“The psychological profile of Afghan women all over is so bad. They are so depressed, it is becoming hard to live,”

On October 26, the women in Afghanistan faced another brunt from the Taliban regime after they were barred from technically “hearing each other”. The Taliban’s Minister of Vice and Virtue, Khalid Hanafi, issued a new ban on women’s rights forbidding adult women to allow their voices to be heard while praying by other adult women. While this left the Afghan women dismayed, the bizarre ban stirred headlines all around the world.

Hanafi emphasized in an audio statement that adult women should not engage in “Takbir,” which is Islamic prayer or reciting the Quran out loud in front of other women. Since women in Afghanistan were already prohibited from speaking in public, many people are left wondering how a sizable portion of the country’s population is left voiceless in light of the new, harsh rules.

Afghan women’s rights activist Mahbouba Seraj discussed her thoughts on the most recent ban and questioned the foreign actors establishing connections with the Taliban in an exclusive interview with a media source. Seraj said he hoped to have discussions with the regime during the last time Firstpost spoke with the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated campaigner. She questions whether there is a way out of the chaos as she paints a somber picture of what is occurring in the nation.

Seraj was questioned about the new prohibition and said she was surprised that the Taliban were imposing such limitations. She questioned how the dictatorship interpreted the Quran and claimed that in order to discover such a strange law, she needed to reread the holy book.

“We did not know that we were not supposed to be a part of everything Allah said to the Muslims, because we are women. I thought that the Qur’an and Allah said that men and women are equal, the only difference between them is the level of their taqwa and the level of their prayers, and being a good human being to Allah and being a good Muslim,” the 76-year-old activist told .

“Now I have to go and restart the Qur’an from the beginning to the end, and I would like to find out where all of this is written, and how come during these 1,400 years of Islam, we didn’t know anything about it. How come suddenly the Taliban came up and found out about this” she questioned.

“According to the Taliban right now, our voices are haram, we cannot breathe in a loud voice, to other women, the Qur’an, nor the hadith, nor anything, because it’s all haram. These are the things that the Taliban are coming up with. I have no idea what the meaning of this is and where they are coming up with all of this. We are stuck”.

While Seraj mentioned that the core ideology of the Taliban hasn’t changed, there still remains a difference between the Taliban that came to power in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and the regime that took over in 2021. “The Taliban from one point of view, haven’t changed because that’s the ideology. Ideologies usually don’t change easily like this. The ideologies usually stay the same and the Taliban is also like that,” Seraj explained.

“But what has changed is really even amongst the Taliban right now, they are actually teaching the younger Taliban about these new edicts. They are teaching them about things that are apparently new to them too. Now, where they have come up with all of this, how it is allowed by the Islamic world to come up with things like this and say that the Qur’an said so, this is what is a question to me,” she said.

“Why was it not given as a direction to the Islamic world, to the men and women of the Islamic world? Why is it something that has come up now? And what is the meaning of it? And if it is not true, how come it’s allowed? Because the words of the Qur’an cannot be changed,” she remarked, insisting that one has to dive deep into the matter.

“These things are being felt very strongly in the provinces of Afghanistan like Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul, etc. Taliban don’t implement these laws in the capital right away. They are implementing in other parts of Afghanistan first and then they come to the capital,” she said.

Seraj pointed out how the Taliban regime has banned living beings from being shown on television. “Our televisions are all shutting down and they are going to make the programmes into radio. So now this is going to come and go into effect in Kabul very soon,” she explained.

“It is being implemented in provinces, it hasn’t come to Kabul yet. And when it enters Kabul, that’s when the trouble starts. So we don’t know what we are going to do,” she said.

Seraj also spoke about the struggles women doctors are facing in the country. “They’re not talking to male counterparts, there are no males around them. So the only ones that women have around them are female doctors. There are women doctors, women nurses,” she told 

The stringent restrictions imposed by the draconian regime are driving many into depression and suicidal thoughts. There has been a sharp spike in cases of suicide in the country not only among women but also among men. “I just heard that two days ago that there was a young girl that killed herself, 20 years old in Kabul, it is unbelievable,” Seraj recalled.

“It is becoming a lot more common among young men and women. There is no money, there is no work, there is no hope, there is no possibilities. I mean, how do we go about living? I don’t understand that.”

“The psychological profile of Afghan women all over is so bad. They are so depressed, it is becoming hard to live,” she added.