There are sermons that call men to humility, mercy, and repentance. Then there are sermons like this one: small, cruel, and drunk on power.In August 2025, a sermon by Taliban cleric Mahmood Zakeri circulated widely online. In it, he declared that a woman has no right to walk outside with both eyes open, and that if one eye remains uncovered it may be used only to watch the path, not to look around. He also reaffirmed the rule that women must leave home only with a male guardian.

That is not holiness. It is not modesty. It is the religious language of domination.

The point is not simply to cover women. It is to reduce them. A woman may see, but not look. She may move, but not appear. She may exist, but only under supervision. This is what tyranny looks like when it becomes intimate. It does not stop at law or force. It enters the body, the face, the eyes, and the terms of ordinary presence.

The Taliban’s rule over women has followed this logic from the start. Women and girls have been pushed out of school, work, and public life. They have been made dependent, restricted, and vulnerable by design. This sermon matters because it states the regime’s purpose with unusual bluntness. The goal is not public morality. The goal is female submission.

And this is where religion is being degraded along with women.

Islam is being used here not as a path to righteousness, but as a warrant for male control. Scripture and clerical authority are being conscripted to make domination sound sacred. That is one of the oldest abuses of religion: to take what should humble the strong and turn it into a weapon against the weak.

No serious moral society should accept that disguise. A woman is not a source of pollution to be hidden, escorted, monitored, and diminished. She is not male property. She is not a household object under external management. She is a human being. Any system that denies that is evil, whatever language it wraps around itself.

There is something especially repellent in the pettiness of it. Afghanistan has been battered by poverty, war, loss, and instability. Women there have already lost freedom, education, work, and legal protection. Faced with all that suffering, this cleric’s great moral concern is whether a woman may use both eyes.

That is not spiritual seriousness. It is sadism dressed as virtue.

When religion rots into ideology, this is what happens. The faith is no longer used to discipline pride or protect the vulnerable. It is used to flatter male authority and train women into fear. It becomes less a way to honor God than a system for breaking human beings into obedience.

A healthy religion reminds men that they are not God. The Taliban uses religion to tell them they may act like gods over women.