and responsibilities of government is clear in the Taliban’s new law. The Taliban think it is the government’s principal responsibility to ensure that people are performing their obligations to God, with those duties strictly defined by the mullahs. The people are considered ignorant of the ways of God while the mullahs are responsible for ensuring the people do not indulge in vices and trump the rights of God. 

Implementing God’s law provides the Taliban the right to rule while the people are subject to this tyranny by the command of God’s law. In the name of God’s law, the Taliban are denying the humanity of the people of Afghanistan. 

As humans, we have the capacity to think, plan, and work to achieve individual or collective objectives. As human beings are responsible for our own affairs. As human beings not only have this capability but also have a moral responsibility to exercise our humanity, to reflect, to understand, and to act. Therefore, to form a government that is responsive to our needs and make laws in accordance with our circumstances is our fundamental human rights and responsibility.

However, Taliban doctrine denies that humans in Afghanistan have this fundamental human essence. The mullahs advocate that they have a predestined code of life, truly understood only by the Taliban, and upon which they have a right and responsibility to govern. That tyranny is one in which no one has the right to raise a finger in objection as even the softest of criticism is forbidden. 

The core of Taliban politics is the political disenfranchisement of the people of Afghanistan. That can be clearly seen in their recent law, which effectively denies the humanity of the population. A correct and justified response to this law is to reject the Taliban’s core claim of forming an Islamic system. It is time for the people of Afghanistan to demand the separation of religion and politics and to assert their human right to self-determination. In the face of a regime that claims to defend the rights of God against the people, we must demand a government that is responsive to the needs of its citizens, is without divine claims, and one that respects the political agency and self-determination of the people. Therefore, a proper response to the new Taliban law is to reject the essence of Taliban politics and demand secularism.

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