Silence is not consent: The Taliban’s war on women and Islam

The room was filled with music and dance. Suddenly, there was a commotion; a young girl was gasping for air. Her face had turned pale, a thin layer of sweat covered her forehead, and her body was ice cold.

These images of Meeran (name changed), a young Hazara girl collapsing during a cultural programme organised to celebrate the culture of Afghanistan in New Delhi, have stayed with me for years.

Her heart would just miss a few beats now and then; she had arrhythmia at just 20 years of age. Arrhythmia is an irregular, too-fast, or too-slow heartbeat caused by a malfunction in the heart’s electrical system.

Meeran, a displaced Afghan girl living as a refugee, was silently fighting depression. She was also fighting the tragic memories of her best friend, who had died by suicide after being forced to marry a man almost three decades older than her. Meeran said her friend was just 15 years old.

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Coerced into the marriage by her family, she might have stayed silent when asked for consent during her nikah — but her silence was not consent.

Today, when I read reports about the Taliban’s attempts to once again erase a woman’s agency at the time of marriage, I thought of Meeran and her best friend. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan has introduced a controversial new family law governing marriage, divorce, and child marriage, drawing criticism from rights groups and international observers.

This law allows the silence of a “virgin girl” after puberty during her nikah to be interpreted as consent to marriage. However, silence from a boy or a previously married woman would not, in itself, constitute consent under the regulation. The law, which increases the authority of the family over a girl, is likely to be misused and can result in an increase in forced marriages and even child marriages.

The Taliban often present their policies as Islamic, but Islamic scholars across the Muslim world have repeatedly argued that coercive marriage practices and the denial of a woman’s consent contradict both the Quran and the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet PBUH).

Islam places consent at the centre of marriage. In Islam, free and explicit consent is a fundamental pillar of a valid marriage contract (nikah). Both the bride and the groom have to willingly agree to the union. Forced marriages are strictly prohibited, and a marriage entered into under duress or coercion is considered null and void.

The Quran describes marriage as a relationship built on tranquillity, affection, and mercy. It has to be a source of peace and happiness for both the man and the woman. A relationship founded on fear, coercion, or compulsion cannot reflect the Quranic ideal of mercy.

The Prophet of Islam himself strongly condemned forced marriages. In an instance narrated in Sahih al-Bukhari, a woman came to complain about being married without her consent by her father. The Prophet gave her the choice to continue or annul the marriage. This established a foundational principle in Islamic jurisprudence: a woman’s consent matters.

Another narration in Sahih Muslim quotes the Prophet as saying: “A previously married woman should not be married until consulted, and a virgin should not be married until her permission is sought.”

However, when asked about a “shy virgin”, the Prophet said: “Her silence should be taken as her permission.”

This is the saying the Taliban are trying to exploit, without considering the second part of the Hadith, which says that silence in a coerced marriage makes the marriage invalid. In Indian cultures, even in my family, many girls from an older generation would not give verbal consent; there has to be a nod or a soft whisper. However, some indication is obligatory.

A girl growing up in a suppressed or controlling environment rarely raises her voice against her family. She learns early that speaking up can lead to consequences, punishment, isolation, or emotional pressure. Hence, in environments like this, consent plays an even bigger role.

Islam has also set a precondition for marriage — marriage should only take place after an age at which the bride and groom understand the concept of consent.

The Quran also explicitly forbids inheriting or taking a woman against her will: “O you who believe; you are forbidden to inherit women against their will.”

Like in seventh-century Arabia, this verse completely dismantles the Taliban’s customs that treat women as property in 21st-century Afghanistan. Forcing women into marriages and denying them autonomy and agency in their private and public lives revives the kind of injustice Islam sought to abolish. Islam, which was born in Arabia when female infanticide was rampant, gave autonomy and rights to women that feminists across the world are still fighting for. It is only cultures and conditioning that keep women suppressed and subjugated.

Islam not only gives a woman the right to consent, but a sane, adult Muslim woman also has the legal right to contract her own marriage without the consent or presence of a male guardian.

