“Women Have No Brains”: Taliban Afghanistan Is Afraid of Women’s Freedom

Some images can reveal the nature of a political system more powerfully than a hundred international reports. An eighteen-year-old Afghan woman, identified by the BBC under the pseudonym Tuba to protect her identity, enters the office of Abdullah Sarhadi, the Taliban governor of Jawzjan province. Her body and face are completely covered, her eyes concealed behind dark glasses. Before armed men, officials and elders, she asks for something that, in any legal order founded upon human dignity, should be an elementary right: the possibility of ending a marriage in which, according to her account, she has suffered months of violence and beatings.

She does not beg. She argues. She says she has made her decision.

When Sarhadi attempts to persuade her to remain with her husband, warning her of the social dishonour associated with divorce and of the difficulty she might face in finding another man willing to marry her, she replies that her honour and dignity have already been destroyed. It is a statement that should silence a room. Instead, shortly afterwards, the governor describes women as being "without brains" and lacking intellect. The men around him laugh.

As a woman and a feminist, I find that laughter even more disturbing than the statement itself. A sentence may reveal the obscene prejudice of one individual; collective laughter reveals a system. It depicts an environment in which the degradation of women provokes not outrage but approval, where a public authority can ridicule half of the population in front of his officials without fearing consequences, and where even an allegation of domestic violence is approached primarily as a problem of preserving the marriage.

If feminism still needed justification, those few minutes filmed in Sheberghan would be enough.

Feminism is not hatred of men. It is not a war between the sexes, nor is it an indulgence invented by affluent Western societies. At its most fundamental level, feminism is the rejection of the proposition that being born female should diminish a person's freedom, legal capacity, credibility or right to determine the course of her own life.

Yet this case cannot be reduced to moral outrage. It is also a matter of law.

Afghanistan is a State Party to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the CEDAW. A change of government and the establishment of de facto authorities do not erase Afghanistan's international legal personality or automatically extinguish its treaty obligations. Article 2 of the Convention requires States to eliminate discrimination against women through legislation, institutions and practices. Article 5 requires action against social and cultural patterns founded upon the idea of the inferiority or superiority of either sex. Article 15 establishes equality before the law. Most importantly in this case, Article 16 requires equality between women and men in entering, during and at the dissolution of marriage.

When a woman alleging that she has been beaten must appear before a male authority and effectively be asked who could possibly want to marry her after a divorce, we are confronting precisely the type of structural inequality that CEDAW was created to dismantle.

The situation of Afghan women is not the product of a few isolated prohibitions. It represents a progressive dismantling of women's legal and social personhood: education, employment, freedom of movement, access to justice, participation in public life and personal autonomy have all been subjected to severe restrictions. UN Women has documented how, since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the principal restrictions imposed upon women have remained in place, while Afghan women and girls continue to be excluded from fundamental areas of social, educational and economic life.

And this is precisely what I find intolerable: Tuba can still speak, but an entire system has been constructed around her to make what she says progressively irrelevant.

It does not matter how lucidly she reasons. It does not matter that she alleges violence. It does not matter that she has reached an autonomous decision. The system begins from a different premise: her judgement is worth less because she is a woman.

The governor makes that assumption almost explicit when he depicts women as intellectually deficient. It is difficult to imagine a clearer representation of the stereotype that Article 5 CEDAW seeks to eradicate. Here, prejudice has not remained within the family, social customs or private conversation.

It is sitting behind the desk of public authority.

Domestic violence makes the situation still more serious. If the young woman's allegations are substantiated, this cannot be dismissed as a marital disagreement. Beatings are violence. International human rights law has long recognised, including through CEDAW General Recommendation No. 35, that gender-based violence constitutes a form of discrimination and that States have positive obligations concerning prevention, protection, investigation and access to justice.

A woman who has been beaten is not adequately protected by offering her a separate room within the same marriage and warning her husband not to strike her again. Protection cannot be subordinated to preserving the marital bond.

Marriage is not a licence to commit violence, and the family cannot become a legal no-man's-land in which a woman's physical integrity is negotiable.

