RASC News Agency: In one of the most ideologically regressive and theologically dogmatic statements made by a Taliban official since the group’s return to power, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, publicly denounced the concept of individual freedom, claiming it to be fundamentally at odds with Islam. Speaking on May 25 during a highly orchestrated gathering of conservative clerics in Kabul, Hanafi declared that under Taliban interpretation of Sharia law, “human beings are the slaves of God and do not possess the right to self-determination.” This declaration starkly exposes the Taliban’s core vision for Afghanistan: a society stripped of personal agency, intellectual autonomy, and civil liberties.
“Modern institutions are brainwashing our youth especially girls into believing they can chart their own path in life, independent of religious law or male guardianship. This dangerous mindset must be eliminated,” Hanafi warned.
His remarks, delivered with ideological fervor, were an overt attack on modern education, personal choice, and social freedom particularly as they relate to women. He openly criticized universities and educational institutions for fostering what he termed “moral deviation,” and called into question the legitimacy of teaching girls to think independently. The Taliban official went further, launching a bizarre cultural assault on men’s fashion and appearance, denouncing suits, ties, trousers, and even the act of shaving as signs of Western contamination. In his words, these were “manifestations of estrangement from Islam” that should be resisted through “pen, preaching, and persuasion.” “This is no longer a war of guns; it is a war of minds. A war of narratives. A war of pens,” he said, framing the Taliban’s current campaign as a battle against intellectual and cultural freedom rather than a conventional military struggle.
Hanafi, widely recognized as one of the most uncompromising and dogmatic figures in the Taliban leadership, also used his platform to double down on the regime’s medieval gender policies. He rejected all criticisms of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and claimed that any form of leniency toward individuals who do not strictly follow the Taliban’s version of Islamic law is tantamount to treason against religion. “Religious scholars and Taliban members will be held accountable by God if they tolerate defiance,” he warned, in a statement laden with authoritarian menace. Most disturbingly, Hanafi portrayed the Taliban’s repressive rule as an embodiment of “moderate and merciful Islam” a gross distortion that attempts to mask the regime’s widespread human rights abuses under the guise of religious legitimacy.
This speech marks the first time a senior Taliban official has so explicitly framed modern education and gender equality as existential threats to the regime’s ideological survival. Since retaking control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban have dismantled women’s rights with systematic cruelty banning girls from schools and universities, expelling women from workplaces, erasing them from public life, and criminalizing their presence in the media. Under the command of Hanafi’s ministry, women have been rendered voiceless and invisible. Laws now prohibit them from traveling without a male escort, and female broadcasters have been censored or removed entirely from the airwaves. Even the sound of women’s voices has been deemed “corrupting,” and thus outlawed in many provinces.
Far from being a religious revival, what Hanafi and the Taliban are engineering is a suffocating theocratic dictatorship a regime rooted in fear, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism. Their rhetoric reveals not spiritual guidance but an obsessive need to control every aspect of private life. In the Taliban’s warped worldview, thought is a threat, freedom is a sin, and women’s existence is a problem to be managed. What is unfolding in Afghanistan today is not a clash of civilizations it is a clash between a dying ideology and the irrepressible will of a people who refuse to be shackled in the name of religion. Hanafi’s sermon, saturated in medieval absolutism, may reflect the Taliban’s current grip on power but it also betrays their growing fear: that even under a regime of total control, the human spirit still dares to resist.
