Customs & Cuisine of Afghanistan

Customs and Cuisine of Afghanistan

By Sheila Dunn

Afghanistan (Persian: Afghan = a member of the ethnic Pashtuns, stan = land of) is a landlocked country in Asia located between Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China. Home to one of the early known human civilizations in the world, Afghanistan has a diverse and tumultuous history.

Contrary to what the name might imply, Afghanistan is home to many regional subcultures associated with their respective tribes and is not one monolithic ethnic group/culture. Individual Afghan identity is strongly aligned with their ethnic tribe, such that the country has long endured as a patchwork of contending ethnic factions and ever-shifting alliances.

Lying along the Ancient Silk trade routes connecting southern and eastern Asia to Europe and the Middle East, Afghanistan has long been under attack by empire-builders ranging from Alexander the Great to the British to the Mongols. All hopeful conquerors were defeated by the harsh landscape, the multitude of ethnic groups and the tireless resistance of its fierce and fiercely independent people.

The terrain and the climate are forbidding in this country that is slightly smaller than Texas. The topography is a mix of rugged mountains (the Hindu Kush range being the largest and most prominent) with sizable settlement clusters at the foothills and in the plains. Afghanistan weather varies by region, but overall has intensely hot and dry summers and bitterly cold winters with heavy snowfall in the highlands.

The People

About 45 million people (2026 est.) call Afghanistan home, clustered mostly in the foothills and periphery of the Hindu Kush mountain range. In general, the east is more densely settled, while the south is sparsely populated. The capital, Kabul, has a population of about 5.6 million (2026 est.). Most Afghans are rural; only about 27% of the population is urban. The absence of a census (the last one was a partial count in 1979) and large fluctuating refugee populations makes these estimates rough approximations.

The median age in Afghanistan is young at 17.4 years. While the fertility rate has been declining steadily – down from nearly 7 children per woman in the early 2000s – it is still one of the highest in the world at 4.57 births per woman.

Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic, highly diverse society with at least 14 distinct ethnic groups. The four major ethnicities are the Pashtun (42%), Tajik (27%), Hazara (9%), and Uzbek (9%). Conflicts centered around ethnicity have rendered it a sensitive subject to self-report, making data on ethnicity hard to estimate reliably.

Most Afghans are at the very least bilingual or trilingual. Afghan Persian (also known as Dari) and Pashto are the official languages, but Uzbek, English, Turkmen, Urdu, and several others are spoken in the country.

Allegiance to the Islamic faith is what unites the many subcultures and ethnic groups in the country as 99.7% of Afghans identify as Muslim. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has remained a haven for some international Islamist terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP) and Al Qaeda. However, the Taliban enforces a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, practiced by 85-90% of Afghans, including the Pashtun. Shi’a Muslims comprise 10–15%, with a significant portion being of Hazara ethnicity. Less than 0.3% of Afghani’s are Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians. The current regime uses religious edicts to crack down on all Afghans who express dissent or different views of Islam than Sunni dogma. Ongoing attacks by the ISKP pose an ongoing threat to Shi’a Muslims in particular.

The Government and Restrictions on Women and Girls

In 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks in the US on Sept. 11, the US led a military campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the repressive Sunni Islamist government that harbored the group in Afghanistan. In the subsequent 20 years, an elected Afghan government replaced the Taliban and, with significant U.S. and international support, made modest improvements in most measures of human development, although Afghanistan remained one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries. During the 20 year conflict, the US and its allies suffered thousands of military casualties mostly at the hands of a resilient Taliban insurgency, who retook power in 2021 when the US withdrew.

Despite its history as one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries, the Taliban’s return to power worsened the economy and deepened the humanitarian crisis. Most foreign aid was cut off or funds frozen as the Taliban government is not internationally recognized as a legitimately elected government. Russia is thought to be the sole country to officially recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, although it is difficult to assess conditions inside Afghanistan. Several other countries (Iran, China, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) operate embassies in Kabul and/or have allowed the Taliban to staff Afghan diplomatic facilities abroad.

The United States disbursed over $3.8 billion in humanitarian and development assistance for Afghanistan after the 2021 Taliban takeover, making it the largest international donor for the country during that period, but all US assistance to Afghanistan stopped in 2025. By the end of 2025, more than 22 million Afghans were experiencing food insecurity, with women and girls disproportionately affected. Following the lead of the US, other countries decreased or terminated their funding, and large-scale forced returns of Afghans from Iran and Pakistan left millions in need of humanitarian aid and assistance. Meantime, the UN World Food Program struggles to obtain donor funding to support feeding the Afghan people.

Fears that the new Taliban regime would be reminiscent of the past Taliban regime proved to be warranted. Since the Taliban regained power, there have been crackdowns on reporters, journalists, and any others who dissent with their policies. The “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” an organization that during their previous rule enforced regulations and restrictions on behavior, was quickly reestablished.