The same principles emerge from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Articles 2 and 3 protect the enjoyment of rights without discrimination and guarantee equality between women and men; Article 7 prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; Article 23(4) requires equality of rights and responsibilities between spouses, including upon dissolution of marriage; and Article 26 guarantees equality before the law.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights likewise protects non-discrimination, equality between women and men and the right to education through Articles 2, 3 and 13.

Education has become one of the most symbolic battlegrounds of Taliban rule. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are prohibited from secondary and higher education. That fact makes the scene involving this eighteen-year-old even more powerful: before a political system that prevents girls from continuing their education, a young woman reasons with a clarity that contradicts, word by word, the man claiming that women are intellectually inferior.

When Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid maintains that the authorities are committed to women's rights while assessing every matter through the lens of Sharia, two opposite mistakes must be avoided.

The first would be accepting the proposition that invoking religion can operate as a general clause capable of neutralising fundamental rights. The second would be automatically equating Islam with the political and religious interpretation imposed by the Taliban.

They are not the same thing.

The legal issue concerns the use of a particular interpretation of religious law as an instrument of governmental power to systematically restrict women's rights, freedoms and legal agency. Religious conviction cannot transform institutionalised discrimination into lawful conduct under international law.

International criminal law has meanwhile taken a step that only a few years ago would have been regarded as historic.

On 8 July 2025, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Taliban Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani, Chief Justice of the Taliban authorities. According to the Court, there are reasonable grounds to believe that they ordered, induced or solicited the crime against humanity of persecution under Article 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute, including persecution on gender grounds against women and girls.

The legal significance is considerable. Gender discrimination, when it reaches the required degree of gravity and forms part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, may move beyond the sphere of human rights violations and enter the domain of crimes against humanity.

For this reason, I also use the expression "gender apartheid" carefully, but without fear.

Gender apartheid does not currently constitute an autonomous offence expressly codified in the Rome Statute in the same terms as racial apartheid. Pretending otherwise would be legally inaccurate. Nevertheless, international experts and human rights mechanisms have increasingly used the concept to describe an institutionalised system of segregation and oppression based on sex and designed to subordinate women and girls.

The debate over formally recognising gender apartheid within international criminal law is therefore far more than a terminological dispute. It concerns the law's ability to adequately name a system in which one part of the population is excluded from education, employment, public spaces, institutions and decision-making power because of sex.

This is where my feminism becomes uncompromising.

I will never accept the argument that our judgement should be softened in the name of cultural differences. Cultural pluralism deserves protection until it is invoked to justify the subordination of human beings.

Violence against a woman does not become less violent because it takes place within marriage.

Discrimination does not cease to be discrimination because it is described as tradition.

Preventing girls from receiving an education does not become acceptable because the prohibition has been incorporated into governmental rules.

And an authority that considers women incapable of rational thought cannot expect the international community to treat such prejudice as a harmless cultural peculiarity.

Women's freedom is not Western.

The right not to be beaten is not Western.

The right to education is not Western.

The rights to work, travel, participate in public life, choose whether and whom to marry, and leave a violent marriage do not belong to Europe, the United States or any particular civilisation.

They belong to women.

Full stop.

The very idea of universal human rights exists precisely to prevent a person's place of birth from determining how much dignity she is permitted to claim.

Above all, I refuse to describe Tuba merely as a victim. Doing so would risk depriving her of agency once again.

The governor may be the most politically powerful person in that room, but she is the most authoritative.

She is eighteen years old. She has been deprived of freedoms that millions of women her age elsewhere regard as ordinary. She is surrounded by men belonging to the same apparatus of power that governs almost every dimension of her existence.

And yet she is capable of saying: I have made my decision.

Those words represent exactly what an authoritarian patriarchal system fears most: female self-determination.

The laughter of the men inside that office in Jawzjan may eventually be forgotten. I hope the voice of that young woman will not.

Because while a governor was claiming that women lack intellect, a woman was proving him wrong before the entire world.

Perhaps this is the most brutal portrait of Afghanistan today: an armed, male-dominated and institutionalised system of power that needs to prevent girls from studying, restrict women from working, control their movement, diminish their access to justice and deny their intellectual capacity in order to continue calling them inferior.

If proving that women have no brains requires preventing them from using their minds, then women's intelligence was never the problem.

The problem has always been the power of men who are afraid of women's freedom.