On 11 December 2024, a 29-year-old Iranian woman named Parastoo Ahmadi sat before a camera in a long black dress, her head uncovered, her lips painted a bright colour, and sang. The performance, streamed live on YouTube, was not held in a concert hall but in an undisclosed indoor space, accompanied by seven musicians. It drew millions of views. Beneath the video, she wrote: “I am a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. It is a right I could not ignore: to sing for the land I love with all my heart.” The act was a direct challenge to the Islamic Republic’s prohibition on women singing solo before a mixed audience, a rule rooted in the notion that the female voice is a source of temptation and therefore sin.

Within days, Ahmadi and her collaborators were arrested, then released. Months later, a criminal court in the holy city of Qom sentenced her to 74 lashes for “offending public decency” and producing “vulgar and immoral content” online. The seven musicians received the same corporal punishment; all eight were barred from leaving Iran and from any artistic activity for two years. The sentence adds to a growing list of artists and activists penalised under the mandatory hijab laws that have been enforced with renewed intensity since the 2022 protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody. Meanwhile, in the Afghan city of Herat, a parallel crackdown was unfolding. In early June, morality police from the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice swept up dozens of women for not wearing the chador or burqa adequately. When protests erupted—joined, unusually, by men—security forces opened fire, killing at least one person and wounding several others, according to accounts gathered by Italian NGOs still operating in the country and by Afghan analysts abroad. More women were seized from the streets in the following days; their whereabouts remain unknown.

Viewed from Tehran, the compulsory hijab is framed as a pillar of social stability and national identity; officials have deployed facial-recognition technology and patrols to monitor compliance. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have constructed what some scholars and activists term a system of “gender apartheid.” Since 2021, they have progressively expelled women from secondary and university education, most employment, public life, the justice system, and even humanitarian work—Afghanistan is the only country on earth where girls are legally barred from schooling beyond the primary level. UN Women estimates that nearly 80 per cent of Afghan girls are now out of school. A new decree bans civil servants from using smartphones, a measure that NGOs fear will cripple aid operations. The restrictions form a dense web: a recent law treats the sound of a woman’s voice in public as a sin, while a separation code strengthens religious courts’ authority over conjugal life. The result, analysts note, is a Catch-22—women cannot study medicine, yet they may only be treated by female doctors, who are vanishing.

International reaction has been vocal but fragmented. The European Union condemned the Herat violence; the United Nations expressed alarm. Human rights organisations have long decried flogging as cruel and inhuman punishment. Yet Afghan researcher Zalmai Nishat, of the University of Sussex, points to a less visible dynamic: Western governments, he argues, have continued to send roughly $40 million in cash to the Taliban regime, funds that help consolidate its power. In Iran, the lashing sentence for a YouTube concert has galvanised women’s rights activists worldwide, who see it as a repression of artistic expression. The contrast between Ahmadi’s globally visible act of defiance and the near-total invisibility of Afghan women—arrested, silenced, their protests fading from headlines within days—underscores the different mechanisms by which the two regimes enforce their codes.

Ahmadi’s video remains online, her uncovered head and steady voice preserved in millions of screens. In Herat, the women forced into police vehicles have vanished into a silence that, for now, no stream can penetrate.