Taliban declares religious education obligatory for Afghanis

Kabul: Religious education is obligatory for men and women in Afghanistan, Mohammad Hashim Shaheed Wror, General Director of the Invitation and Guidance Directorate (an independent body that determines religious policies in the Taliban regime), said, ToloNews reported on Wednesday.

Speaking at a gathering in Kabul, Wror said, ‘The education that we say is obligatory at every stage for both men and women is religious education, not other education’. ‘The history of (the necktie) is obvious in Islam. What is a tie? It is the cross. The cross looks like this. It is ordered in Shariah that you should break it and eliminate it,” he said. “The cross is a symbol of pagans. The cross is the symbol of Jesus’ martyrdom. They say Jesus was hung like this’, he added.

However, speaking at the same gathering, Taliban-appointed Minister of Higher Education, Mohammad Tahir Ahmadi, said that learning modern education is also obligatory and that the Afghans need to learn it, as per ToloNews. Since August 2021, women and girls have been banned from attending secondary education in the country. While the de facto authorities banned women from attending universities since last December. The previous year, on September 18, the high schools in Afghanistan opened their gates to boys whereas girls were ordered to stay at home by the Taliban.

Several human rights and education activists had urged world leaders in an open letter recently to mount diplomatic pressure on the Taliban to reopen secondary schools for girls in the war-torn country as the Taliban’s brutal regime in Afghanistan will soon complete a year in August. World leaders, regional allies, and international organizations were urged in the letter to take serious actions to fulfil their commitments in order to promote and protect Afghan girls’ rights, especially the right to education which was snatched away from them after the Taliban-led Afghan government banned the education for girls in classes 6 and above. Taliban has imposed draconian restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association, assembly and movement for women and girls.