RASC News Agency: The Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has once again issued a formal decree mandating stringent adherence to its narrowly defined Islamic dress code within all university campuses across Afghanistan. The directive sternly warns that any defiance of these rules will lead to severe disciplinary actions, including the immediate expulsion of professors and students alike. According to this official communique disseminated to every public and private university nationwide, faculty members and students are now compelled to present themselves in rigid conformity: sporting beards, donning traditional headwear such as turbans or caps, and wearing customary attire comprising the Afghanistani shalwar kameez. The ministry explicitly prohibits the use of non-traditional garments like kurtas and trousers, branding them as unacceptable.
Furthermore, the ministry has announced the initiation of periodic inspections and monitoring regimes to enforce these draconian standards. Any individual found in breach of these dress codes will be subjected to punitive measures under Taliban legal frameworks, which lack transparency and due process. Sources within academic circles have voiced grave concerns regarding the corrosive effects of these measures on the morale, intellectual freedom, and academic engagement of both educators and students. They warn that these ideological impositions threaten to erode the very foundation of Afghanistan’s fragile higher education sector, already battered by years of conflict and neglect.
This latest edict aligns with the Taliban’s broader agenda of imposing a regressive moral and social order. Since their return to power in August 2021, the regime has aggressively enforced a stringent dress code policy across all government institutions and public spaces. Recent mandates have even extended to children and adolescents, compelling them to wear traditional garments like the lungi, further entrenching the regime’s fixation on controlling personal appearance. Officials from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue justify these authoritarian measures as necessary implementations of their interpretation of “Islamic Sharia” and related codes governing public morality. Yet, international human rights organizations and Afghanistani civil society groups unequivocally denounce these decrees as gross violations of basic human rights and personal freedoms.
The enforcement of compulsory beards and traditional attire, coupled with a ban on Western clothing styles, constitutes part of the Taliban’s wider strategy to reverse decades of social progress and impose a 1990s-style sociocultural rigidity. This is compounded by their continuing ban on secondary and higher education for girls, which has drawn widespread condemnation. Experts warn that these policies jeopardize academic autonomy, stifle critical thinking, and demoralize both faculty and students. The cumulative effect threatens to precipitate an unprecedented intellectual crisis, isolating Afghanistan from global educational standards and condemning an entire generation to intellectual stagnation. The Taliban’s moral policing, wielded through a powerful ministry that acts as a religious police force, seeks not only to dictate dress codes but to exert total control over speech, behavior, and even interpersonal interactions. This systematic repression stifles any semblance of academic freedom, pluralism, and progressive thought.
In sum, these regressive policies exemplify the Taliban’s relentless drive to suffocate Afghanistani society under a suffocating blanket of ideological conformity, fear, and exclusion especially targeting the country’s youth and academic community, who represent Afghanistan’s potential for future growth and renewal.
