I was a child when I first saw a man flogged on screen. It was not an accident – no forbidden video smuggled and passed through a teacher’s eye. It was part of the lesson. In the religious school I attended, we were gathered and made to watch recordings of public punishments: floggings, amputations, executions. The teachers did not present these as warnings of what might happen to us. They presented them as demonstrations of what justice looked like. We were being trained not only in theology, but in the aesthetics of violence. We were being taught that cruelty, when performed in God’s name, was not cruelty at all – it was order. 

That early education has stayed with me, not as trauma alone, but as a key. It unlocked something I have spent years trying to name: the way political Islam does not merely punish – it performs. And the audience is always the point.

I. The Stadium as Theater

Under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, stadiums are not only for sports. They are stages. Anyone the Taliban have accused of some certain crimes is subjected by their courts to public punishment (usually flogging, and in some cases, execution) carried out before crowds of spectators. Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have flogged hundreds of people, including women, across Afghanistan. Twelve people have been executed publicly in stadiums so far. These are the figures the Taliban themselves have been published. In a country where independent journalism is now effectively banned, the true count is likely far higher.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his landmark work Discipline and Punish, opens with a scene of public execution in eighteenth-century Paris and he further argues that one of the purposes of public punishment is to spread fear among the people, to instill in them the feeling that no violation will go unpunished. In this way, public punishment also becomes a spectacle of power: a demonstration not just of authority, but of its reach. The Taliban’s stadiums operate on exactly this logic. The goal is not justice. The goal is the manufacture of fear, and through fear, submission.

Although only a few hundred people may be flogged in stadiums across the country in the last four years, the suffering that follows is collective. A few months ago, people were flogged publicly in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province, and residents of the region remain in shock months later. One man described what it meant for his family: “They beat my son here in front of everyone. Now I no longer have a face to show in public. Neither my son has had a good day since, nor my family. They shouldn’t have beaten my son in front of people – better they had killed him.”

The aim of the public flogging was not merely to punish a son, but to crush the dignity of a family, and to make an example that would echo through a community and establish their domination through the rule of fear. Hannah Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that terror is the essence of totalitarian rule. The Taliban do not use fear to achieve other goals. Fear is the goal. 

II. Women as Territory

Ziba was from Nangarhar, an eastern province of Afghanistan. She had completed half of her medical studies when the Taliban took power in August 2021. Because she was a woman, she was barred from continuing her education, though she was permitted to work as a nurse in a local hospital with her incomplete qualifications. After the ban, family pressure mounted, and she was pushed into marriage. Her husband promised he would allow her to work. After the wedding, he broke that promise. She turned to the Taliban court – the same institution that had denied her every right. She applied for a divorce, but the court refused. It dragged out the process, made her situation more dangerous, and left her alone to face the pressure of family, society, and a system that had no interest in protecting her. Eventually, her husband killed her in the name of “honor.” And in this way, under Taliban rule, the life of a doctor and nurse came to an end, as if she had never existed at all.

In the ideology of Taliban and in the broader discourse of political Islam, a woman does not exist as an independent human being. She is terrain – a domain in which Islamist groups must demonstrate their authority and impose their vision of social order. The restrictions imposed on women under Taliban rule have further constrained the lives of more than three million Afghan women and girls who have been deprived of the right to education and stripped of many other fundamental human rights. As a result, every woman’s daily existence is shaped by fear.

The Taliban seek to make their rule permanent through the spreading of fear, stripping people of the courage to question their actions, their governance, or their decrees. At the same time, control of the population is one of their central preoccupations, and in pursuit of that control they have erased half of society from public life. Women have been removed from public space through religious edicts, stripped of their rights, and subjected to relentless surveillance of their movement, their clothing, their relationships, their very identity as women. Through this surveillance, the Taliban have seeded fear both across society at large and among women themselves, threatening them with torture, imprisonment, and public humiliation. Alongside this, they have constructed a system of structural discrimination that operates quietly beneath the more visible violence.

Beyond physical coercion, the Taliban weaponize religious propaganda to frighten women in God’s name, telling them they must not leave their homes, and that to do so is to invite God’s wrath. By every available means, they work to ensure that women are too afraid to challenge their rule or defy their commands. In a conservative society, the price women pay for Taliban punishment is particularly devastating: imprisonment or public flogging does not only hurt the body, it calls a woman’s reputation into question before her entire community. The Taliban exploit precisely this fear – the social death that follows punishment – to silence women, and through that silence they have succeeded in depriving half of the population of their most basic human rights. These mechanisms of fear are what allow the Taliban to sustain their authoritarian grip on power.

This fear-driven system is at the same time ideologically fortified by political Islam, and it is here that I am reminded of those videos we were shown as part of our religious education. And I find myself thinking about what it means to show violence to a child and call it justice. The lesson was not only about religious law. It was about the relationship between the self and power. It was teaching us that our bodies, our choices, and our futures were not our own, and that they belonged to a system larger than us, more certain than us, and prepared to hurt us if we forgot that.

The father in Uruzgan whose son was flogged said it best, without meaning to theorize anything. “Better they had killed him,” he said. Because public flogging is designed to be worse than death. It destroys not just a body, but a person’s place in the world, their family’s dignity, their community’s sense of safety. It is meant to make everyone who witnesses it, whether in person or by word of mouth, calculate the cost of any defiance.

That is what political Islam, in its Taliban form, has built in Afghanistan. Not a state, not a legal system, not a society, but a sustained lesson in fear, taught to an entire nation, with stadiums instead of classrooms, and bodies instead of screens.

References

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. P. 464, 465. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. P. 3-5, 57-58. SECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1995