Opening – One Eye Open
In May 2022 the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice decreed that Afghan women must cover their faces in public, ideally wearing the full-body burqa leaving only the eyes visible (PBS NewsHour). In August 2024 that decree became formal law, part of a morality code that now governs every corner of female life (Reuters).
Some activists allege that Taliban clerics have gone further still, suggesting that women “need only one eye visible.” Though unverified by mainstream outlets, the rumour captures the mood of an ideology that thrives on erasure.
“I have had to walk several kilometres to home or my classes… when I try to explain I don’t have a [male guardian], they won’t listen,” one Afghan woman told Al Jazeera.
This is not an aberration. It is the modern face of an ancient hierarchy: religion as the architecture of male power.
1. Genesis of Submission
Long before monotheism, early cultures often celebrated female deities — goddesses of fertility, wisdom, and creation. Over centuries, those goddesses were replaced by patriarchal pantheons and single male gods.
The Judeo-Christian story of Eve marks a turning point. Created from Adam’s rib, punished for curiosity, she becomes the prototype for disobedience. Through her, woman is tied eternally to guilt and submission.
As theologian Mary Daly wrote:
“If God is male, then male is God.” (AZ Quotes)
Once divinity was gendered, the hierarchy of power became sacred. The male voice became synonymous with truth; the female voice became temptation, silence, or sin.
2. God’s Chain of Command – The Voice of Heaven Is Male
Across all major religions runs a striking pattern: when God speaks, He speaks to men — about men — for men.
Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.
The line of divine communication is a closed circuit of masculinity. Women are not addressed; they are addressed through men.
Religion tells women to obey, not to interpret. To serve, not to speak. Scripture after scripture repeats the same hierarchy: God at the top, man as His echo, woman as the audience.
Beth Allison Barr summarises the problem succinctly:
“Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.”
Hans Küng, one of the few theologians to challenge this imbalance, warned:
“If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences.” (Goodreads)
Those “bad consequences” are visible in every faith structure where revelation and authority are mediated only through men. When the divine is male, the institution becomes male. Religion’s voice, its laws, its rituals — all speak in a man’s tongue.
3. Law in the Name of Heaven
Theology became law. What began as myth solidified into control: purity codes, inheritance rules, guardianship systems.
Women became dependents, not citizens. Property, not persons.
The Taliban’s morality law is a modern manifestation of the same logic — divine command weaponised for domination. The 2024 codification bans women from travel without male accompaniment, enforces full-body covering, and requires men to grow beards (Reuters).
In Christianity, similar ideas survived for centuries through canon law that restricted property ownership and institutional authority. In Judaism and Islam, women’s testimony and inheritance were made unequal by scripture and custom. The pattern repeats with theological precision: the closer the text to power, the smaller the space for women within it.
4. Silencing the Voices
Religious authority depends on who may speak. Across centuries, women were forbidden to teach, preach, or interpret the sacred.
Early Church father Origen wrote:
“Men should not sit and listen to a woman… For it is improper for a woman to speak in an assembly, no matter what she says.” (Marg Mowczko)
In Islam, female scholarship once flourished in the medieval period but was gradually erased as patriarchal jurisprudence consolidated power. In modern Afghanistan, the Taliban have taken the logic to its extreme — silencing not only women’s speech but even their voices in public, labelling them instruments of “vice” (The Guardian).
Carol P. Christ, a pioneering feminist theologian, described this dynamic bluntly:
“The maleness of God makes male authority seem natural and female authority seem deviant.”
When divine communication excludes women, silence becomes sanctified.
5. Modern Continuities – Dress Codes, Voice Bans, Labour Restrictions
The Taliban’s edicts follow a long lineage of control through appearance and mobility. The full-body covering is not merely clothing; it is theology stitched into fabric.
As one activist said, “A woman’s body became a battlefield where men fought their wars of virtue.”
In 2023 and 2024, Afghan women were barred from secondary education, public-sector jobs, and beauty salons – entire industries shuttered overnight. The pattern mirrors patriarchal restrictions across other faiths and eras, from modesty policing in Christianity to caste-bound roles for women in Hinduism.
Barbara G. Walker observed:
“Patriarchal religion denied women the natural rights of every other mammalian female: the right to control the circumstances of her mating, to occupy and govern her own nest.” (Feminist.com)
Religion often calls this morality. History calls it subjugation.
6. Counting the Cost – Psychological, Social, Global
The cost of centuries of sanctified inequality is incalculable.
Girls internalise shame as virtue. Women learn silence as safety. In theocratic regimes, even visibility becomes a moral crime.
The Taliban’s assault on women’s rights has drawn international condemnation, with the International Criminal Court now pursuing arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders over crimes against women and girls (Reuters).
Yet the damage is already spiritual as much as political. To tell women they are unworthy of direct address from the divine is to fracture their very sense of being.
An Afghan academic put it simply:
“I gave hope to so many young girls… and all of that has been thrown in the trash as meaningless.” (Al Jazeera)
Religion, when stripped of equality, leaves half the human race without a mirror.
7. Voices of Resistance – Women Who Refuse the Script
Against this tide stand countless women who have reclaimed their place in thought, activism, and theology.
South African scholar Sa’diyya Shaikh explores the divine feminine in Islam in Islamic Feminist Imaginaries, reinterpreting scripture through empathy and equity (Wikipedia).
Indian feminist Kamla Bhasin reminds us:
“Often religion is used as a shield to justify patriarchy. When you question something, you are told, ‘This is our culture’. When that happens, logic has ended, and belief has taken its place.” (Wikipedia)
And across Afghanistan, women like Wahida Amiri continue to risk their lives running underground libraries for girls denied education (Wikipedia).
From Hypatia of Alexandria to Malala Yousafzai, the story of resistance is older than any holy book. The flame of reason has always been carried, not by prophets, but by those forbidden to speak.
8. Conclusion – Reclaiming the Sacred from the Script
Religion did not begin as a weapon against women, but its custodians made it one. From Eve’s fall to the burqa’s veil, divine revelation has been filtered through the lens of male authority.
To reclaim equality, the voice of God must be stripped of gender, or left behind entirely.
The liberation of women from faith’s hierarchy is not a war on belief — it is the end of ownership.
As secular reason expands, the sacred must be redefined as human dignity itself.
From one visible eye to one full voice, women are no longer asking for permission to see, or to speak.
They are rewriting the script of humanity itself.