KABUL, Afghanistan -- This is a country without faces.
Postage stamps show landscapes; currency is engraved with mosques. Government ministry walls are adorned with calligraphy, hotel rooms feature floral designs.
In the bazaars, there are posters and calendars for sale depicting Mecca in a hundred styles, but none showing people. In the newspapers, stories are accompanied by photos of fruit stands and Islamic artifacts.
Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban, which enforces its strict interpretation of the Islamic ban on human images and idols, which are viewed as an insult to God. Two weeks ago, the Taliban shocked the world by demolishing two 1,500-year-old stone statues of Buddha.
The ban starts with the Taliban's religious hierarchy. Mohammad Omar, its supreme leader, is a reclusive cleric who is rarely seen and never photographed. The Prophet Muhammad is never depicted.
A few Taliban officials allow foreign journalists to take their pictures at news conferences, but visitors are ordered not to photograph "any living thing." Taliban police frequently detain those they catch in the act or confiscate their cameras.
The faces of Afghan women are especially invisible. The Taliban says that if a man views a strange woman's face, he may be tempted to impure thoughts or acts. As a consequence, women are forbidden to leave their homes without wearing a head-to-toe cape called a burqa. If a woman needs a passport or identity photo, it must have only her eyes showing.
Men are partly hidden too, with covered heads and long beards required for males past puberty. Men whose beards are too short may be jailed until they grow, and newly arrived Muslims hide their stubbled chins beneath cloaks.
Perhaps because adult faces are muffled, those of Kabul's children seem especially sharp. They peer from every alley, workshop and garbage heap. They thrust into car windows, begging for coins. They glance up from grimy tasks, streaked with dust.
The ban has a sentimental cost. Couples marry without wedding portraits, unless they can afford to cross into Pakistan for the ceremony. Parents die without leaving their children any likeness. Family snapshots may be confiscated at the Kabul airport, especially if they depict men and women together.
There are a few camera shops in Kabul, and most ID pictures are taken by sidewalk vendors with ancient wooden box cameras.
At one camera shop, the proprietor said the religious police, a powerful, autonomous force, can enter at any time. If they find photos of people larger than a passport head shot, he said, "they tear them into little pieces."
In a pharmacy, several customers discuss the ban. "When I was young, I didn't know that taking a picture was making an idol, but now I know," the pharmacist said. "Yes, you can be born and die without a photograph, but you will go to paradise."
An elderly man who had studied abroad shook his head sadly. "It is not normal," he said, but added that the ban on pictures of women is "a very small problem compared to the problems of living. Women cannot work, they cannot go to school. Those are the real problems."
A turbaned member of the Taliban militia entered the shop. "If I say I don't take pictures now but I once did, someone will think I was a communist," he said with a laugh.
Afghanistan was governed by a communist party and then occupied by the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Beneath its faceless veneer, Kabul is full of photographs. Treasured family portraits are hidden in trunks. Shopkeepers hide postcards of Afghan women in traditional costumes behind shelves of books. Others offer prohibited photos of the destroyed Buddhas.
One antiques dealer explained cautiously that he was not allowed to sell any antiquity that contained a human image, but after a cup of tea he brought out a packet of prized postcards: portraits of traditional Afghan kings in their military and tribal regalia.
Around the corner was an ice cream cart, decorated with a painting of a little girl holding an ice cream cone. The girl's face had been painstakingly scratched off.