Afghanistan’s most senior judge outlawed cable television yesterday saying it was against Islam, a decision reminiscent of the Taliban regime.
Fazl Hadi Shinwari, a religious cleric and the new government’s chief justice, said cable television, which now provides foreign news, movie, sports and entertainment channels in Afghanistan, was filled with ”prostitution” and ”nudity”.
”I don’t want such TV in this country,” he said yesterday in Kabul. Some of the programmes shown were ”clearly contrary to Islam and against morality”, he said.
The chief justice also wants to outlaw coeducation. ”I want education for women, but we want men and women not to sit together,” Shinwari said yesterday.
In Herat, western Afghanistan, men have been banned from teaching female students. The move has been strongly opposed by aid agencies and human rights groups who say that many girls will miss out on classes because of the shortage of women teachers.
Cable operators were told to shut down their service on Sunday, although direct satellite transmissions, which the Kabul government cannot control, continue unhindered.
Shinwari comes from the same Pashtun tribe as the Taliban and he taught for many years in a madrassah, or religious school, in a conservative area of Pakistan.
Yesterday he said he was unhappy with the ”smut” shown on foreign television channels. Television programmes showing women and men together were acceptable only if they were informative and entertaining, he said.
Afghanistan’s information and culture minister, Makhdom Raheen, said none of the cable operators had broadcast anything objectionable.
He said he hoped the judge’s decision would be reversed at a cabinet meeting next week.
”The freedom of cable is a part of the freedom of our press,” he said.
The extremist religious students who made up the Taliban regime banned music and television in Kabul shortly after seizing the capital in 1996. They resurfaced only once the Taliban regime crumbled under the weight of a US military onslaught in November 2001.
Televisions, most of them smuggled from Pakistan, immediately appeared in the bazaars and entrepreneurs began producing makeshift satellite dishes made from old tin cans. Five cable television networks were then licensed by the government and provided a series of channels into hundreds of homes. One of the firms, Star Cable Network, delivers 32 channels to 900 homes in the city.
Mr Shinwari’s decision is an indication of how difficult it is to liberalise Afghanistan’s deeply conservative cultural and religious beliefs.
Although sections of the capital, Kabul, have always had a reputation for open-mindedness, much of the countryside remains firmly attached to its traditions.
As a result many Taliban laws have survived into the new regime. Legal punishments still include amputation for thieves and stoning for adulterers.
Mr Shinwari has argued, however, that the judiciary now has a genuine appeals process and that the Taliban’s shotgun justice has gone. – Guardian Unlimited Â