The Taliban, who took control of Kabul and overthrew the government of Afghanistan in August 2021, have set up a ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice. In August 2023, they published a document containing 35 articles, which are to govern the public and private lives of their citizens.
Some of these rules propagating virtues and preventing vices include: the full covering of women in public from head to ankle; women and girls forbidden from speaking, singing, or praying out loud in public; women and girls forbidden from leaving the house without a male relative or using public transportation without a male relative.
Men must be covered between the navel and knees if they are in public; they must grow beards; they are forbidden from wearing Western-style clothes, especially neck-ties, as they are a “sign” of the Christian Cross, which is a sign of infidels; men are forbidden from making friendships with Western people or acting in ways that resemble non-Muslims. Gambling, adultery, pornography, lesbianism, sodomy, and child sexual abuse are outlawed, as are the misuse of radios or the storage and viewing of images of human beings on phones or computers.
Prayers at certain times of the day are mandatory, and everyone’s work schedule, including taxi drivers, must comply to the minute. Farmers and merchants are required to pay certain tithes.
There is more, but you get the idea. No one is exempt from these rules, not even visitors to the country. The ministry has enforcers—a Muhtasib, who is an inspector—and there will be many of them employed to police the private and public lives of the people. The punishments range from one hour to three days in prison, or up to the discretion of the Muhtasib.
One of the most dehumanizing rules is that a woman must not sing so loud in her home as to be heard by a passerby. The justification for all the rules surrounding women and their voices is that a woman’s voice is considered to be awrah, an Arabic word meaning ‘intimate parts.’ That is, a woman’s voice is a form of nakedness. Therefore, a woman singing, praying, or speaking outside the home is exposing her nakedness, thereby enticing and arousing men. This, in turn, can cause them to do things to her that are unlawful, and if that happens, it is her fault for enticing them.
The fundamental problem underlying all these regulations is the premise that human beings are intrinsically evil.
As a note, theologically, Islam believes that human beings are capable of both good and evil. However, Islam, like Protestantism, is splintered, with different imams teaching different things. And although they have the Qur’an and the Hadith, there is no ultimate teaching authority—unlike the Catholic Church, which has an uninterrupted apostolic authority. When a group decides to go with a certain set of rules to be as “faithful” to Islamic law as possible, there’s no higher authority to correct it if it oversteps—because who is to say?
From a Catholic perspective, establishing a government ministry to regulate people, creating a morality police department, and establishing laws that vanish the entire female population is saying, fundamentally, that people cannot be trusted to be good and do good. It assumes that people are evil and the only way to get them to do the right thing is through punishment. It assumes men have no agency to control their behavior. Regarding the laws concerning women in particular, it removes responsibility for wrongdoing from men, holding that most of the moral depravity is the fault of the woman.
We do not need a long think piece on Islamic anthropology to understand that this violates the dignity of these people. For us Christians, that’s what this is about—not the minutiae of parsing the Sharia Law between those who want to bring Islam into the modern world and the majority of Muslims who reject this modernization of their laws.
The Catholic Church’s teaching is that after man sinned against God, the consequence of Original Sin, in perpetuity to all humans, is that man’s heart is darkened and his will is weak. But man did not become totally depraved. With God’s grace, he is still capable of choosing the good and doing the good. Our Church also teaches that men and women are equal, and that in marriage there is a “mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ.”
Catholic anthropology can re-humanize the world. That’s what first caught my attention when I was a Protestant. Catholic teaching about humanity communicated a dignity I had not experienced before.
