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A woman wearing a burqa on a street in Kabul in early May
Photo: AHMAD SAHEL ARMAN / AFP
When I woke up on Saturday and watched the news, I saw the Taliban's official order: that all women must cover their face and body again with a burqa.
A burqa covers the wearer's entire body and eyes with a kind of grid of fabric.
The Taliban claim that this is an order from God and that Afghanistan, as a Muslim country, must implement this order.
They threatened that if women did not cover their faces, their homes would be identified and their husbands would be put under pressure: Make sure your wives wear a burqa!
If the woman is caught again in public without a cover-up, her husband will be jailed for three days.
If it happens again, heavier penalties will follow.
Since the Taliban took power again almost ten months ago, they have done nothing to ensure good governance in the country.
Hunger is everywhere in the country.
Families sell their children's organs, sometimes their children themselves, in order to somehow survive.
Food has become infinitely expensive, medicines are missing.
The aid organizations that are still in the country are having problems organizing supplies.
First, the Taliban took the heads off the female mannequins.
Then the secondary schools for girls opened briefly, only to close again after a few hours.
Tens of thousands of women who worked for the government have lost their jobs.
Women are also only allowed to leave the country when accompanied by a male relative.
The Taliban do not listen to the needs of the people.
Instead, each week they issue executive orders that further violate and restrict women's freedoms in the country.
As if they came back just for that: to terrorize the women.
What is the truth behind the Taliban's claims about the burka?
Nothing.
Their decree has no Islamic basis.
In the time of Prophet Muhammad, women's faces were not covered.
This covering does not have its roots in the culture of the country.
In most rural areas of Afghanistan, women work shoulder to shoulder with male family members in the fields, and they do not cover their faces.
Momena is scared
A burqa requirement represents so much more than a piece of cloth covering a woman's body.
It promotes violence and oppression of women.
It perpetuates the imbalance of power between the men who make the announcements and the women who depend on their word.
If a woman resists, she must expect violent punishment.
Child and forced marriages will continue to increase.
All the mechanisms and institutions that protect women that existed before the Taliban took power no longer exist in Afghanistan.
Women have no point of contact when injustice happens to them, when they are in need, when they need help.
I want to give you an example.
Momena is 29 years old.
Before the Taliban took power, she was a primary school teacher and was very committed to gender equality.
She has always fought to make her school children understand that it makes no difference whether they are a boy or a girl.
She wrote me a message when she heard about the burqa decree: »I am so depressed.
I want to share my pain with you.
Who gives the Taliban the right to interfere in my private life?”
She wrote, "I wish I could say these things publicly and loudly, but they will stone me to death and shut me up forever."
"It hurts me so much that my face and body are a political tool for a group of people to gain political gain and control."
Momena became more and more emotional the longer we wrote back and forth.
She wrote that she had no more tears to shed and that she saw little meaning in this life.
This shows what a single commandment does to the woman's psyche.
Momena feels so emaciated, insecure and cut off in her self-esteem by the recurring oppressive ideas of those in power in her country that it seems nonsensical to her: to continue living.
It doesn't get any more horrible!
At the end of our conversation, Momena said that she was a mother too.
She knows she has to persevere "when I look at my daughter, who has just started school, and my son, who is only two years old."
I didn't have much to say to Momena other than that we have no choice but to fight back.
That we mustn't give up.
Because then our opponents won.
Editing and translation: Maria Stöhr
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