The conditions are that she must marry a legally compatible and suitable match (kuf) and have two Muslim witnesses present. An adult woman can propose, accept, and conclude her nikah herself.

Prophet Muhammad’s first marriage was proposed by Hazrat Khadijah, a much older woman. She not only proposed but concluded the marriage herself.

Islam also gives a woman the right to end a marriage in her adulthood that her parents arranged during her childhood. A Muslim woman can even file for divorce if she lacks physical attraction to her husband.

A married woman is not legally or socially obliged to do household chores in Islam. She can do them out of love for her family. She is entitled to a separate house and household help if a man can afford it.

This Islamic principle, “khiyar al-bulugh”, or the “option upon puberty”, allows individuals married as children to seek annulment after reaching adulthood.

The Taliban law states that marriages arranged for minors by relatives other than a father or grandfather may still be recognised if the spouse is considered socially suitable and the dowry acceptable. Annulment, however, would require approval from a Taliban court.

The questions that need to be asked are: why would anyone other than a father or grandfather have the authority to arrange marriages for minors? Second, how is child marriage even allowed when Islam says consent has to be sought from the bride and groom, who fully understand the meaning of consent?

Traditions like child marriage, which have no basis in the fundamentals of Islam, cannot be applicable in today’s time.

The Taliban regime’s suppressive diktats restricting women’s rights to education, movement, and employment also clash with the Islamic tradition of seeking knowledge. A widely circulated Hadith quotes the Prophet as saying that “seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim” — and every Muslim means both men and women.

The Taliban restricting women’s right to learn goes against this very important decree of the Prophet.

Islamic history offers great examples of women scholars, traders and teachers. While the Prophet’s first wife was a businesswoman, his youngest wife, Hazrat Aisha, is considered a renowned Islamic scholar. Not only did she teach both men and women, but she is also considered one of the most authentic and respected narrators of Hadith.

Women participated in wars, nursed the wounded, and mastered chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy.

Women rose against tyrants and ran political campaigns. After the massacre of the Prophet’s grandson Imam Hussain, it was his surviving sister Hazrat Zaynab who, through powerful speeches in the streets of Kufa and Damascus, and in the courts of the Umayyad rulers, publicly condemned the massacre and exposed the truth of what happened in Karbala to the Prophet’s family.

In the ninth century, Fatima al-Fihri founded the world’s first university in Morocco; it is still operational.

So, what is happening to women in Afghanistan is not merely a political issue, but a battle to stop the Taliban from redefining Islam — redefining it to suppress women in the country.

For Afghan women, the suffering is often layered. They face oppression, discrimination, and the trauma of decades of violence. Their stories cannot be reduced to statistics — their grief, anxieties, and suppression have to be taken into account.

Islam came with the promise of justice and dignity; laws that strip women of consent, voice, and humanity cannot claim legitimacy by misinterpreting religion. The state-sponsored gender persecution has been described by the UN as “gender apartheid”. The UN says Taliban rule has erased women from public life, sparking a mental health crisis. While there is no nationwide data collection in the country, many international rights agencies have said violence against women has increased manyfold.

UNICEF data estimates that nearly 28 per cent to almost half of Afghan girls are married before their 18th birthday, with a significant percentage (around 10 to 19 per cent) married before the age of 15.

Years on, the horrors have not stopped for Afghan girls. According to the UN, the impact of leaving 1.1 million girls out of school and 100,000 women out of university correlates with a 45 per cent increase in early childbearing and up to a 50 per cent increase in maternal mortality. In 2024, the adolescent birth rate was projected by the UN to be 62 for every 1,000 women and girls aged 15-19 in Afghanistan. The worldwide average is 41.

Sixty-eight per cent of women reported having “bad” or “very bad” mental health, and eight per cent said they knew at least one other woman or girl who had attempted suicide.

This is happening as the world watches, and some countries, including some Islamic countries, are directly and indirectly supporting the regime.

The Taliban justify their gender apartheid as ‘sharia-compliant’, although it is in direct conflict with the core teachings of Islam on justice and equality. Faith does not mean fear. A nation cannot heal when half its people are silenced.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)