Afghanistan (MNN) — Afghanistan’s Taliban regime is taking its oppression of women one step further. Now, women across the country are forbidden from baring their faces or even speaking in public. The ruling came down in a set of new laws approved by the supreme leader at the end of August.
Denise Godwin with International Media Ministries (IMM) says the increasing censorship of Afghan women stands in stark contrast with examples in the Bible.
“We had a lot of people who are working in the Middle East and North Africa who said, ‘Can you do some more for women? We need more products for women. We’d love dramas,'” says Godwin. “We discussed how about women from the Bible? Because that’s something we had done a lot of projects on.”
“When the Taliban says to women, ‘You have no voice. When you leave your home, you can’t even speak. We don’t want to see your face,’ and then you open the Bible, and you find out that an Iranian queen who had Jewish blood (Esther) stood up and spoke for all her people – that’s a pretty dramatic thing. God rescued people through that.”
IMM has been working on a television project called Women of the Bible, and several stories are complete in multiple languages.
The Women of the Bible series has been a continuing project at IMM since 2009. The goal of the series is to reach out to Muslim women, victims of human trafficking, and women in harsh situations who are simply searching for love and peace in their lives. All four programs are complete in Spanish. New language versions and digest versions are currently in production.