The Taliban-led Afghan authorities has banned video video games, international movies and music within the western metropolis of Herat, branding them as un-Islamic, the media reported. The ban imposed by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which got here with out warning, has pressured greater than 400 companies in Herat to shut, RFE/RL reported. It adopted crackdowns on different types of leisure and leisure that conflict with the Taliban`s extremist interpretation of Islamic Shari`a regulation. Earlier this month, additionally in Herat, the Taliban closed restaurant gardens for ladies and households. In October 2022, the group shut cafes providing hookahs — the smoking of which is a well-liked pastime amongst Afghan males — throughout the nation. Earlier in May, the Taliban banned women and men from consuming collectively in Herat`s eating places and shut down women-owned and women-run eating places within the metropolis, RFE/RL reported.
The hard-line Islamist group has aggressively re-imposed draconian restrictions on how Afghans can seem in public and the way women and men work together, harking back to its brutal reign via the late Nineties earlier than it was displaced by a US-led army invasion and a UN-backed authorities for twenty years. The affect of Taliban restrictions on companies is conspicuous in Herat, an historic centre of cultural and mental life within the Muslim world that lies at a strategic crossroads resulting in Iran and Turkmenistan. In the years earlier than the Taliban retook energy in August 2021, Hazratha Market was the centre of video gaming in Herat. Scores of retailers lining slender corridors additionally offered international movies and TV serials on DVD. They provided Indian, Iranian, and Western music on CDs and cassettes, RFE/RL reported. But the once-teeming market that echoed with Afghan and Iranian music has now fallen silent and nearly all its retailers are closed. The officers of the Taliban`s morality police in Herat are adamant that closing sport arcades and film and music retailers was the best factor to do.
Mawlawi Azizurrahman Mohajir, the provincial head of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, mentioned the authorities closed the gaming parlours after many households complained that their youngsters have been losing time there. “These shops were selling films that depicted and promoted Indian and Western values and culture, which are very different from Afghan culture and traditions,” he informed Radio Azadi. Mohajir, too, repeated the acquainted Taliban argument that it considers such on a regular basis leisure actions un-Islamic. “The films they were selling did not have women in hijab, which is against Sharia,” he mentioned, referring to the strict interpretation of the Islamic gown code that the Taliban insists be adopted in Afghanistan. “This is why the sale of such films is prohibited.”
