In 1987, when Islamists
entered the government, they imposed fundamentalist Sharia law and banned most
normal activities including employment, education and sports for women, movies,
television, videos, music, dancing, hanging pictures in homes, clapping during
sports events, kite flying, and beard trimming.
One Taliban list of
prohibitions included: pork, pig, pig oil, anything made from human hair,
satellite dishes, cinematography, and equipment that produces the joy of music,
pool tables, chess, masks, alcohol, tapes, computers, VCRs, television,
anything that propagates sex and is full of music, wine, lobster, nail polish,
firecrackers, statues, sewing catalogs, pictures and Christmas cards.
Men were required to have
a beard extending farther than a fist clamped at the base of the chin. On the
other hand, they had to wear their head hair short. Men were also required to
wear a head covering.
Possession was forbidden
of depictions of living things, whether drawings, paintings or photographs,
stuffed animals, and dolls.
These rules were issued by
the Ministry for the Promotion
of Virtue and Suppression of Vice and enforced by its "religious police". In newly
conquered towns hundreds of religious police beat offenders (typically men
without beards and women who were not wearing their burqas properly).
Theft was punished by the
amputation of a hand, rape and murder by public execution. Married adulterers
were stoned to death.
Women were prohibited from
working as teachers and schools closed. Employment of women was restricted to
the medical sector.
Women were also prohibited
from wearing unapproved clothing, taking a taxi without a "close male relative",
washing clothes in streams and having their measurements taken by tailors.
Women were made to wear
the burqa, a traditional dress
covering the entire body, with a small screen covering the face through which
the wearer could see. Taliban restrictions became more severe after they took
control of the capital.
In 1996, a Taliban decree
banned music, shaving of beards, keeping of pigeons, flying kites, displaying
of pictures or portraits, western hairstyles, music and dancing at weddings,
gambling, "sorcery," and not praying at prayer times.
In February 1998,
religious police forced all women off the streets of Kabul and issued new
regulations ordering "householders to blacken their windows, so women
would not be visible from the outside." Home schools for girls, which
had been allowed to continue, were forbidden.
In June 1998, the Taliban
stopped all women from attending general hospitals, leaving the use
of one all-women hospital in Kabul. There were many reports of Muslim women
being beaten by the Taliban for violating the Taliban interpretation of
the Sharia.
In February 2001, Taliban
used sledgehammers to destroy representational works of art at the National
Museum of Afghanistan.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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