This Is Sharia Law as Enforced in Afghanistan Today
In a Friday sermon delivered on August 1, 2025, at Kabul’s Abdul Rahman Grand Mosque, senior Taliban cleric Mahmood Zakeri, the mosque’s official preacher and advisor to the Taliban’s Ministry of Refugees, laid out the rules plainly for hundreds of male worshippers.
Fuller context from the same sermon (translated from the original Dari/Pashto by multiple monitoring services):
“This very eye, which shari’a has permitted you, when you go outside, at the time of going out, you are allowed to have that very eye open; the rest of your face must be covered with jilbab [loose body covering] and hijab. If that very eye of yours is open, that eye must be on the path. You are not permitted [to look at] anything else; you do not have permission. This is narrated in Tirmidhi and Abu Dawood [hadith collections].”
Zakeri went further in the same speech:
- Opposing the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Taliban’s morality police) is the same as opposing Allah and His Messenger.
- Even when speaking to a doctor, a mufti, a judge, or any man, a woman must have a physical barrier or curtain between them: no face-to-face contact, even if she is fully covered.
- A woman who leaves home without a male guardian (mahram) is cursed by God, the angels, and all beings in the heavens and earth (citing hadith).
The sermon was not some rogue rant.
The Taliban’s Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs, working with security agencies, dictates sermon topics nationwide. Imams are required to promote the official “Law on the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”
This law (updated and enforced under Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada) already mandates:
- Women may not leave home without a male relative.
- Face and voice are “awrah” (forbidden to be seen or heard unnecessarily).
- Full burqa with only eyes visible — now tightened to one eye only, focused straight ahead on the path.
- No high school or university for girls.
- No women are working in most public roles.
- Beauty parlors closed.
- Windows in homes must be covered so women cannot be seen from outside.
These are not fringe opinions. This is the official law of Afghanistan, preached in the country’s largest mosque in the capital, by a cleric on the government payroll.
The full sermon video was released by Afghanistan International on August 2, 2025 (the one-eye section begins at approximately 29 minutes).
To be clear:
This is not “extremism.”
This is Islam as it is practiced and enforced by law in Afghanistan in 2026. The Taliban controls the country. They write the law. They direct the sermons. They arrest women who violate it. And the clerics explain exactly why — straight from the hadiths and Shariah.
Every Afghan woman living under Taliban rule today knows the rules Zakeri spelled out. This is the daily reality in Kabul, Herat, Kandahar, and everywhere the Islamic Emirate holds power.
In the video below, some other draconian laws of the Taliban limiting the most basic of liberties of women are detailed. Again, this is not any form of Islamic extremism, any more than concentration camps are Nazi extremism. This is the central dogma of Islam manifesting itself in law in Afghanistan, and therefore, cannot be extreme by definition.
To be extreme, it must be fringe and at the very edge of a popular belief system, believed or practiced by a tiny minority of a population.
Given the nature of sharia across much or most of the Islamic world, this is Islam as it actually is. In Afghanistan, just a little ahead of the curve as it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Brunei, Yemen, Somalia, Mauritania, which still sells people into slavery as encouraged in the Koran, and parts of Pakistan.
The question for the rest of the world isn’t whether this is “extreme.” The question is whether we are willing to accept that this is exactly what Sharia looks like when fully implemented. Because in Afghanistan, it already is.
