Taliban minister says women can attend university, but not alongside men

He said women would not be kept out of schools as they were from 1996 to 2001, when the Taliban last ruled the country under a fundamentalist Islamist code. But he said Taliban officials would conduct a curriculum review, and suggested the group would not abandon its hard line. “We will not allow female and male students to study in one classroom,” Haqqani said. “Coeducation is in opposition to sharia law.”

Questions of how the Taliban will handle culture, education and civic freedoms have loomed over Afghanistan since the group defeated government forces and returned to power last month. The fate of women, perhaps more than anything else, has been a central concern in the early weeks of Taliban rule.

Women in the past week have led protests in several major cities to demand they be allowed to keep their government jobs — only to have their demonstrations broken up forcibly by Taliban fighters patrolling the streets. Journalists covering an unapproved women’s march in Kabul were also detained and whipped.

Meanwhile, pro-Taliban women have held a countermarch, and a group wearing niqabs — a conservative face veil showing only their eyes — sat in a Kabul University lecture hall on Saturday to hear speakers inveigh against the liberal women who protested earlier in the week.

The Taliban dismissed women from government ministries shortly after seizing Kabul on Aug. 15, saying the work was not appropriate for female employees. And as classes resumed in the past week for the first time since the Taliban takeover, some universities already began imposing gender segregation, or classrooms divided by curtains.

On Tuesday, the Taliban unveiled an all-male caretaker cabinet drawn entirely from its own ranks. That brought criticism from foreign governments, which have said they will monitor how the Taliban rolls out its social policies to determine whether to extend diplomatic recognition to the caretaker government.

The Taliban raised its white flag over the presidential palace on Saturday, the 20th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to signify it was beginning the business of governing.

In the first news conference on Sunday, Haqqani took pains to emphasize gender segregation in the classroom.

In most circumstances, he said, women should be taught only by female teachers, but in the event of a shortage of lecturers, male instructors could teach women from behind a curtain, or via video call. “We will provide classrooms with a video screen,” he said.