I see it as up to us Catholics to speak out against this degradation. The Taliban will probably not listen. When they published the 35 articles for the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice, they preemptively said that any criticism of their morality laws from those not familiar with Islamic law is “arrogance,” and they have also rejected the U.N. report. Rather, they dug in, insisting “the concerns raised by various parties will not sway the Islamic Emirate from its commitment to upholding and enforcing Islamic Sharia law,” as stated by the Taliban’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
As religious people, we can somewhat understand how, after watching the moral degradation in the West, people serious about their religion can become so extreme as to suffocate the very faith they desire to enflame. This is where our Catholic faith can lead by example; this is where our understanding of faith and reason, our intellectual heritage, our moral fortitude, our spiritual fervor, and social courage can light the way for others. Our faith is not only for ourselves but for the world, and the Curch does not teach us to save our souls and then say, “To hell with the world.” Rather, Jesus working through his Mystical Body, the Church, to this day works effectively for it, because “God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
George Weigel has written that, “the great British historian Sir Michael Howard once told [him] that the Catholic Church’s transformation into the world’s most prominent institutional defender of basic human rights was one of the two great revolutions of the twentieth century.” And so I am asking all Catholics to be courageous, to re-humanize the world, to follow St. John Paul II’s example to stand in solidarity with these people; to speak against the indignities against all Afghans, but especially against the erasure of women.
Thirty years ago, St. Pope John Paul II said to the United Nations in his Letter to Women:
Women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity.
Although women have made some advancements since St. Pope John Paul II said those words, it does not mean they no longer apply; in fact, in certain sectors (e.g., “trans” men trying to get into women’s sports), there has been a regression to the rights and dignity of women everywhere. This is why Catholics in particular must live and speak the Catholic understanding of man—that he is not totally depraved and that human nature is not whatever is aesthetically pleasing to the individual.
While we speak and live the truths of our faith, we must also pray. We must specifically pray that God will open the eyes of these men to see women as equals, and to see that society and their faith would be served better when the female population is contributing to it. And we must pray that they will recognize that human beings are not intrinsically evil but are called, in and through Jesus Christ and His saving work, to be “children of God” (Jn 1:12).
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Well, some of those things outlawed by the Taliban sound similarto Catholic teaching. They’re not wrong about everything.
Your reply sent an absolute shiver through my soul. Living here in Catholic Ireland we now have an atheist president, who nevertheless swore an oath to Almighty God. She was then blessed by a muslim cleric. I am sorry Mrs Cracker, but the horrors of Islam, the foolish thinking of some Christians that islam and Christianity have any meeting point is in my opinion deluded. Such foolish sentiment drives the immigration debate. Europe is becoming islamified. They do not believe in the Cross, they do not believe Christ is the son of God and for many of them the idea of a woman commenting in public would call for some serious stoning. I have no doubt there are good and well intentioned muslim individuals, but women in particular seeking a meeting of minds with this ideology brings turkeys and Christmas and chickens and KFC to mind.
” adultery, pornography, lesbianism, sodomy, and child sexual abuse are outlawed…”
*****
Surely we can agree at least on having that in common as Catholics?
You know, in the UK Muslims protested sex ed being taught in schools. In the States Christian & Muslim families together protested mandatory sex ed in Maryland public schools.
Pretty sure their abuse of children is open to interpretation. Bacha Bazi, for example.
And I suspect the other items are open to interpretation as well.
I think Catholics are on some shaky footing regarding the abuse of minors. At least in the eyes of the world.
Of that, we are all only too well aware.
Yes Ma’am.
That’s cultural, not religious.
“. . . laws that vanish the entire vanish female population . . .”
Vanish?
This sentence requires a transitive verb.
To vanish something is a transitive verb. As in to disappear something.
Islam rejects original sin, and therefore pretends to reinstate the world prior to the Fall. This condition it calls Islam. The self image is that the dictated Qur’an is prior to history and even ontologically “uncreated”—the very essence of God.
Islamic submission to a totally inscrutable and deterministic Allah is, ironically and tragically, a consequence of original sin. A false anthropology. An estrangement that then sees everyone else as outside of God and therefore arrogant. The post-Christian rationalism of the radically secularist West confirms this 7th-century predisposition. The West has disenchanted the world as it was in the beginning.
Islamic simplicity is not likely to yield to Christian “fraternity” since the alternative universe (!) is the besieged and now resurgent Islamic brotherhood of the umma, outside of which are the infidels. Pre-Christian tribalism, but under a monotheistic mantra that then replaces the Triune One and the incarnate Christ in history with the untouchable Qur’an.
