pleased that they get to study maths, science, geography and English (which they all speak well) as well as Islamic studies, which they enjoy. One, Diwa, says she is sorry many of her friends cannot afford to attend. They all say they are frustrated that they will not be allowed to make much of the precarious education they are getting. “We don’t want to just sit at home and raise children, or be a teacher in an Islamic school,” says Nadia. “That was not our dream.” The chief canceller of dreams is the man in Kandahar whom some diplomats in Kabul call the Wizard of Oz. Mr Akhundzada, who is thought to be around 60, does not, as far as is known, stay hidden behind a curtain, but he is very rarely seen in public; the most recent verified photos of him were taken decades ago. A former cleric and sharia judge, during the war he championed the Taliban’s shift towards suicide-bombing, allowing one of his sons thus to murder people in 2017. Mr Akhundzada has imposed a version of sharia law that vanishingly few other Muslims would seek to justify, one which includes strict sex segregation, strong dress codes and the erasure of women from public life. His broadcast speeches make clear that he sees women’s rights, and non- religious education for anyone, as the work of Satan. “He thinks the outside
world is essentially poisoned, and is taking Afghans away from the path of sharia and God,” says a diplomatic source in Kabul. “His view is basically ‘switch it off’.” Adam Weinstein of the Quincy Institute, a think-tank, argues that the Kandahari faction may believe that more aid and foreign investment would only strengthen the influence of its rivals. Harsh decrees and isolation, on the other hand, help make clear, and thus maintain, the emir’s iron grip. They are not the only tools to that end. The emir has made sure that ministers in Kabul have deputies who report to him. He directs the white- robed vice-and-virtue police, the regime’s primary mechanism of social and institutional control. Bypassing the finance ministry in Kabul, he has established control over some revenues from mining. And in the past six months, arguing that tensions with Pakistan require it, he has built up a force of 8,000 fighters in Kandahar that sits outside the army’s chain of command and has a strong whiff of the praetorian about it. There were sincere hopes that the return would not go Mr Akhundzada’s way. Many of the moderate Talibs now based in Kabul believed that the second emirate could emulate the shining examples of Islamic modernisation they had seen in the Gulf without sacrificing their beliefs. For a time there were rumours that less reactionary figures—notably Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister and leader of a powerful faction—would challenge the emir. Now unhappy Talibs have closed ranks, perhaps unsure that they can win, perhaps because whatever concerns they have come second to remaining in power. There is thus no obvious alternative to more regressive policies and further isolation. The state of health care shows what that costs. The Taliban have insisted on segregating male and female patients and doctors, have pushed female doctors out and have prevented women from undertaking medical training. The result has been predictable: a chronic lack of care for women. A survey by Refugees International, a charity, found that maternal mortality in Herat in the first half of 2026 was five times higher than in the same period the year before. Another indicator is emigration. A professor whose entire faculty has been cleared of women (and whose educated wife is unable to work) says that
regressive policies have already caused a huge brain drain. Unless they change, that draining will speed up. “We have stayed, hoping things would get better, but soon we will start trying to leave,” says the professor. Though Iran has turned hostile towards Afghan migrants, many Afghans are still attempting to escape across the Margo desert. Marg is the Persian word for death, and the landscape meets its billing. But if some leave, most have no choice but to stay. Some Talibs still insist that things will ease up in time. But many Afghans feel impatient. “It has been five years,” says Diwa, the student. “We don’t want to wait.” ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/08/13/under-the-taliban-afghanistan-is-for- once-peaceful
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Should every Indian follow the same rules? The ruling party’s apparently liberal argument for making everyone marry, divorce and inherit like Hindus Aug 13th 2026 AFTER RETURNING from sunset prayers in the mosque next door, Khursheed Ahmed shoos away his all-male entourage to talk to a female journalist. The 71-year-old community leader is glum. A law he spent months unsuccessfully campaigning against has put him in a quandary. How, he wonders, can a person be both a God-fearing Muslim and a law-abiding Indian? “If you don’t follow sharia, you are not a Muslim,” he says. But since January 2025 it has been illegal for Muslims in Mr Ahmed’s home state of Uttarakhand to obey many of their customary family laws. This is what awaits much of India. Uttarakhand, up in the Himalaya, was the first state in independent India to be subject to a uniform civil code (UCC),
