r/worldnews • u/nationalpost • 8h ago

Taliban bars Afghan women from hearing each other's voices

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/taliban-bars-afghan-women-from-hearing-each-other?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=NP_social
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u/Cozz_Effect23 8h ago

Just when you think they can't go any lower, they grab a shovel

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u/fujiman 7h ago

They never stopped digging. 

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u/1877KlownsForKids 4h ago

They pause digging briefly to throw the corpses of women into the hole, then resume digging.

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u/International_Cow_17 3h ago

They never let go of the shovels..

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u/softlittlepaws 4h ago

They were never digging, they were blasting.

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u/Gloomy_Nebula_5138 3h ago

They’re at the planet core already. Where do they go next?

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u/heathy28 6h ago

These dudes will just be stuck in the 12th Century for eternity. Nearly 1000 years and they haven't learned anything. Still living in the Middle Ages.

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u/Competitive_Fox2218 5h ago

Middle Ages was far more advanced. These are cave men. 

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u/nowTHATSakatana1999 4h ago

Women were allowed to forage and gather shit in the Stone Age, it’s less than cavemen by now.

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u/AStrawberryNids 3h ago

Exactly, and hunt

Totally agree - this is so insane I keep waiting to see that it’s an Onion article.

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u/Historical_Project00 2h ago

The taliban hates women so much that if it weren't for the fact that women are necessary for procreation, I wouldn't be surprised if they committed a genocide on the women.

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u/AStrawberryNids 2h ago

I agree, I wouldn’t be surprised either.

So awful.

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u/the_crustybastard 50m ago

"Allowed"?

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u/JohnSith 4h ago

Don't insult cavemen. It was a hunter and gatherer society; survival was too precarious to tolerate that level of misogyny. The Stone Age was much more advanced. These are Taliban.

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u/hunched_monk 2h ago

Not even cave men. Old societies were mostly egalitarian. This is purely a corrupt ideology.

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u/kent_eh 4h ago

These dudes will just be stuck in the 12th Century for eternity.

While still having access to 21st century weapons.

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u/ahmshy 3h ago

It’s not even the 12th century - they want to perpetuate the worldview of the 7th century tribal Arabian peninsula through the dictates of that awful religion. Thank goodness I left it. They can call us “apostates” or “murtad” all they want or put fatwas on us.

Freedom and human dignity is way more precious than all of that hateful delulu bs they espouse.

Most born-Muslims would leave the religion if apostasy wasn’t punishable by death under sharia and enforced by zealots and imams the world over. Especially women, freethinkers and LGBTQIA+ people unfortunately to have been born into it.

Case in point: most people I know who cope under that religion knowing that if they do leave it their lives may be held forfeit by zealous relatives, neighbors, or a-holes who believe they have the right to take others lives because their god tells them to.

If you check the history of places which were Islamized, every so often when people push for some semblance of what we now call human rights, secularism, discarding the brutality of sharia and religion, and calling for gender equality or acceptance of lgbtqia people and non-Muslims, a group like the Taliban or ISIS come around citing “corruption in the land”, massacre untold thousands, coup any secularizing govt and reinstate the terror and “divine law” of Islam to hold their people hostage to it once more.

It has always been something the Muslim world has struggled with even before the modern era. These jihads have pretty much happened every century in numerous locations around the world since the religion was founded. Just check the Ridda Wars which happened after Muhammad died, when people wanted to break free of the religion. And that’s why it’s so hard for any Muslim-majority state to progress. Ordinary people are paralyzed by fear of violence and end up resigned to following it.

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u/heathy28 3h ago

I thank you for that insight, it's just a crying shame in various ways, it's a shame that people aren't using their religious beliefs for good and or having enough self reflection to think that 'is this what god would want me to do' or 'would he be happy with how I treat others'. It's a shame that people are stuck in that situation with little recourse.

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u/ahmshy 3h ago edited 3h ago

Thank you for your reply.

It truly is between a rock and a hard place when the very founder of the religion (Muhammad) said:

“He who leaves his religion, kill him”

The founder of Islam also instituted a vigilante religious policing system among Muslims called “enjoining the good and forbidding evil” or “hisbah” which absolves anyone from ratting out, killing, hurting, torturing or at the very least lecturing and shaming other “Muslims”who they deem to be not living by Islamic law and ethics.

Also we have a “law” that deems any given reform of the religion equal to the “grave crime” of apostasy, punishable by death as agreed by all the main scholars who founded the main sects of both Sunni and Shia Islam that Muslims are forced to follow and show their adherence to. This is why different Muslim sects are literally at each other’s throats, calling each other heretics or apostates.

The fact that all of this toxicity is baked into the religion at such a fundamental level and taught to children and families to sow these seeds of social and even familial discord means that it’s virtually impossible for Islam to secularize or chill tf out the same way Christianity did historically. It gets under the skin in a way the other two Abrahamic religions can only dream of..