In the initial days following their takeover, Taliban officials declared that they would strictly follow Sharīʿa (Islamic law) and in the ensuing years, women and girls have been denied access to education, economic opportunity, and so many other freedoms that international rights experts and legal scholars have termed women’s treatment in Afghanistan “Gender Apartheid.”

Afghanistan is reputably the most repressive country in the world regarding women’s rights. The Taliban have systematically dismantled virtually every human right of Afghan women and girls through the issuance of more than 100 edicts that ban girls from secondary school, strip women of employment, and limit freedom of movement and access to justice. In 2025 alone, at least 170 women were publicly flogged.

Key restrictions to women’s rights currently include:

Women are excluded from all education above sixth grade except for madrasas, or religious schools. Some Afghan women have courageously continued to provide informal education to girls in private homes or online.
Women are not allowed to leave their homes without being accompanied by a close male relative (mahram).
Women must fully cover their bodies when outside of their homes or risk punishment. Male relatives of women who do not wear chadras/burqas are also punished.
Women are banned from public parks, gyms, and bath houses.
Women are forbidden to look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage.
Women’s freedom of expression is severely curtailed. They cannot speak “loudly,” laugh, sing, or read aloud in public. Further, women cannot let their voices be heard even in their own homes if there are non-related men present. Women’s voices are banned from radio and TV in some provinces.
Women are banned from leadership roles. In 2020, Afghan women held over 25% of seats in Parliament and could run for president. Today, they hold no positions in the de facto ruling
Women are banned from formal employment, including civil service, NGOs, and even from delivering humanitarian aid in the United Nations offices throughout Afghanistan. The few informal workplaces that employ women must provide separate facilities to segregate them from men. In mid-2025, the Taliban shut down beauty salons run by women in their homes and a women’s radio station.
Women are only allowed to receive healthcare from a female physician, and the Taliban prevents women from receiving education to become physicians. Without changes in the law, there will be no healthcare available at all for women in the future. Women currently make up roughly 27% of general practitioners, 18% of specialist doctors, and 29% of nurses. Female healthcare professionals require a male guardian to commute to work, and are forbidden to speak to their male colleagues at work. With no new female graduates entering the system and experienced professionals leaving or retiring, the UN warns Afghanistan could lose up to 5,400 female healthcare workers by 2030.
Husbands have the authority to punish their wives, eroding women’s access to due process and impartial justice.
Women who leave their marital home without their husbands’ permission are punished by jail time and/or lashings.
Women who are accused of apostasy (not believing in Sunni Islam) are sentenced to life imprisonment, accompanied by 10 lashes every three days. This provision applies only to women and ignores the reality that accusations of apostasy require little evidence and are easily weaponized, placing women at constant risk of arbitrary detention and torture based solely on allegation.
Universities are prohibited from teaching books written by women.
The silence of a virgin girl who has reached puberty is considered consent for marriage.

The Taliban’s edicts function primarily as mechanisms of control and intimidation of women and girls. In July 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Taliban’s leaders for “the crime against humanity of persecution … on gender grounds.”

As was the case under Afghanistan’s former penal code, the Taliban criminalizes same-sex relations and anyone who is non-binary or identifies in any way other than cisgender.

In early 2026, the Taliban issued a new two-point decree containing the most alarming provisions yet, normalizing violence against women, and dividing society into classes, one of which is “enslaved.” The regulation renders ordinary behavior criminal and converts citizens into enforcers of Taliban ideology. For instance, punishments may be carried out by the husband and the “master” who are explicitly empowered to discipline their wives, who are “property” with no legal agency of their own. If a husband strikes his wife with excessive beating resulting in fracture or physical injury, and the wife proves her claim before the judge, the husband is sentenced to 15 days of imprisonment. By contrast, harm to animals carries a harsher penalty. In practice, it is impossible for a wife to prove her claim of gender based violence when:

women need a male relative to accompany them to the police station or courthouse, and,
women who could examine the woman for evidence are not employed in the Afghan judicial system.

Basic judicial services may be more inaccessible to women in remote and rural areas where traditional norms and patriarchal attitudes are often prevalent and more entrenched. Geographic isolation, lack of transportation, and poverty limit women’s access to justice in these cases, and dispute resolution may be handled informally and is male dominated. The absence of formal reporting channels has led to serious underreporting of domestic and intimate partner violence.

Widows and female-headed households who are deprived of male guardians and also barred from employment often face deep social stigma, exclusion, and economic hardship. Their property and inheritance rights are disregarded, and to provide for their families, some are forced to rely on street vending or begging.

The UN notes a growing mental health crisis of anxiety, depression, and despair among women and girls linked to social isolation and loss of autonomy. Constant exposure to surveillance, threats, and legalized discrimination and violence in both private and public spaces creates for Afghan women a climate of chronic fear, trauma, learned helplessness, and erosion of self-worth and personal agency. For children raised under such a system, violence and inequality are normalized, shaping a generation taught to accept the systematic subordination of women as ordinary and inevitable realities of life.

