Afghanistan’s ruling Taleban militia is enforcing a fatwa, or religious edict, stating that religious minorities, primarily Hindus, must wear yellow badges to distinguish themselves from the Muslim majority. A Taleban official said the edict will protect Hindus from police enforcing Muslim rules. University of Oregon international studies professor Anita Weiss, however, believes the Taleban are crossing a dangerous line by marking people based on their religion, which could lead to persecution and genocide. "This is enormously important from a human rights standpoint, because a Muslim nation is saying that a manufactured religious order justifies its singling out of religious minorities," says Weiss, a nationally recognized expert on Pakistan, South Asia and Muslim societies. She stresses that the Taleban hold extreme views and lack wide support in the Islamic world. "They’re creating their own brand of Islam and cutting themselves off from the rest of the Muslim world. To create a state-sponsored mechanism by which non-Muslim minorities can be readily identified has no basis whatsoever in any school of Islamic thought," Weiss says. Christians and Jews have a certain status accorded to them in Islam, while Hindus, the largest religious minority in Afghanistan, do not. She fears that the Taleban could decree that certain kinds of religious minorities–called "kafirs" and including Hindus–must be converted or killed. "That is what really worries me. I would hope that all Muslim states publicly condemn this pronouncement, which has no place in Islam, and condemn that a fatwa was created to justify it." The Taleban also sparked international outrage in March, when they destroyed two giant historic Buddha statues and other relics they deemed offensive to Islam.

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