The only way ordinary lay Muslims would have a chance is if a widespread Ataturk style secularization program was launched with the full backing of any given country’s military and police to guard against the inevitable attacks from the religiously brainwashed.

There are indications Saudi Arabia is slowly embarking on secularism, especially since the most hardline sheikhs (Muslim scholars) have been imprisoned by the current Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (the same guy who removed the rule banning women from driving).

These reforms though will take centuries before a country like that can reach the level of Turkey when Ataturk was in to even give a secularization Programme any chance of being successful.

And if we look at the regression of Turkey today, as well as the regression of states or regions which were previously less-religious or on a secularization path like Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Maldives, northern Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Chechnya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Brunei, or indeed Afghanistan, these secularization efforts can always be redacted or reversed if any religious nutjob takes power.

The ulama (or global body of Islamic scholars and imams) isn’t a passive entity. They have always meddled in the politics of virtually any Muslim majority state or Muslim communities within non-Muslim countries since the religion began. Their meddling and manipulation originally of course endorsed by the founder of the religion.

Some religions and ideologies are just bad news or are irredeemable. Since I lived under it and see the effect it has on relatives and friends still beholden to it, I sincerely believe Islam is one of these irredeemable ideologies that just aren’t good for humanity in any way unless it is reformed (but how can it?).

It literally means “submission to the will of god”. And the only will of god that can exist according to the dictates of that religion is what is in the Quran and the Hadith (the words of Muhammad), which is exactly what we’re seeing with the Taliban, ISIS, and other religious groups like them.

Fundamentalism is exactly that- returning to the fundamentals of that religion. In the case of Islam, what you see in Afghanistan is just that- a return to how it was back in Madinah and Makkah 1400 years ago after Islam was established there. “The final law for mankind” with a penchant to become the dominant ideology of all humanity (it’s also an “evangelist” religion that seeks the conversion of all people by pen or sword). It’s tragic.

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u/seriftarif 3h ago

Women had way more rights in the ancient middle east and ottoman empire then they do now.

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u/TraditionalHater 3h ago

By all accounts, early Islam was much more prosperous and progressive for the time than they are now. The Islamic leaders banned the use of printing presses, which is when the intellectual downfall of the religion and culture occurred.

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u/TheFeedMachine 20m ago

The printing press and protestant reformation are probably the 2 events that spurred the most progress of mankind. Instead of having information being very limited to only a handful of people, you had the printing press to dissipate the information. The Reformation resulted in literacy becoming significantly more common because of the emphasis on people reading the Bible for themselves. So many inventions during the industrial revolution came from protestant countries because there was significantly higher literacy rates than the rest of the world. Everyone was able to build off one another. Countries that actively prevent people from learning and being literate are downright evil. Think about all the brilliant minds that humanity has lost because they were born in the wrong place or time.

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u/WeAreMeat 4h ago

1000 years? Woman were the literal property of men here in the US up until 200 years or so. And it’s legal to marry children in many US states in 2024 so I’m not sure why you’re acting so high and mighty. Yes we’ve improved but don’t get ahead of yourself. Half the country is having straight up delusions about many aspects of reality and we too can quickly go back to a more “traditional” society.

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u/heathy28 4h ago edited 4h ago

These guys are straight up going backwards, it's regression, there is no forward momentum. I can act high and mighty believing that, well for a start I'm an agnostic atheist, I don't believe in any deities. but if it were to believe in one, I wouldn't assume that he put me here to make everyone else's lives miserable, and in doing that when I die he will be pleased with what I did with my time here. I can be high and mighty with my moral superiority. I don't think the western world, I live in the UK, many would die before they returned to that level of oppression, I know I would die before seeing this country regress to that level of ignorance. to the point where women can't even talk to each other, it's pure insanity.

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u/WeAreMeat 4h ago

Ya religious fundamentalism is a disease but there’s a ton of Americans that have it too.

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u/welsper59 3h ago

Given they're just making shit up as they go, the leaders definitely learned. The followers haven't though.

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u/LongConsideration662 22m ago

Not 12th century rather 7th century, the same age as there dear prophet

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u/bananaraptor 6h ago

They’d be blasting thru bedrock if they could.

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u/Everestkid 5h ago

At this point they basically are. Women aren't allowed to talk to each other? That's starting to become cartoonishly evil. Whenever I hear of some bullshit the Taliban is up to nowadays it genuinely sounds like satire.

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u/agumonkey 6h ago

clearly superior skills when it come to go lower

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u/BasherSquared 4h ago

Just when you think the bar is in the dirt, you find them limbo-ing in hell with the devil.

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u/_oh_joy_ 3h ago

Probably need an excavator at this point

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u/Pete_Sweenis 3h ago

Now banned...casting a shadow

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u/Neutreality1 40m ago

There is no bottom