For inter religious dialoguers—even in red hats—to settle for a an academic comparison of the two scriptures would fail to even understand the question: the Word made flesh vs “the word made book.”
Personally, I agree with you, but Merriam-Webster disagrees with both of us. The verb can be used in a transitive sense, meaning “to cause to disappear.” I wonder, however, if the usage has extended to mean that in relatively modern times. As I’m sure you know, language occasionally accommodates to contemporary inaccuracies. “Pea,” for example, was once “pease,” as in “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold” and “Peaseblossom,” the character in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A similar phenomenon seems to be occurring to the (originally singular) word “kudos.” (Forgive the pedantry. I’m a retired English teacher.)
I always thought pease was a plural for pea or meant “made from peas/of peas”?
Several sources I checked suggested “pease” is an archaic or dialectic form of “pea.” According to AI (not always correct by any means), “pease” was a singular, uncountable noun like “flour,” whereas “pea” was plural (!) by a process called back-formation.
Thank you so much for the explanation.
It’s funny, I actually had field peas/pease for supper tonight. They did really well in the garden this year.
Islam. Seems like it’s the only “religion” where radical is the religion.
Agreed. There’s no such thing as “radical” Islam, only varying degrees of adherence to Islamic teachings. The same applies to the term “Islamic terrorist,” which is a misnomer. The Qur’an contains no teachings that condemn terrorist actions committed by some Muslims.
Curious about how some Muslims fall into this radical insanity. In other Muslims countries, like Egypt, the army must occasionally shoot a few of the crazies to keep them contained.
Mr. Beaulieu above (6:35 p.m.)
Only in modern corrupt usage is “disappear” a transitive verb.
Personally I find it unfortunate that language accommodates to common errors and inaccuracies, not only when spoken but when written as well. Although I might not live to see it, I’m convinced that the apostrophe will sooner or later disappear from written English; it already appears to be doing so. The frequency with which “it’s” appears as “its” is staggering — and don’t get me started on plural possessives! I know I’m a product of a bygone era, but when I was going to school, most students had mastered the apostrophe by fifth grade.
One of the stained glass windows in my Church was donated by someone named Ladie. I know also that this person had a sodality in his or her possession because in the window it says Young Ladie’s Sodality.
I visited a church over the weekend that had 2 obvious spelling errors in its stained glass windows. The windows themselves were absolutely beautiful but the church was built at a time when our state had the lowest level of literacy in the nation & most folks locally didn’t speak English as a first language. So things like spelling errors could slip by more easily.
This won’t help the tourism industry much.
Interesting -esp. the mention about the claim in Islam about the Pre -Fallen state . The truths revealed in writings on Divine Will through Luisa – the focus is on humanity being prepared for same through Holy Spirit operation in our times, how we are in times of the purifications of our rebellions prior to same . Short narrative on same -in book recommended by Mo.Gabrielle of Benedectine Daughters of Divine Will- -https://benedictinesofdivinewill.org/uploads/3/4/3/2/34324596/drop-book-series.pdf
There is also Sam Khadouri OCDS -with some background connections to the author as a Chaldean Catholic, active in Divine Will mission .
https://www.beingcatholicmedia.org/category/sam-khadhouri-ocds/
God bless !
To explain further, possibly, the predisposition of Islam is called “fitrah.” “There is not a child that he or she is born upon this fitrah, this original state of the knowledge of God. And his parents make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian . . . and if they are Muslims, Muslim.” Various translations of fitrah are “natural disposition, constitution, temperament, e.g., what is in a man at his creation, a sound nature, natural religion (and) the germ of Islam.”
In fitrah are we talking about an intuited–but fatally truncated–version of the inborn and universal (not historically acquired or constructed) Natural Law? The Qur’an includes explicit mention of only the first four affirmative Commandments, and excludes explicit mention of the six prohibitive Commandments?