meant to apply to almost all its citizens regardless of creed. The code aims to replace religion-based personal laws with a single rulebook for marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption. So far this year, codes that are in essence identical have been passed by legislators in the states of Assam, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, though none is yet in force; another five states are planning to follow. If West Bengal passes its own law, as expected this month, close to 30m more Muslims will face Mr Ahmed’s dilemma. All the states passing a UCC into law are ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu-nationalist outfit that runs the country and many of its states. It took over West Bengal after state elections in April. The BJP presents the new codes as a matter of universal human rights, in particular women’s rights. But look more closely and what is actually going on is a process of imposing on religious minorities the laws and customs that Hindus already follow. The basic principle looks fair and simple: every Indian should follow the same law. The reason they do not goes back to the trauma of partition. After the departing British split India into a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India in 1947, India’s Hindus wanted to soothe the anxieties of the new country’s minorities. They drew up a constitution that let religious groups, including Muslims, govern their own civil matters. No longer. The universal codes extend to Muslim daughters the same equal inheritance rights that Hindu daughters won in 2005. They criminalise polygamy for Muslim men. Talk to Muslim women in Uttarakhand and many are pleased to see such fixes. That makes it easy to dismiss critics as conservative cranks. “Hard-core Islamists think you cannot tinker with God’s will,” says Shatrughna Singh, a Hindu, who sat on Uttarakhand’s drafting committee and now oversees the law’s roll-out there. But the reality is that the codes are not an instrument of women’s liberation, or indeed liberalism of any kind. One of the Uttarakhand code’s provision, for instance, requires all couples to register a live-in relationship with the state within 30 days or risk a prison sentence. State and party officials insist that the aim is to protect women from exploitative men by bringing informal liaisons out of the shadows. But many lovers avoid a formal set-up precisely to protect themselves from prying eyes—especially those in unconventional
relationships, say, between castes or creeds. The code potentially makes the relationship everyone’s business. Under some versions of it, faith leaders, parents and even the general public can object and block couples from shacking up. Nor do the new codes pick the most woman-friendly bits from India’s varying traditions. Take Muslim personal law. Under its dictates, women can generally escape toxic marriages faster than Hindu wives can. And they are also protected by mehr, a payment that a husband-to-be must make at the time of marriage to ensure his wife’s financial independence. Yet Uttarakhand’s all-Hindu UCC drafting committee “basically copy-pasted” what used to be Hindu personal laws and imposed them on religious minorities, says Saumya Saxena, a legal scholar at India’s Jindal Global University. The UCC does nothing to correct injustices in Hindu law that still often exclude widows, wives and mothers from inheriting ancestral property. It draws no inspiration from India’s tribal communities, which often treat women best of all; tribal communities (who, note critics, often vote BJP) are excluded from the codes. When Uttarakhand officials face a foreign audience, they make sure to call the law “progressive” and “secular”. But religion quickly intrudes on their logic when they explain why the code was first tried out in Uttarakhand, where the BJP has ruled for most of the state’s 25-year history. The state, which floods with pilgrims at this time of year, is as holy to Hindus as Jerusalem is to Jews, they say. They claim the Muslim population is exploding and mutter about an “expansionary mindset” that drives Muslim men to marry many wives, supposedly to outbreed Hindus. On the surface, Uttarakhand’s experiment seems largely symbolic. The first criminal case under the new law came only this April, when a woman objected to her husband’s attempt to make use of halala, an archaic Muslim divorce custom. As of early July, fewer than 100 couples in a state of 12m people had formally fessed up to their live-in relationship. But over time, the law may push Muslims even further from the mainstream. Mr Ahmed advises fellow Muslims to shun courtrooms and to quietly fix disputes