Islamic scholars assert that the Taliban’s repressive edicts stand in direct contradiction to Islamic legal principles, which emphasize equality, justice, and human dignity. Rather, the edicts constitute gender-based persecution equating to gender apartheid under international law. In mid-2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, charging them with crimes against humanity for persecution of women and girls and of LGBTQ people.

The Family Unit

The patriarchal family unit is traditionally the norm in all areas of Afghanistan. Among the nomadic factions of the rural population in the Northern regions of the country, the family unit lives in round yurts which are ascribed to a Central Asian influence. In the Southern regions, black goat-hair tents, a Middle Eastern influence, are more common. Qalʿahs (“fortresses”) are the mud-brick and stone villages that are common among the sedentary populations of the northern and western parts of Afghanistan. In the eastern parts, wooden, multi-storied housing is more common.

Over a third of homes lack access to potable water, and adequate sanitation is a continuing struggle. While the majority of Afghans now have electricity, only about a third (mostly urban dwellers) use the national electric grid, with the rest relying on off-grid systems.

Gender roles are rigid in their definition and absolute in their observance. Women’s place is restricted to the home, wherein their role is to care for the home (cook, clean, sew, weave) and the children. Even within the home are “private” and “public” areas, delineated to prevent the women of the house – who would stay in the “private” areas – from interacting with visitors who are welcome to the “public” areas. In the absence of guests, men and women in a family unit dine together. When guests visit, however, the men would dine with the guests while the women would dine separately in the private areas of the home. Children, however, are allowed to move seamlessly between the “private” and “public” areas of the home.

Endogamy, the practice of marrying within kin groups, is the norm. While polygamy is allowed, it is infrequently practiced, and occurs in instances such as a man feeling obligated to marry and “be responsible” for his brother’s widow. Marriage is viewed as a responsibility that adults ought to fulfill and divorce is unacceptable and stigmatized.

Cuisine

The spices, herbs, and techniques of the many cuisines that the Afghans came in contact with, both voluntarily and less voluntarily, have contributed to the rich variety in Afghan cuisine. Indian cuisine in particular appears to be a heavy influence. From the naan (flat bread) that is a staple in both cuisines, chai (milk tea), Jalebi (fried sweet), Sheer Kurma (vermicelli pudding that is akin to rice pudding), and lassi (yogurt drink), the two cuisines have dishes that are identical in their ingredients, preparation and even their names.

The Persian (Iranian) influence is evident in the use of dried fruits and nuts in savory and sweet dishes and the use of yogurt as an accompaniment to all meals. Traditional Afghan delicacies, such as Qorma/Korma (a vegetable or meat stew), pulaos (rice pilaf), kebabs (marinated skewered meat), and lavash (flat bread with ridges and nigella or sesame seeds) have their roots in Persian cuisine.

Rice, when served, is the main dish and the star of meals. Spiced with combinations of saffron, turmeric, coriander, and dried fruits and nuts, it is complex in flavor and texture yet tempered in heat and spiciness. Quabili/Kabuli pulao, often referred to as the national dish of Afghanistan, is a baked basmati rice dish cooked in broth and mixed with julienned carrots, raisins, strips of orange peel, and chopped almonds or pistachios. Lamb (and less commonly beef) is buried in the rice mixture making it a hearty one-pot meal.

Manto/Manti dumplings that are akin to steamed dumplings filled with ground meat, and Bolani, a stuffed flatbread that is very similar to scallion pancakes, show the influences of other Asian cuisines.

Mutton (goat meat), lamb, chicken, and beef are the animal proteins most commonly used in Afghan dishes. Pork is strictly prohibited by Islam, and as is typical in regions that are land-locked, fish is rarely available.

Meals are eaten family style, with the dishes laid out on a tablecloth that is spread on the ground, referred to as dastarkhan. The right hand is used to eat, and naan or lavash serve the purpose of cutlery. A piece of naan or lavash is torn off and used to scoop up the korma. While customs are specific to tribes, common customs include placing the best dishes within easy reach/next to the guest, not stepping over or on the dastarkhan, and having a designated person serve tea.

Sources:

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/afghanistan-population/#google_vignette

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1106142

https://afghancooks.com/best-afghan-recipes-top-10/

https://flavorverse.com/traditional-afghan-foods/

https://www.everyculture.com/A-Bo/Afghanistan.html

Afghanistan: Background and US Policy in Brief 3/10/2026: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45122.

United Nations Human Rights Report: Afghanistan, 30 March, 2026: https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/03/report-afghanistans-human-rights-situation-continues-deteriorate-dramatically

Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/afghanistan

Amnesty International: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/afghanistan-new-criminal-regulation-targets-women-and-minority-groups-with-ever-harsher-punishments/

Congress: Afghanistan and US Policy in Brief: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/HTML/R45122.html#_Toc224039536

Religion. https://www.uscirf.gov/countries/afghanistan