Kabul, Apr 15 (IANS): The Taliban-led Afghan authorities has banned video video games, international movies and music within the western metropolis of Herat, branding them as un-Islamic, the media reported.

The ban imposed by the Ministry for the Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice, which got here with out warning, has pressured greater than 400 companies in Herat to shut, RFE/RL reported.

It adopted crackdowns on different types of leisure and leisure that conflict with the Taliban’s extremist interpretation of Islamic Shari’a legislation.

Earlier this month, additionally in Herat, the Taliban closed restaurant gardens for girls and households.

In October 2022, the group shut cafes providing hookahs — the smoking of which is a well-liked pastime amongst Afghan males — throughout the nation.

Earlier in Might, the Taliban banned women and men from consuming collectively in Herat’s eating places and shut down women-owned and women-run eating places within the metropolis, RFE/RL reported.

The hard-line Islamist group has aggressively re-imposed draconian restrictions on how Afghans can seem in public and the way women and men work together, harking back to its brutal reign by means of the late Nineteen Nineties earlier than it was displaced by a US-led army invasion and a UN-backed authorities for twenty years.

The impression of Taliban restrictions on companies is conspicuous in Herat, an historic centre of cultural and mental life within the Muslim world that lies at a strategic crossroads resulting in Iran and Turkmenistan.

Within the years earlier than the Taliban retook energy in August 2021, Hazratha Market was the centre of video gaming in Herat.

Scores of outlets lining slender corridors additionally offered international movies and TV serials on DVD. They supplied Indian, Iranian, and Western music on CDs and cassettes, RFE/RL reported.

However the once-teeming market that echoed with Afghan and Iranian music has now fallen silent and virtually all its retailers are closed.

The officers of the Taliban’s morality police in Herat are adamant that closing sport arcades and film and music retailers was the appropriate factor to do.

Mawlawi Azizurrahman Mohajir, the provincial head of the Ministry for the Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice, stated the authorities closed the gaming parlours after many households complained that their youngsters had been losing time there.

“These retailers had been promoting movies that depicted and promoted Indian and Western values and tradition, that are very totally different from Afghan tradition and traditions,” he instructed Radio Azadi.

Mohajir, too, repeated the acquainted Taliban argument that it considers such on a regular basis leisure actions un-Islamic.

“The movies they had been promoting didn’t have ladies in hijab, which is towards Sharia,” he stated, referring to the strict interpretation of the Islamic costume code that the Taliban insists be adopted in Afghanistan.

“That is why the sale of such movies is prohibited.”

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