Although the Taliban* vowed to provide Afghan women with all rights in line with Sharia and the country's law, there have been reports showing that the situation in this field has worsened since the fall of Kabul to the militant group.
Khola Hasan, a UK Islamic Sharia Council scholar, has accused Western media of “misrepresenting” the Taliban's views on women's rights, arguing that the militants' recent posturing on the matter was a “good start”.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, she insisted that if Western countries would “give them [Taliban fighters] a helping hand […] maybe they could really progress”.
When asked to comment on reports about women and children being beaten and whipped when passing through Afghan checkpoints, Hasan described Afghanistan as a “tribal society with tribal loyalties” and with “a lot of violence within the communities” amid decades of “occupation”.
She urged the international community “to be very careful not to take small, minor incidents and make them into something huge”.
She went on to claim that the issue “has been misrepresented for so long that I've got used to it, I don't even blink an eyelid anymore”.
After she was told the world had “seen this movie before” in terms of the Taliban's promises not to crack down on women, Hasan said, “No we haven't because the Taliban have grown up”.
“They were not exposed to the modern world, so what they were saying…
