Afghan women filmed singing in protest of ban on their voices

KABUL: An Afghan woman sings in a video showing just a sliver of her face, one of dozens of women taking part in an online protest against a law that bans women from raising their voices in public.

Taliban authorities last week announced the law, which includes rules that women´s faces, bodies and voices should be “covered” outside the home, among 35 articles dictating behaviour and lifestyle.

In response, Afghan women inside and outside the country have posted videos on social media of them singing, along with hashtags such as “My voice is not forbidden” and “No to Taliban”.

In one video, reportedly shot inside Afghanistan, a woman is shown singing while dressed head to toe in black, with a long veil over her face. “You have silenced my voice for the foreseeable future... you have imprisoned me in my home for the crime of being a woman,” she says.

Groups of women activists posted videos raising their fists or tearing photos of the Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who rules by decree from the southern city of Kandahar.

“A woman´s voice is the voice of justice,” an activist group chants in another video. In another, X user Taiba Sulaimani sings as she adjusts her veil in a mirror.

“A woman´s voice is her identity, not something that should be hidden,” she says.

The morality law, known as the “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”, formalises many rules already in place since the Taliban takeover in 2021.