Interreligious or intercultural dialogue (not interfaith) with Islam could be more fascinating, except for this vacuum exploited in history and today by jihadist zealots citing violent inserts also cobbled into the Qur’an.
St. Irenaeus said things more completely and reasonably: “From the beginning, God had implanted in the heart of man the precepts of the natural law. Then he was content to remind him of them. This was the [whole] Decalogue.”
Consider this observation by T.E. Lawrence of World War I fame, upon meeting the Bedouins for the first time:
“The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faith . . . .The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds.” In contrast with the Christian attentiveness to the personal interior life and reasoned distinctions, the Bedouin of the desert “Could not look for God within him; he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great [….]
“In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitations, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades . . . [but then] They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistencies seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity” (“Seven Pillars of Wisdom”).
One may suggest the author is more pro-feminist than Catholic….
And I think one would be wrong.
The author said, “The fundamental problem underlying all these regulations is the premise that human beings are intrinsically evil.” I disagree. As usual, it is their unwillingness to apply their own truth TO THEMSELVES that is the premise creating the problem. Fully understood and embraced, total depravity demands that we be “born again.” There is no other solution personally. This worldview must restrain the governors themselves. Otherwise, you get Islam…trans…and Trump.
The point is control! It’s easier to control half the population than the full population. Women have balancing effect and in a terribly oppressive state control without opposition is everything!
Be aware that there are radical Catholics who would love to institute a Catholic theocracy and impose some of these restrictions on women. This program has actually been called “Catholic Taliban” and “a virtual Catholic caliphate.” Shun these ideas!
Also be aware that there is an anti-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan that views the regime’s policies too lenient. One shudders to think what they have in mind.
Would you care to further explicate what you mean by this comment?
Are you suggesting that women veiling in holy places, wearing long skirts, staying home and homeschooling etc… are somehow oppressed? A wife submitting to her husband with a complete act of the will out of love for Christ is Catholic.
The two ends of the continuum of woman’s place in society are both grievously evil: the completely covered Muslim mother who fears speaking or going for a walk and the liberated cussing masculine career-focused Catholic broad who flaunts her curvatures and chastises red-blooded men for noticing.
Both extremes are perpetuated by effeminate men.
Virtue lies in the middle: The only solution is meditation on and imitation of the Holy Family and Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary for both sexes.
Ave Maria!
Imposing those behaviors on all women by law in a Catholic theocracy would be oppressive. If Catholic women want to wear veils at church and stay home with their children, fine. I could stay home because my husband had a good job. Not everyone is that fortunate nor does every woman have a husband. My children shudder in horror at the thought of having been homeschooled by me. And for the record, my daily “uniform” is pants and a t-shirt. I wear dresses to church and on special occasions.
I was referring to people who want to take away women’s voting rights, condemn/discourage high education and work outside the home for them. We wouldn’t even need property rights because our male guardians would take care of all that. These ideas were being advocated in the RadTrad press 40 years ago and are creeping into the mainstream Catholic publications. The unstated assumption is that–nuns aside–women are only good for bearing and rearing children, functions that have natural time limits. I beg to differ.
Thanks for following up.
We agree that it is not the right of government to impose laws that are harmful to women. The goal of any just government is to provide the guardrails for society so as allow the flourishing of virtue in each household so as to maximize the common good and augment the search for truth.
My final question would be: are women better off now with the right to vote, the ability to dominate in nearly every field (maybe outside of sports), the license to murder and render their bodies infertile, and countless other so-called rights?
Are men and women more virtuous and is western civilization more wholesome since the advent of the feminist movement?
May Our Lady wrap you her magnificent mantle and give you peace!m.
Ave Maria
The way you’re phrasing your question suggests sympathy with the idea of denying women the vote. Is that the case? How do you feel about universal manhood suffrage or should only fathers of families or men of property be able to vote. Have you ever known 1) a woman beaten to death by her husband after her priest urged her to stay with the abuser? 2) a woman deliberately failed out of university because she was female? 3) a woman left with nothing but the clothes on her back after her husband locked her out of the house and divorced her? This is why we need civil rights. If you disagree, argue with SS. John Paul II and Edith Stein. I’m done here.
