ISLAMABAD — ISLAMABAD (AP) — The Taliban introduced Tuesday that every one magnificence salons in Afghanistan should now shut as a one-month deadline ended, regardless of uncommon public opposition to the edict.
Sadiq Akif Mahjer, spokesman for the Taliban-run Advantage and Vice Ministry, didn’t say whether or not it will use drive in opposition to salons that don’t comply.
The ruling is the most recent curb on the rights and freedoms of Afghan ladies and ladies following edicts barring them from training, public areas and most types of employment.
The Taliban mentioned it determined to ban magnificence salons as a result of they provided companies forbidden by Islam and precipitated financial hardship for the households of grooms throughout marriage ceremony festivities.
Its earlier announcement of a one-month deadline for salons to wind down their companies led to a uncommon public protest wherein dozens of beauticians and make-up artists gathered in Kabul, the capital. Safety forces used hearth hoses and tasers and shot their weapons into the air to interrupt up the protest.
The ban additionally drew concern from worldwide teams frightened about its affect on feminine entrepreneurs.
The United Nations mentioned it was engaged with Afghanistan authorities to get the prohibition reversed.
U.N. Secretary-Basic Antonio Guterres “helps the efforts by the U.N. Help Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which has known as on the de facto authorities to halt the edict closing magnificence salons.
“UNAMA has mentioned that this restriction on ladies’s rights will affect negatively on the financial system and contradicts help for ladies’s entrepreneurship, and we’re searching for a reversal of the bans,” U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq mentioned Monday.
The Taliban listed a collection of companies provided by magnificence salons that it mentioned violated Islam. They included eyebrow shaping, the usage of different folks’s hair to reinforce a girl’s pure hair and the appliance of make-up, which it mentioned interferes with the ablutions required earlier than providing prayers.
Grooms’ households have been required by customized to pay for pre-wedding salon visits by brides and their shut feminine relations.
“This isn’t about getting your hair and nails completed. That is about 60,000 ladies dropping their jobs. That is about ladies dropping one of many solely locations they might go for group and help after the Taliban systematically destroyed the entire system put in place to reply to home violence,” mentioned Heather Barr, affiliate ladies’s rights director for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.
Regardless of preliminary guarantees of a extra reasonable rule than throughout their earlier time in energy within the Nineties, the Taliban have imposed harsh measures since seizing management of Afghanistan in August 2021 as U.S. and NATO forces pulled out.
They’ve barred ladies from public areas reminiscent of parks and gymnasiums and cracked down on media freedoms. The measures have triggered fierce worldwide criticism, growing the nation’s isolation at a time when its financial system has collapsed, and worsening a humanitarian disaster.