Afghan women sing in defiance of Taliban laws silencing their voices

Afghan women, both inside and outside the country, have posted videos of themselves singing in protest against the Taliban’s laws banning women’s voices in public.

Late last month the Taliban published new restrictions aimed, it said, at combating vice and promoting virtue. The 35-article document, which includes a raft of draconian laws, deems women’s voices to be potential instruments of vice and stipulates that women must not sing or read aloud in public, nor let their voices carry beyond the walls of their homes.

As rights campaigners reacted with horror, Afghan women began pushing back. Across the country, women began uploading videos of themselves singing, in defiance of the Taliban’s systematic efforts to erase women from the public sphere.

“No command, system or man can close the mouth of an Afghan woman,” one 23-year-old said after posting her own video.

The 39-second video showed her singing outdoors. The song she sang had been carefully chosen for its lyrics, which spoke of protest and strength. “I am not that weak willow that trembles in every wind,” she sang. “I am from Afghanistan.”

In another video, reportedly recorded in Kabul, a woman is shown singing while dressed from head to toe in black. “You have silenced my voice for the foreseeable future,” she sang, her face concealed by a long veil. “You have imprisoned me in my home for the crime of being a woman.”

Other videos showed women in Afghanistan singing alone or in small groups, using hashtags such as “#My voice is not forbidden” and “#No to Taliban” as they raised their voices against what UN officials have described as a “gender-based apartheid”.

Others around the world soon joined in. “We do not go to the field with a gun, but our voice, our image,” said Hoda Khamosh, an Afghan woman living in Norway. She posted her own video in a bid to show “that we women are not just a few individuals who can be erased”, she said.

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The new laws also force women to wear thick clothes that completely cover their bodies – including their faces – while in public, and bans them from looking directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.

Those who fail to comply with the restrictions can be detained and punished in a manner deemed appropriate by Taliban officials.

On Tuesday, the UN high commissioner for human rights called for the law to be repealed, describing it as “utterly intolerable”.

The new law cements policies that seek to completely erase women’s presence in public, “effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows”, said a spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, they have steadily eroded women’s rights. Women and girls have been blocked from attending secondary school, banned from nearly all forms of paid employment, and barred from public parks and gyms.

Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced that they would resume the practice of stoning women to death for adultery.