Women's Right to Freedom of Movement in Islamic Law and Under Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan
The Taliban’s claim to legitimacy is rooted in their assertion that between the time of the American invasion in 2001 and the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, the Afghan government applied laws that were inconsistent with clear commands in Islamic scripture and with the rules of Islam that have been developed over the centuries by Islamic scholars associated with the Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic law. The Taliban claims that Islamic Sharia and the Hanafi school, which is the most widely followed school in Sunni Islam and the dominant legal tradition in Afghanistan, justify its restrictive measures. The Taliban claims they overthrew Afghanistan's recognized government to establish a society governed by Islamic Sharia. Their strict rules on women’s movement, education, and public participation are justified as necessary regulations based on Islamic scriptures, as interpreted by Hanafi scholars. Western academics and policymakers have criticized the Taliban’s rules as being clearly and flagrantly inconsistent with modern liberal ideas of women’s dignity and as violations of international human rights treaties that Afghanistan has ratified. Because few Westerners have training in the classical Islamic tradition or in the Hanafi school of Islamic law, none have so far been willing to evaluate the Taliban’s rules on their own terms.
This Article argues, however, that even if one accepts that Afghanistan’s laws should comply with Hanafi Islamic law, the Taliban’s rules regarding women cannot be justified. Using close textual analysis of the Islamic scriptures and exhaustive engagement with Hanafi scholarship from the medieval period up to the present day, this article demonstrates that the Taliban’s claim to be imposing Islamic restrictions on women cannot be accepted. Informed by years of classical training in Afghanistan and teaching in the Sharia faculties of Kabul University, followed by an LLM from an American law school and PhD studies in Germany in comparative law, this article demonstrates that the Taliban’s claims are inconsistent with the tradition they claim to follow. The rules clearly conflict with the scriptural passages that address women’s rights to movement. More importantly, they often contradict the mainstream Hanafi interpretations of these passages and, therefore, oppose the majority positions within Hanafi law for nearly a thousand years. After establishing that the Taliban’s views are unusual within the mainstream Hanafi school, the article points out that, when it comes to women’s rights, the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam differs from that of the rest of the Islamic world, including other regimes that intentionally follow classical Islamic norms. The findings indicate that many of the restrictions imposed by the Taliban are based on socio-political beliefs rather than sound Islamic legal reasoning.
Recommended Citation: Lutforahman Saeed, Women's Right to Freedom of Movement in Islamic Law and Under Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan, 49 Fordham Int'l L.J. 945 (2026).