RASC News Agency: Local sources within Kabul University have confirmed that the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has imposed yet another sweeping decree targeting the academic community. The directive, circulated to all public and private universities, prohibits professors and students from wearing shirts or coats with trousers inside classrooms, compelling them instead to adopt attire deemed acceptable by the regime. The order, officially endorsed by the Taliban-controlled Ministry of Higher Education, goes further: all professors and students must maintain beards and hair strictly in line with the Taliban’s arbitrary standards. The ministry has threatened that initial violations will trigger warnings, while repeated infractions will lead to what the group describes as “legal consequences” a euphemism for intimidation, dismissal, and punishment.
This policy is not an isolated incident but rather part of the Taliban’s ongoing campaign to suffocate Afghanistan’s educational landscape since seizing power in August 2021. The group has already enforced gender segregation, mandatory dress codes, and the wholesale expulsion of girls from secondary and higher education, erecting one of the most repressive educational systems in modern history. A recent investigative report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network underscores the devastating reach of the Taliban’s so-called “Virtue Law.” It documents how families, living in constant fear of harassment, raids, and violence by Taliban patrols, are pressuring women and girls to remain inside their homes. As a result, the right of Afghanistani women to participate in society has been gutted, leaving homes as prisons and public spaces as zones of exclusion.
The impact on university life has been immediate and corrosive. Professors and students alike, aware of the risks of defiance, have begun complying with Taliban diktats by adopting shalwar kameez, turbans, and regimented beard styles. What the regime touts as “upholding Islamic values” is widely seen as a deliberate effort to enforce ideological conformity, silence dissent, and erase the diversity of Afghanistani intellectual life. “The classroom is no longer a space of thought, but a cage of fear,” said one Kabul-based academic, who requested anonymity for security reasons. “Every lesson is overshadowed by the possibility of surveillance, punishment, or expulsion. What the Taliban are doing is not education it is indoctrination.”
Observers warn that these policies are accelerating Afghanistan’s slide into cultural and intellectual isolation. By policing clothing, grooming, and behavior with fanatical rigidity, the Taliban are extinguishing academic curiosity and replacing it with coercive obedience. This collapse of higher education threatens to cripple an entire generation of Afghanistani youth, depriving the country of the very human capital it needs to survive its economic and humanitarian crises. For many, the Taliban’s obsession with regulating appearance is symptomatic of their broader inability to govern. Instead of addressing hunger, poverty, or unemployment, the group invests its energy in micro-managing beards and trousers. Analysts argue that such policies reflect the Taliban’s fragility: a regime incapable of governing through service or vision, relying instead on repression, intimidation, and cultural regression.
By imposing such measures, the Taliban claim to defend virtue, yet their rule has produced the opposite: a society where knowledge is strangled, women are silenced, and the future of a nation is sacrificed at the altar of authoritarian dogma.
