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 that leaves only the eyes visible (PBS NewsHour). In August 2024 that decree hardened into formal law, one clause of a sweeping morality code that now governs every corner of female life (Reuters). Some activists allege that certain clerics have gone further still, muttering that a woman need leave only one eye visible to the world. Mainstream outlets have not verified the claim. Still, the rumour captures the mood of the regime. This is an ideology that openly 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 some local aberration that history will quietly forget. It is the modern face of a very old hierarchy, religion functioning as the architecture of male power, and the persecution of women in religion history did not begin in Kabul. It only found a frank administrator in the Taliban. They were willing to write the unspoken rules down. Then they enforced them street by street.
The Genesis of Submission
Long before monotheism took hold, a great many early cultures celebrated female deities, goddesses of fertility, of wisdom, and of creation itself. Over the centuries those goddesses were steadily displaced by patriarchal pantheons and then by single male gods who tolerated no rivals. The Judeo-Christian story of Eve marks the decisive turning point in this long demotion. Created from Adam’s rib, she is then punished for the sin of curiosity. She becomes the lasting prototype of disobedience. Through her, woman is tied for ever to guilt, shame, and submission. The theologian Mary Daly compressed the whole consequence into a single famous line:
“If God is male, then male is God.” (AZ Quotes)
Once divinity itself was gendered, the entire hierarchy of power became sacred rather than merely customary. The male voice grew synonymous with truth and authority. The female voice was recast as temptation, as silence, or as sin. None of this was presented as politics. It was presented as the settled will of heaven.
God’s Chain of Command: The Voice of Heaven Is Male
Across all the major religions runs one striking and rarely questioned pattern. When God speaks, he speaks to men, about men, and for men. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. The line of divine communication forms a closed circuit of masculinity. Women are structurally excluded from it. Women are not addressed directly in these accounts. They are addressed only through men, second-hand, as the audience to a conversation they are never invited to join.
Religion, arranged this way, tells women to obey rather than to interpret, to serve rather than to speak. Scripture after scripture repeats the identical hierarchy, with God at the summit, man as his appointed echo, and woman seated quietly below as the listener. The historian Beth Allison Barr summarises the root of the problem with admirable economy:
“Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world.”
The theologian Hans Kung, one of the few inside the Church willing to challenge this imbalance directly, warned that a tradition which cannot see divinity as including and yet transcending both male and female characteristics will reap bad consequences from the failure (Goodreads). Those consequences are plainly visible in every faith structure where revelation and authority are mediated only through men. When the divine is imagined as male, the institution built to serve it becomes male as well, and its voice, its laws, and its rituals all end up speaking in a single man’s tongue.
Law in the Name of Heaven
Theology rarely stops at belief, because sooner or later theology becomes law. What began as myth gradually solidified into machinery for control, expressed through purity codes, inheritance rules, and elaborate systems of male guardianship. Under such systems women became dependents rather than citizens, treated in practice as property rather than as persons in their own right. The Taliban’s morality law is simply a modern and unusually candid manifestation of that same ancient logic, divine command openly weaponised for domination. The 2024 codification bars women from travelling without a male escort, enforces head-to-toe covering, and even requires men to grow beards (Reuters).
The pattern is hardly confined to one faith. In Christianity comparable ideas survived for many centuries through a canon law that restricted women’s property ownership and barred them from institutional authority. In both Judaism and Islam, women’s legal testimony and their share of inheritance were made unequal by a mixture of scripture and inherited custom. The principle repeats with a kind of theological precision. It holds across the traditions. It can be stated almost as a rule. The closer a text sits to power, the smaller the space it leaves for women within it.
Silencing the Voices
Religious authority always depends, in the end, on the question of who is permitted to speak. Across the centuries women were forbidden to teach, to preach, or to interpret anything held sacred, and the prohibition was justified in the most exalted language. The early Church father Origen stated the position with a bluntness that still startles, insisting that men should not so much as sit and listen to a woman, since it was improper for a woman to speak in any assembly no matter what she might have to say (Marg Mowczko).