Are any of us better off without the right to vote? A great deal of our society wouldn’t qualify for suffrage under older rules.
I’m seeing some distressing comments about women lately. And some ugly name calling.
“Career focused Catholic broad?”
Mrs. C,
Such is a term used by my father who recently passed. It is from a different era.
Double-checking some sources it appears it has taken on a negative connotation in recent times. If it is offensive, I apologize. Nonetheless, it is more gentle than many other terms that could have been utilized.
Thanks for your valued input on this and a few other sites. I always enjoy your takes.
Ave Maria!
Some things should remain in earlier eras, Mr. Joseph. But I appreciate your apology. Thank you for that.
“Effeminate men”? Really?
And the difference between your examples is that most women under Islamist regimes like the Taliban aren’t freely choosing to live their lives that way but the grotesquely charicatured western woman has the choice of how to live.
Steve,
Yes, that term is used in many places in Holy Scripture. It is never virtuous.
For the muhammedist, it is the unwillingness to see the inherent dignity in the woman and to control her because he cannot control his carnal passions. For the secularist, effeminacy is the spiritual sloth that facilitates a false peace between the sexes, an excess of comfort and the avoidance of backlash for standing up for the truth.
In all cases, this effeminacy in men is always the result of a refusal to sacrifice for the good of the other. This is all further exacerbated by many men being outside the state of grace.
The solution is to start teaching the domestic church, teaching men to imitate St. Joseph in their hard work and unwillingness to expose their wives to shame and women to give their unconditional fiat to God’s will and to do whatever He tells her..
Ave Maria!
I don’t see a problem using “vanish” as a transitive verb. In fact I rather like the way she used it! 🥲
Ken T. above (5:04 a.m.) –
See my comment to Mr. Beaulieu (11:33 p.m.)
I’ve thought more about this (English teacher hazard).
I’ve decided to go with Newman, yes, that Newman.
Language matters.
If the language used both reflects and promotes muddled thinking, I say it is corruption.
Sounds like the Taliban is doing the work of God. “Gambling, adultery, pornography, lesbianism, sodomy, and child sexual abuse are outlawed.” Really? I’m supposed to dislike them for this? And wouldn’t women be safer if they were well covered in public and accompanied by a male relative everywhere? What faithful Catholic would find these policies objectionable? I thought modesty and chastity were virtues.
I admire Muslim’s piety and I think we do agree with them on those issues. Maybe not gambling 100%, but certainly gambling in excess.
Modesty and chastity are virtues , yes but modesty can look a little different in each culture we can respect the differences.
And women in the western world have surely everything to do with dehumanisation.
How so Miss Margaret?
You’ve just proved the point I was trying to make above about Catholics who’d love to see women subjected to Taliban-style rules–in a Catholic theocracy, no doubt. If women have to be completely covered and guarded by a male relative in public to be “safe,” what does that say about the morals of men?
The Afghan rules just promulgated reflect Islamic attitudes that the mere sight of a single strand of female hair or hearing a female voice will incite men to rape–which will be the woman’s fault and bring her a death sentence for unchastity.
God gave us free will …. and the Ten Commandments. In society, there is criminal law, and there is moral law. The complexity is to intertwine these four concepts into a single action that obeys God’s will. Humans defining God’s will is where the problem lies. Does God receive greater happiness from having one forcibly submitting to His will; or from one self willingly submitting to His will? Islamic rules may seem strenuous with harsh repercussions, but on the Catholic side, there are “cafeteria” Catholics who pick and choose what rules they will obey. Our Catholic faith says we obey our conscience, Islam says one must obey their rules. But if either type of worshiper follows their conscience or mandatory rules with a willing and loving heart, then I would think God would be pleased. God is love, and wants us all to love each other willingly. That is God’s true mandate that we are to follow.
