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The Taliban government is purging books written by women from Afghanistan’s male-only university system and outlawing gender studies courses, the latest blows in a campaign against women’s rights since the group returned to power four years ago.More than 600 books, many of them written by women, were included in a 50-page list of banned works. The directive was announced in a letter to universities by the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, dated to late August, and published by the Independent Persian on Thursday. The letter said the titles were in conflict with principles of Shariah, or Islamic law.A member of the committee reviewing the books later clarified the Taliban’s position to BBC Afghan that “all books authored by women are not allowed to be taught.”The ban is “a criminal act,” said Rahela Sidiqi, the director of The Rahela Trust, a Britain-based group that works in Afghanistan to help women and girls access education. “It not only affects females. It also affects males. It affects society, because those books were part of the curriculums of those universities.”Alongside the book ban, the Taliban has instructed universities to drop 18 courses spanning topics from human rights and democracy to women’s studies, and said more than 200 others were under review. “We know in the spring, there was a committee put together by the Ministry of Higher Education to do exactly this,” said Lauryn Oates, the executive director of Right to Learn Afghanistan, a group based in Canada that supports human rights and education for girls and women in Afghanistan. “This will give people the false idea that women don’t write books, or that women’s ideas are not worth consulting.”The list of texts and subjects being stripped, Oates said, shows that “they really don’t like political science or international relations.” But she said it was also inconsistent, adding that much of it appeared to be coming from “individual members’ personal suspicion of the subjects.”In 2022, Afghanistan’s higher education commission released a report after a review of school curriculum. Among the “deficiencies” outlined were the promotion of foreign cultural norms, “moral deficiencies” and the advancement of “un-Islamic customs and practices, such as music, television, democracy, etc.”Because the Taliban has banned women and girls from secondary and higher education, the latest wave of censorship primarily affects the curricula of male students. But Sidiqi said the step is reflective of a pattern of “restricting women from every part of life,” adding that the removal of women’s writing reflects an attempt to “destroy the history of their life.”The move is part of a wider overhaul of higher education, which the Taliban has pursued since returning to power as it seeks to reshape Afghan society to conform to its hard-line ideology. It has fired scores of university professors who it claims break from state values, stifled dissent on university campuses and restructured curricula to augment the amount of religious education students are required to take.Earlier this week, internet shutdowns hit several provinces of Afghanistan to curb “misuse,” which had the effect of curtailing the ability to attend online classes and exchange information.