In Islam, female scholarship genuinely flourished during parts of the medieval period before being gradually erased as a more rigid patriarchal jurisprudence consolidated its grip. In modern Afghanistan the Taliban have pushed the same logic to its grim extreme, silencing not merely women’s public speech but their voices in public altogether, formally labelling them instruments of vice (The Guardian). The feminist theologian Carol P. Christ described the underlying mechanism with great clarity, observing that the maleness of God is precisely what makes male authority appear natural and female authority appear deviant. When divine communication is built to exclude women, their enforced silence stops being an accident and becomes something sanctified.
Modern Continuities: Dress Codes, Voice Bans, Labour Restrictions
The Taliban’s edicts follow a very long lineage of control exercised through appearance and mobility. The full-body covering is never merely clothing. It is theology stitched directly into fabric. It is then worn out into the street. As one activist put it, a woman’s body had been turned into a battlefield on which men chose to fight their endless wars of virtue. In 2023 and 2024, Afghan women were barred from secondary education, from public-sector employment, and from beauty salons, with entire industries shuttered overnight at the stroke of a decree. The shape of it mirrors patriarchal restrictions found across other faiths and other eras, from modesty policing in parts of Christianity to caste-bound roles assigned to women within Hinduism.
The feminist writer Barbara G. Walker traced the deeper deprivation underneath the rules:
“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)
Counting the Cost: Psychological, Social, and Global
The cost of centuries of sanctified inequality is, in any honest reckoning, incalculable. Girls are taught to internalise shame and to mistake it for virtue. Women learn, often very young, that silence is safest. It becomes the currency they trade in. In the most rigid theocratic regimes even simple visibility can be reclassified as a moral crime, so that a woman walking uncovered becomes, in the eyes of the state, an offender. The Taliban’s assault on women’s rights has drawn sustained international condemnation, and the International Criminal Court is now pursuing arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders over crimes committed against women and girls (Reuters).
Yet the damage runs deeper than politics and is in part spiritual. To tell women across a lifetime that they are unworthy of direct address from the divine is to fracture their very sense of being, to inform them that the universe itself has nothing to say to them in person. An Afghan academic captured the private devastation behind the public statistics, saying that she had given hope to so many young girls only to watch all of that hope thrown into the trash as if it had been meaningless (Al Jazeera). Religion, once stripped of equality, leaves fully half of the human race without a mirror in which to find itself.
Voices of Resistance: Women Who Refuse the Script
Against this long tide stand countless women who have reclaimed their place in thought, in activism, and in theology itself. The South African scholar Sa’diyya Shaikh explores the divine feminine within Islam in Islamic Feminist Imaginaries, reinterpreting scripture through the twin lenses of empathy and equity (Wikipedia). The Indian feminist Kamla Bhasin named the rhetorical trap that so often shuts the conversation down:
“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)
Across Afghanistan today, women such as Wahida Amiri continue to risk their lives running underground libraries for the very girls now denied any formal education (Wikipedia). From Hypatia of Alexandria, murdered by a mob for the crime of teaching, to Malala Yousafzai, shot for the crime of attending school, the story of resistance turns out to be older than any holy book that opposes it. The flame of reason has always been carried forward, not by the prophets who claimed a monopoly on heaven, but by those forbidden to speak at all.
Reclaiming the Sacred From the Script
Religion did not begin its life as a weapon aimed at women, but its custodians made it into one and then called the result holy. From the fall of Eve to the veil of the burqa, divine revelation has been filtered, edited, and enforced through the narrow lens of male authority. To reclaim genuine equality, the voice of God must either be stripped entirely of gender or else left behind altogether as the relic of a less honest age. The liberation of women from faith’s inherited hierarchy is not, whatever its enemies claim, a war upon belief. It is simply the end of ownership. A very long account is finally being closed.
Secular reason continues to expand its reach. The idea of the sacred can be redefined around something defensible. That something is human dignity itself, not the authority of whoever happens to hold the pulpit. From a single permitted eye to a full and unapologetic voice, women across the world are no longer asking anyone’s permission to see or to speak. They are quietly, and then loudly, rewriting the script of humanity itself.