In the windows of Kabul’s clothing stores, a striking sight: the faces of the mannequins in richly embroidered wedding dresses have their faces covered with a black plastic bag or crossed with a wide adhesive strip.
The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, which prohibits the reproduction of human figures, does not only concern women.
In shops in a shopping mall in the central Shahr e-Naw district, male mannequins have their faces covered with aluminum foil and children’s mannequins have their heads stuffed into plastic bags.
As soon as they recaptured Kabul on August 15, 2021, the Taliban sent a chilling message by covering the faces on the windows of beauty salons, barber shops and billboards with paint.
But the decree concerning the mannequins dates back to last year, according to the Kabul traders interviewed by AFP, all of whom requested anonymity.
“It was the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice that asked” stores to cover mannequins’ faces, one of them explained. “The environment must be Islamic.”
In his shop, his mannequins have improbable brown hair, an enormous head of hair that falls down over their faces to their mouths.
“It makes the windows look quite ugly,” admits the 22-year-old shopkeeper, but it “doesn’t affect sales.”
Further on, a few women wearing an abaya and a mask over their mouths, as required by the Taliban, are quietly doing their shopping.
“Beheading with a box cutter”
The faceless mannequins wear wedding dresses embroidered with sequins or elaborate floral patterns. Curiously, the shoulders and arms are bare, the necklines generous.
“Later, they may order the arms to be covered in plastic,” the salesman predicts.
Another shopping center in Kabul, another clothing store: the two owners explain that the brigades of “Vice and Virtue” come “three times a day” to check that the faces of the mannequins are well hidden.
In the Kart e-Naw district, they say, the men of this morality police “decapitated mannequins with a box cutter”.
It was in Herat, in the west, that the movement of decapitating mannequins — with saws — began in January 2022. Today, the ban on faces is in force throughout the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Resignation has apparently given way to indignation. Customers are not shocked because “there are more serious issues,” explains one of the two owners, referring to the economic situation or women deprived of education.
Frequent inspections
In Kabul, Popalzai (not his real name) also downplays the impact of these masked faces in his vast shop selling jeans, polo shirts and suits.
“This is not very important to Afghans,” said the 32-year-old trader. “We live with it.”
“Our store caught fire, Kabul was destroyed, we lived through the worst days imaginable,” he explains, referring to past wars until the return of relative security with the Taliban.
At the entrance to his store, mannequins of men in Western costume are all hooded. One of them is wearing sunglasses.
Further on, a row of mannequins, wearing three-piece suits and elegant breast pouches, have their faces covered in aluminum foil.
As for the child mannequins, one has its head hidden in a Superman hood, another in a gold plastic bag and a third has no head at all.
“In some places, the Vice and Virtue raids always take place on the same days, so the vendors cover and then uncover the mannequins’ faces,” jokes the shopkeeper.
“But here, there are between three and six guys who come two or three times a week,” he says of the men who can be identified by their white coats.
“They look without approaching, they are less harsh than before,” assures this man who experienced the first reign of the Taliban, from 1996 to 2001.