The Hollywood actress Meryl Streep, pleading on behalf of a very emotive appeal to the world community, slammed the Taliban regime’s oppressive handling of women in Afghanistan, drawing a comparison between the freedom of animals and the rights of Afghan women under the regime. On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Meryl Streep spoke out against the Taliban’s new set of “morality laws” under which women have been significantly restricted and face worse conditions than animals.
Meryl Streep Attacks Taliban Regime
Streep said all aspects of Afghan women and girls’ lives were limited with numerous restrictions, “from education and work to venture out in public”. She is free to sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face, or chase a squirrel in the park.” While under Taliban law women can’t speak out in public, they have to be covered head to toe if outside, and cannot enter schools, parks, gyms, or sports clubs if they have passed the age of 12.
Her more important point, however, is that these laws were affecting women’s participation in society. As she put it, “A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl may not in public. This is extraordinary. This is a suppression of natural law.”
Taliban Responds: Women’s Rights Under Islam
In response to Streep’s assertions, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen rejected the notion that women in Afghanistan had their rights taken away. He insisted that women were “highly respected” by the Taliban in their role as mothers, sisters, and wives but refused any comparison between women and animals. He also said hundreds of thousands of women were still working in different sectors across the country and defended the new laws as being in line with Islamic Sharia law.
“We respect them in their position as mother, sister, wife. They are an integral part of the family and society but we never equate them with cats,” Shaheen told the BBC. He added the Taliban is working to revise Afghanistan’s educational system according to Islamic teachings and repeated assurances to reopen schools to women once reforms were finished, but none have actually materialized.
UN and International Reaction
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who also witnessed Streep’s speech, is apprehensive of how women and girls are dealt with by the Taliban. He said that the prospects of Afghanistan would remain silenced if the educated women continue to be sidelined from society. “Afghanistan will never take its rightful place on the world stage without it,” he concluded.
The new restrictions imposed on women by the Taliban have been condemned by the West, especially by the United States and the European Union. But the Taliban continues unmoved, believing its policies are actually in conformity with Islamic law. The condition has been deteriorating rapidly, and rights organizations asked for greater pressure on the Taliban so as to save the rights of women.
International icons such as Meryl Streep and others add to a growing chorus demanding action as Afghan women continue under one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. As the international community condemns the Taliban’s policies in increasing exile, there is little indication of this regime change arriving anytime soon, leaving Afghan women confined to a brutal yet evermore isolated reality.
It’s a powerful claim for global attention that draws attention both to growing concerns about the rights of Afghan women and raises questions urgent enough for the future of that country under Taliban rule.