“Taliban restrictions are based on personal interpretations not Sharia ” Stanikzai

In a rare display of criticizing a Taliban leadership decision, Taliban’s Acting Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai called for an end to prohibition on girls going to school in Afghanistan.

Addressing the graduation ceremony at a seminary in Khost, Stanikzai said that the rationale behind the Afghan Taliban’s decision to deny education to women was based on personal interpretations and had no basis in Sharia. He asked the upper leadership of the Taliban to ‘open the doors’ of education to everyone.

“In the time of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the doors of knowledge were open to both men and women,” he said.

He went on to say that females made up twenty million out of Afghanistan’s forty million total population, and the government’s order was committing an ‘injustice’ against them.

Stanikzai, a key Taliban leader who was the leader of the team that negotiated with the US in Doha before the withdrawal of the US, is perhaps the highest official to date to question the policy which has led to severe criticism against the Afghanistan government globally.

Although the Taliban had initially promised to allow education for women, they reversed the policy in 2022, a year after they came to power.

Female students have been banned from attending school after Grade 6 and for three years and women have been unable to attend universities since the end of 2022.

Earlier this month, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai accused the Afghan government of enacting a ‘gender apartheid’ in the country and accused the Taliban of ‘weaponising faith’ to justify the lack of education for women while speaking at a conference on women’s education in Pakistan .

During her speech, Malala called on Muslim countries not to legitimize the unequal treatment of women in Afghanistan.