Four Afghan men were ordered to report to the Taliban government’s department of vice and virtue for dressing in costumes inspired by the TV series Peaky Blinders.
The friends were told that their clothing was “in conflict with Afghan and Islamic values”, a Taliban spokesman told the BBC, adding the values in Peaky Blinders went against Afghan culture.
In videos posted online, the men, who have been released, can be seen posing in flat caps and three-piece suits similar to those worn in the series set in England soon after World War One.
Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, they have imposed a number of restrictions on daily life in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.
“Even jeans would have been acceptable, but the values in the Peaky Blinders series are against Afghan culture,” Saiful Islam Khyber, a spokesman for the Taliban government’s provincial department of Vice and Virtue in Herat city told the BBC.
The men, all in their early twenties, come from the town of Jibrail in Herat province. They were ordered to report to the Taliban’s “morality police” on Sunday, and presented themselves for questioning in Herat the following day.
“They were promoting foreign culture and imitating film actors in Herat,” Khyber wrote on social media, adding that they had undergone a “rehabilitation programme”.
They were not formally arrested, “only summoned and advised and released”, Khyber told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
“We have our own religious and cultural values, and especially for clothing we have specific traditional styles,” he said.
“The clothing they wore has no Afghan identity at all and does not match our culture. Secondly, their actions were an imitation of actors from a British movie. Our society is Muslim; if we are to follow or imitate someone, we should follow our righteous religious predecessors in good and lawful matters.”
The men could be seen thanking officials for their advice and saying they were unaware they had violated any laws in a video released by the ministry after they were questioned – though it is unclear under what circumstances the interview was recorded.
“I have innocently been sharing content that was against Sharia which had many viewers,” one said in the recording.
He said he had been “summoned and advised”, and would no longer do “anything like this”.
In an interview with YouTube channel Herat-Mic uploaded at the end of November, before they were summoned, the friends said they admired the fashion displayed in the series, adding that they had received positive reactions from locals.
“At first we were hesitant, but once we went outside, people liked our style, stopped us in the streets, and wanted to take photos with us,” one of the men said, according to a translation by CBS News.
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