How the Taliban are Institutionalizing the Propagation of Virtue and Enjoinment of Vice in Afghanistan

This article examines the body of rules that the Taliban has enacted to institutionalize the propagation of virtue and enjoinment of vice by presenting a critique of the institution from within the Islamic tradition. In so doing, this study reveals important tensions in the way that the Taliban has tried to constitute the Ministry of Propagation of Virtue and Enjoinment of Vice jurisprudentially, suggesting similar tensions in the project of Islamic state-building more generally. It illustrates the incongruities that exist in the jurisprudential constitution of this institution between a desire to constitute the ministry as the morality police of an Islamic state and the competing demands of due process, prohibition of extrajudicial punishments, protection of privacy, respect for jurisprudential plurality, and equal application of sharia to the ruler and the ruled in Islamic jurisprudence.