OIC to send Delegates to Afghanistan to discuss the women’s Freedom of education and work

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is planning to send delegates to Afghanistan. OIC is a grouping of Islamic countries with 57 members. The diplomats are being sent to Kabul to have a meeting relating to women’s rights in Afghanistan. It will be done because of the Taliban’s rigid Islamic values about women.

This was also just after a United Nations diplomat’s tour to Taliban- reigned Afghanistan, along with the repeated requests from the international community to re-establish the freedoms of women and girls to work and study.

On January 13, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), said that the Taliban’s ban on women from achieving basic education or working in health agencies is “in violation of the purposes of Islamic law and the methodology of the messenger of Allah”. 

The date of the OIC visit to Kabul is not fixed till now. However, Afghan women are viewing it as a ray of hope by the virtue of heightening extremism. This immoderation has thrown out their rights since the moment the Taliban arrived in Kabul’s administrative system.

It has been over a month since the Taliban announced that women were no longer to be allowed to work and educate. On 21 December 2023, at a university in Jalalabad, a top university official announced that no girl will be educated from now on.

The University announced this in an auditorium full of women students who immediately started crying. One of the girls fainted after hearing the rule. 

Not only education the women’s right to work is also taken away from them. The government banned women to work most jobs outside their homes. Their treatment from any male doctor is also prohibited, which leaves the women with no option but to wait for their health to deteriorate.

While this report was being filed, the Taliban imposition that women health workers can no longer practice in Afghanistan remains as it is. Later in January, the Taliban authorized that male doctors no longer examine and treat female patients. On 30 January 2023, all female students were barred from attending the University entrance exams across the country.

A student from Jalalabad University told the local news that there are verses in the Quran promoting education for all and Prophet Muhammad’s first wife Khadijah was a very acknowledged businesswoman herself. She also added that the Taliban’s religious interpretations of its laws and rule that deny freedom of education and work to the women-run counter to Islam’s basic teachings.

As mentioned in various Islamic religious texts, Khadijah, Prophet Muhammad’s first wife was a businesswoman who successfully conducted transactions and traded within the Arab world.

Highlighting these verses of religious texts, many Afghan women talk about the revolutionary and enlightening life of Khadijah to tarnish the Taliban’s Islamic interpretations of the ban on women’s freedom to work and education. 

Its been over a month since the Taliban introduced a ban on women’s university education. Now the anti-women rulings and laws from Kabul’s administrative system have become quite common.

Afghanistan’s expectations from the OIC visit

The women are requesting the OIC to pay a visit to Afghanistan and inform the Talibani hardliners that women are educated and allowed to work in other Islamic countries. They are demanding the OIC make efforts to educate the Talibani extremists about the fact that there is an Islamic world beyond Afghanistan, and women enjoy their freedom there. 

The women are requesting that the OIC member countries should together issue an advisory that women’s basic fundamental rights such as education and freedom to work should be allowed in Afghanistan.