Following Cleo about wording, above, might it be better to distinguish between “forcibly ‘submitting’ to His will; [and] willingly ‘surrendering’ [not submitting, but totally and freely as in ‘fiat’] to His will”?
In either case, and also in response to other recent commenters, we have this about Islam in its aspects as a supervisory culture and “religion”–as under its Taliban executors of arbitrary and simplistic Divine Will:
“[Islam] would be a heresy by its refusal to grow and develop. And it is true that Mohammed retrenched and simplified: he made historic time stand still as Joshua did the sun. But we must underline once more that to this simplification there was added a most powerful resource, the harmonization of contraries. Of all religions, the religion of Mohammed has more than any other united contradictions: blood, lust, death, the difficult and reassuring ritual, the worship of a sole and transcendent God—sensuality, frenzy, violence, cunning—and the most unencumbered and most constant spirituality, ceaseless prayer in a nature that is void [….] In making all believers contemplatives, without imposing ascetic rules on their sexuality, Mohammed secured for his religion a great deal of prestige” [….]
“Islam has not wanted to choose between Heaven and Earth. It proposed instead a blending of heaven and earth, sex and mysticism, war and proselytism, conquest and apostolate. In more general terms, Islam proposed a blending of the spiritual and the temporal worlds which neither in Islam nor among the pagans have ever been divided” (Jean Guitton, “Great Heresies and Church Councils,” 1965).
As the sole Western guest in a regional convocation of Muslim leaders, in the Sultanate of Oman in the 1980s, the internationally respected and world traveler and Catholic aristocrat and intellectual, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn from the Austrian Tyrol, was asked why HE thought that the Muslim world had fallen from its Golden Age into such eclipse in recent centuries….
SUMMARY: At considerable risk to himself in such a large gathering (and alternative universe), he answered: “It is because you do not respect your women” (personal communication).
IMO, defending the Taliban is totally beyond the pale.
Defending!?
Mr. Beaulieu above (7:17 p.m.) –
Yes, some of those commenting here seem to be defending the Taliban.
Seriously? You complain about sodomy and sexual abuse being forbidden?
Most people would attack Islamic teaching regarding the legality of marrying minors, but curiously this is not what I have found in your article.
I think you’re misunderstanding the essay. The author presents the content of the “regulations,” but is not defending/condemning them en masse. She presents the facts, then focuses on the points re: women. It’s quite straightforward.
Carl (12:20 p.m.) – If you’re talking to me, I am referring to some of the comments, not the essay.
Understood; thank you!
It’s all about power and control over other people. Authoritarians use religion as an excuse.
“Spread Islam by the sword”, is what Muhammed proclaimed.
He wasn’t in to dialog, reason, persuasion or logic. Rather, he made an explicit command, plain and clear to his 7th century followers, which they picked up and continue to implement around the world to this day.
Having lived and worked in the UAE, I learned that Sharia law is very clear in regard to how moslems deal with moslems, in contrast to how moslems deal with infidels (anyone who is not muslim).
To Islam, a non-Muslim is not even considered human.
Thus, it is logical, reasonable and lawful for a Muslim to lie, cheat and steal to an infidel. It is even lawful within Islam to kill an infidel.
A colleague of mine who worked in Saudi Arabia, told me that when he first arrived there, he, along with other western workers, was taken to a stadium where they were forced to witness a beheading. The obvious intent was to impress upon the newly arrived infidels just how seriously Muslims regard Sharia law.
In NYC, the new mayor, who is neither a socialist nor communist, is a radical islamist.
Muhammed instructed in the Koran that in order to take over a territory, Muslims must first populate that territory. Then, after the Muslims have had time to grow their population, aspects of Sharia Law can be slowly but methodically implemented.
My point in all of this is God Himself protected Ishmael and allowed vast peoples to be descended from him.
God knew beforehand that Islam would cause no end of trouble for the rest of the world. So, we can only conclude that God is in control and that He knows what He is doing.
People of NYC, you are in my prayers.