Afghan women protest Taliban's hijab mandate by posting photos in colourful outfits

New Delhi: Afghan women from all over the world have taken to social media to show their opposition to the Taliban's new hijab diktat,CNN report said.

According to the Taliban's interpretation of Sharia law, female students, lecturers, and employees must wear hijabs in order to maintain gender segregation in classrooms.

Following this, Photos of a group of female students wearing head-to-toe black robes and waving Taliban flags in the lecture hall of a government-run university in Kabul had emerged, showing support to the Taliban mandate.

However, as a stark contrast to the black hijab mandate outlined by the Taliban, other Afghan women were seen posting pictures of themselves in bright and colourful traditional Afghan clothing.

Bahar Jalali, a former faculty member of the American University of Afghanistan according to her LinkedIn profile, helped kick off the picture posting campaign, according to other women who shared photos on Twitter., CNN reported.

Jalali tweeted a picture of a woman in a full black dress and veil and said: "No woman has ever dressed like this in the history of Afghanistan. This is utterly foreign and alien to Afghan culture. I posted my pic in the traditional Afghan dress to inform, educate and dispel the misinformation that is being propagated by Taliban."

Other Afghan women soon followed her lead on social media, the report added.

Waslat Hasrat-Nazimi, head of the Afghan service at DW News, posted a picture of herself in Twitter wearing traditional Afghan dress and headdress. She captioned her photo: "This is Afghan culture and this is how Afghan women dress."

Another Afghan singer and activist named Shekiba Teimori, who fled Kabul last month, told CNN that the "hijab existed before Kabul's fall. We could see Hijabi women, but this was based on family decisions and not the government. They wore the same colourful Afghan dresses that you see in my pictures before the Taliban came to Afghanistan."