Taliban’s acting deputy foreign minister urged his senior leadership to establish schools for Afghan girls, in one of the sharpest public condemnations of a policy that has contributed to the authorities’ worldwide isolation.

Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai stated in a speech over the weekend that limits on girls and women’s education were incompatible with Islamic Shariah law, requesting that “leaders of the Islamic Emirate to open the doors of education,” according to Tolo, a local broadcaster.

He asserted that injustice was being done against “twenty million people, out of a forty million people population,” and noted that “in the time of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the doors of knowledge were open to both men and women.”

The statements were among the harshest public criticisms of the school closures by a Taliban official in recent years. Taliban insiders and diplomats have previously told Reuters that the supreme spiritual leader Hibatullah Akhundzada imposed the closures despite internal dissent.