RASC News Agency: Prominent former jihadist leader Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf has issued a scathing condemnation of the Taliban’s continued crackdown on women, denouncing the recent arrests of female civilians by the so-called “morality police” as a flagrant violation of Islamic teachings and a disgrace to human dignity. In a strongly worded post shared on Friday, July 18, on his official X (formerly Twitter) account, Sayyaf described the Taliban’s detention of women by unrelated male officers as not only irreligious but utterly devoid of any moral or ethical justification. “Detaining women by non-mahram men, transferring them to prisons guarded by male officials this is not just contrary to the Sharia,” Sayyaf wrote, “but a trampling of Islamic honor, Afghanistani decency, and fundamental human compassion.”
Sayyaf’s remarks come in response to reports that Taliban forces once again raided public areas of Kabul’s Shahr-e-Naw district, violently detaining scores of women without legal justification or due process. Witnesses and local sources confirm that women were forcibly removed from the streets, often under the pretense of enforcing vague and arbitrary “modesty” standards imposed by the Taliban’s so-called Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Legal scholars and religious authorities across Afghanistan have increasingly voiced alarm at such actions, arguing that they are bereft of any credible basis in Islamic jurisprudence. Rather, critics argue, these incidents reveal the Taliban’s weaponization of religion to enforce patriarchal domination and suppress women’s presence in public life. Sayyaf did not mince words, warning the Taliban: “Fear God.” This statement was not a pious formality, but a direct and uncompromising warning to those who, in his words, are “destroying religion in the name of religion, and transforming Sharia into an instrument of social and moral terror.”
Sayyaf also pointedly described the Taliban’s misogynistic policies as a grave betrayal of Islam itself. “To commit such injustices against women in the name of Islam,” he said, “is among the greatest acts of treachery against the faith and its sacred law.” His message underscored a growing consensus among Afghanistani religious and civil leaders that the Taliban’s repressive regime is not only illegitimate but actively corrosive to the spiritual and moral fabric of the nation. Multiple local sources have verified that the recent wave of arrests in Kabul is part of a wider campaign of fear and suppression by a regime that has no legal foundation, no electoral legitimacy, and no moral authority. The Taliban, Sayyaf and others argue, are neither protectors of religion nor guardians of Sharia. They are, rather, its abusers oppressors of women, violators of public dignity, and enemies of the basic principles of justice.
In the face of such systemic repression, voices like Sayyaf’s remain critical in reclaiming the narrative of Islam from those who distort it for authoritarian ends. His denunciation reflects a growing call within Afghanistan’s religious community to resist the Taliban’s theocratic authoritarianism and to reassert a vision of Islam grounded in justice, compassion, and respect for human dignity values that the current regime continues to violate with impunity.
