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After a council of Afghan clerics issued restrictive guidelines for women, later embraced by President Hamid Karzai, young Afghans streamed to social media sites to lampoon the rulings, reports BBC Persian's Tahir Qadiry.

"It's outrageous," wrote one young Afghan on his Facebook page.

"The next thing they'll be saying is that Afghanistan needs to be divided up in two - one half for men and the other half for women."

This was just one of thousands of comments posted on social media sites by young Afghans this week, after their country's top religious council said that men and women should not mix at school, work or in other everyday situations.

When President Hamid Karzai endorsed the council's recommendation at a news conference in Kabul, the Afghan blogosphere went into overdrive.

New sites have been set up to campaign against what critics are calling gender segregation.