Over five years of Taliban rule, Afghanistan has undergone profound transformation. The country is mired in crisis: the economy is in collapse, its government faces a legitimacy problem at home and abroad, and there are systematic human rights violations.
In particular, the education sector has been dramatically affected. This piece looks at what five years of Taliban rule have done to Afghanistan’s higher education system, drawing on published reports along with interviews with university staff, students, and professors inside and outside the country. Their identities are withheld for security reasons.
The complete exclusion of women
One of the Taliban’s first acts was to exclude women entirely from higher education, making Afghanistan the only country in the world where women are barred from the right to study.
In December 2022, Minister of Higher Education Neda Mohammad Nadeem decreed a ban on women’s university education until further notice. Soon after, all women — including professors and staff — were barred from entering public and private universities. The ban was so abrupt that female students already mid-exam that semester were not allowed to finish. Student protests against the ban were violently suppressed.
Five years on, women are still not allowed in universities, while their existing degrees are no longer processed or certified, and textbooks and materials authored by women have been purged. Before the Taliban’s return to power, tens of thousands of women enrolled in universities each year: in 2020–21, 30 percent of the 147,000 students admitted to university after sitting the Kankor entrance exam were women. That total was more than 44,000, with thousands more entering private universities through separate exams.
During these five years, 2.4 million Afghans have been denied education, including at the secondary level, according to UNESCO.
Replacing specialist professors with mullahs
A post-2021 brain drain hit Afghan universities hard. A 2022 report found that 229 professors with master’s and doctoral degrees had left just three universities: Kabul, Herat, and Balkh. A 2023 report put the number who departed from Kabul University at 400.
In August of this year, 11 professors at Herat University’s medical faculty resigned en masse after officials from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice detained and harassed them for trimming their beards. Similar losses have occurred at other public and private universities, including some dismissed by the Taliban under its “human resources reform” program.
The Taliban have been using a “level-verification” exam to grant bachelor’s and master’s equivalency to supporters and religious seminary graduates, then appointing them to fill positions that once belonged to specialists with academic qualifications. Professors of Islamic culture, for instance, must now pass a separate certification exam, a mechanism that clears out existing staff to make room for new appointees. Unofficial sources at the Ministry of Higher Education say roughly 2,000 newly graduated mullahs are awaiting assignment to teach Islamic culture courses.
Securitization and ideological control
The academic atmosphere and any spirit of inquiry on campus have been destroyed by a heavy security presence and the imposition of Taliban ideology. According to sources close to the universities, the Ministry of Higher Education enforces control through a web of oversight bodies, including a Directorate of Call and Guidance (Da’wat wa Irshad) at every campus, a Chief Directorate that tracks compliance with leadership decrees, intelligence services, an Accreditation Board, and informant networks among students.
The Directorate of Call and Guidance, which is headed by a Taliban appointee, sits in on every academic and administrative meeting, and no university decision is valid without that appointee’s signature. Staff and students must attend congregational prayers and the directorate’s moral guidance sessions, and it monitors everyone’s dress, beards, behavior, and speech.
A separate compliance directorate is posted on campus to assess how fully Taliban decrees are being carried out, while the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice makes unannounced inspections. University presidents must hold weekly meetings to relay and enforce the leader’s directives, including a recent decree from Kandahar that makes promoting Taliban policy part of professors’ formal performance evaluation, and thus a factor that can determine a professor’s career and a university’s accreditation.
Quality assurance standards have been rewritten to emphasize religious teaching, Hanafi jurisprudence, and compliance with leadership decrees. University officials must also report all campus activity and staff travel to Taliban intelligence. The result, sources say, is that academic debate has all but disappeared, as everyone fears being reported if they talk openly in class.
Persian language and anti-Shia discrimination
The Taliban have also moved against the Persian language (Dari) and Shia religious teaching. Course materials written in Persian or printed in Iran have been dropped from reading lists, and all ministry correspondence is now conducted in Pashto.
A decree issued in March 2026 and attributed to Taliban leadership orders government bodies to coin “Islamic and Afghan” substitutes for foreign terms of speech. In practice, sources say, even common Persian words like daneshgah (university) and pazhuhesh (research) are being treated as foreign.
Shia books and Iranian publications are being pulled from libraries, forcing professors to rely on their own handouts in place of banned texts. Private universities have not been spared: Ibn Sina University and three others were suspended last year. Unconfirmed reports indicated that Khatam al-Nabieen University is to be folded into a religious seminary of the same name.
Islamic culture courses may now teach only Hanafi jurisprudence, while Shia jurisprudence, hadith, and any reference to Shia imams or scholars are banned in any subject. Because the certification exam for these courses draws solely on Sunni sources, Shia professors are effectively disqualified. Beginning in the spring of 2026, incoming students must sign a 14-point pledge, one clause of which requires them to declare adherence to the Sunni Hanafi school. Shia staff are also required to join congregational prayers led by the head of the Directorate of Call and Guidance. Recently, 130 Shia and Hazara students at Balkh and Herat universities were denied dormitory access.
Eliminating the humanities
Viewing the humanities as fundamentally at odds with their emphasis on jurisprudence, sharia, and unquestioning obedience to leadership, the Taliban have pressured these disciplines with radical alternation or complete elimination. In particular, they have begun phasing out law, political science, and international relations at private universities, with the same expected across the public system.
At the same time, Islamic culture requirements for students have expanded sharply from 8 credit hours under the republic to 24 today, with a total of 30 hours planned for next year. There is little to discuss or debate as the constitution, human rights, democracy, elections, minority and women’s rights, political parties, and civil society are all topics deemed off-limits for discussion.
Reshaping the physical campus
Afghan campuses increasingly resemble religious seminaries. Staff, students, and professors are required to dress and groom themselves like madrasa students; traditional Afghan clothing, caps, and beards are mandatory, and a recent Kandahar decree requires turbans, not just caps, worn during congregational prayers. Taliban inspectors monitor compliance, and violators face salary cuts, demotion, or dismissal. Images of scientists, historical figures, founders, and other human likenesses have been stripped from campus buildings and replaced with banners bearing the leader’s decrees and ministry directives.
Mohammad Qasim Erfani is a former university professor in Kabul and researcher and writer.
