One of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s main religious advisers will not overturn a decree issued by clerics in the north reimposing Taliban-style curbs on women, in another sign of returning conservatism as Nato forces leave the country.
Just days after the United States launched a $200 million programme to boost the role of women in Afghanistan, a senior member of the country’s top religious leaders’ panel said he would not intervene over a draconian edict issued by clerics in the Deh Salah region of Baghlan province.
Deh Salah, near Panshir, was a bastion of anti-Taliban sentiment prior to the ousting of the austere Islamist government by the US-backed Northern Alliance in 2001.
But the eight article decree, issued late in June, bars women from leaving home without a male relative, while shutting cosmetic shops on the pretext they were being used for prostitution — an accusation residents and the police reject.
“There is no way these shops could have stayed open. Shops are for business, not adultery,” Enayatullah Baligh, a member of the top religious panel, the Ulema Council, and an adviser to the President, told Reuters late on Friday.
Residents of Deh Salah described the order as a “fatwa”, or religious edict, although only senior clerics in Kabul should issue such a binding religious order.
But underscoring opposition to the edict, a mayor was shot dead by a teenaged shop owner while trying to enforce the order, which also barred women from clinics without a male escort, threatening unspecified “punishments” if they disobeyed.
Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates and more than a decade after the United States-backed toppling of the Taliban, it still ranks as one of the worst nations to be born a girl.