Severe restrictions
“Even jeans would have been acceptable, but the values of the series Peaky Blinders go against Afghan culture,” Saiful Islam Khyber, spokesperson for the provincial department for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice in Herat, where these people come from, told the BBC.
He told CBS that the four men had not been officially arrested, but “only summoned, counseled and then released.” “We have our own religious and cultural values, and we have very specific traditional styles of dress,” he continued.
Before adding: “The clothes they wore have no Afghan identity and do not correspond to our culture. Moreover, their actions imitated actors from a British film. Our society is Muslim: if we are to follow or imitate someone, they must be our pious religious predecessors in what is good and lawful.”
A video was released by the ministry after their interrogation. The four men are seen saying that they were not aware that their outfits violated Sharia law, thanking those responsible for the “morality police” for their advice. However, there is no evidence that the images were not filmed under duress.
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“I innocently shared content contrary to Sharia law, which was seen by many people,” one of them admits in the recording, assuring that he will never do “anything like that again.”
Coming to power in 2021, the Taliban established Islamic Sharia law in Afghanistan and implemented a whole series of severe restrictions on freedoms, particularly clothing.
