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“What I would say about the Taliban is that they are an outlier in the Muslim world.
The old Taliban had been formed in seminaries of the Deoband school of Islam. I think of Deobandis as sort of like Haredim or ultra-Orthodox among Jews. The school developed in British colonial India and was a way for Indian Muslims to assert their identities against British Christian rule and the Hindu majority. It is a sectarian movement and the vast majority of Indian Muslims rejected it. Its seminaries in northern Pakistan attracted Saudi funding, and so some seminaries mixed Deobandi teachings with some ideas from the hard line, rigid Saudi Wahhabi movement.
But the Taliban were also the result of the chaos and violence of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Many were orphans. They were misogynists, knowing few women. They were militant in a country of then 16 million where a million had died and three million had been wounded and 7 million displaced.
Mainstream Sunni Muslims in Egypt (population 100 million) or Turkey (pop. 82 million) do not agree with most Taliban practices and beliefs. In fact, almost no one outside Afghanistan shares many beliefs or practices with the Taliban. They are an Afghan (and to some extent northern Pakistan) phenomenon, and even most Afghans and Pukhtun Pakistanis don’t share their views.”
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Taliban "Islam" versus the Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - British academic Abdul-Azim Ahmed of Cardiff University, an expert on mosques in the UK, complained …
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – British academic Abdul-Azim Ahmed of Cardiff University, an expert on mosques in the UK, complained on Twitter that he was invited onto television to debate whether the Taliban represent Islam:
I sympathize with his despondency that the European and North American press can still ask a stupid question like that in 2021. Muslims are nearly 1/4 of humanity and, as you might imagine, their practice of Islam varies widely. To say the least.
I addressed a similar question regarding ISIL in a Nation essay, How Islamic is the Islamic State?
All you have to do is think about the manifestations of Christianity. You have your Kentucky snake handlers and your QAnon militants, some of whom carried guns at the Capitol insurrection. Then you have your mainstream Presbyterians and Congregationalists. You have your Order of the Solar Temple cult inside Catholicism. And then you have mainstream American Roman Catholicism. And we haven’t even gone into Evangelicalism in Brazil or all the different ways Christianity is practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. There, you have millions of ordinary Catholics and Protestants but also the virulent Christian terrorist organization, the Lord’s Resistance Army. If we go back in time, you have your Protestant Peasants War in the early 1500s in Germany. You get the picture.
In my view, the Taliban resemble the Ku Klux Klan. New York Times journalist David Sanger complained when I said that, saying that the Taliban took over a whole country and the KKK is a fringe. But I’d just like to point out that the KKK had enormous influence in the Democratic Party in the 1920s and that it took over the state of Indiana for a while in the 1920s, having the governor, a majority of the state assembly, and 250,000 cadre members. And today’s KKK was an important constituency for Trumpism and influential on the former guy’s policies.
Likewise, there are all kinds of Muslims. Here’s a picture I snapped in Tunis in late spring, 2012. It has two Muslim women in it. One is a traffic cop. The other is standing in the background. There isn’t a veil of any sort in sight.
The Tunisian constitution, passed by a constituent assembly in 2014 that was dominated by the pro-Islam Renaissance (al-Nahda) Party, specifies the equality of women and men. The US constitution does not have such a provision, in part because the Equal Rights Amendment was successfully opposed by the U.S. Christian Right.
What I would say about the Taliban is that they are an outlier in the Muslim world. The old Taliban had been formed in seminaries of the Deoband school of Islam. I think of Deobandis as sort of like Haredim or ultra-Orthodox among Jews. The school developed in British colonial India and was a way for Indian Muslims to assert their identities against British Christian rule and the Hindu majority. It is a sectarian movement and the vast majority of Indian Muslims rejected it. Its seminaries in northern Pakistan attracted Saudi funding, and so some seminaries mixed Deobandi teachings with some ideas from the hard line, rigid Saudi Wahhabi movement. But the Taliban were also the result of the chaos and violence of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Many were orphans. They were misogynists, knowing few women. They were militant in a country of then 16 million where a million had died and three million had been wounded and 7 million displaced.
Mainstream Sunni Muslims in Egypt (population 100 million) or Turkey (pop. 82 million) do not agree with most Taliban practices and beliefs. In fact, almost no one outside Afghanistan shares many beliefs or practices with the Taliban. They are an Afghan (and to some extent northern Pakistan) phenomenon, and even most Afghans and Pukhtun Pakistanis don’t share their views.
Here is a picture I took in May, 2010, of Egyptian undergraduates getting ready for a pop music concert. Young men and women socially mixed. Most of the young women had head coverings, but they jumped up and down and danced during the concert, so that wasn’t a sign of being puritanical. None of this behavior would be allowed by the Taliban, who believe in strict gender segregation, what some critics call gender apartheid, and at least the old Taliban would not have allowed women university students.
Well, you might ask, sure, there are lots of liberal Muslims nowadays, but are the Taliban closer to the Muslims scripture, the Qur’an?
No. Just, no.
I wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an, which has become a midlist book and has been warmly welcomed by many Muslims around the world (it has been translated and published in Arabic, Persian, Bahasa Indonesian and Serbo-Croation, and an Albanian edition is in the works).
Here are some Qur’an quotes that the Taliban routinely ignore:
Stories 28:52-54 says of believers,
“They will be given their reward twice over inasmuch as they patiently endured, and repel evil with good deeds and shared the provisions we gave them. And when they hear abusive talk, they turn away from it and say, ‘to us our deeds and to you yours; peace be upon you– we do not seek out the unruly.'”
That is, the Qur’an urges a kind of turning the other cheek in the face of mere harassment, and urges returning evil deeds with good ones, and wishing peace and well-being (salam) on all. The Qur’an does permit warfare in self-defense if a community is militarily attacked, but sees that as a last resort. The first option recommended is to try to win the enemy over with kindness.
This sentiment is repeated:
Distinguished 41:34.
“Good and evil are not equal. Repel the latter with the highest good, and behold, your enemy will become a devoted patron.”
The Taliban are sectarian, hyper-Sunni and have massacred Shiites. Yet the Qur’an discouraged sectarianism in the community
The Family of Imran 3:103:
“Hold fast, all of you, to the cord of God, and do not divide into factions. Remember God’s favor to you, inasmuch as you were enemies, but he united your hearts–so that by his blessing you became siblings. You were on the brink of a pit of fire, and he delivered you from it. In this way does God make clear his signs to you, so that you might be guided.”
The Family of Imran 3:105:
“Do not be like those who divided into sects and disputed, after clear verses came to them, for severe torment awaits them.”
The Qur’an only allows defensive war, but the Taliban took Afghanistan by aggressive war, twice.
The Cow 2:190 says, “Fight in the path of God those who enter into combat against you, but do not transgress. God does not love transgressors.
The Taliban have contempt for women and for some ethnic groups, like the Hazara Shiites, and persecute them. The Qur’an in contrast says that men have something to learn from women, and each people has something to learn from other peoples:
The Chambers 49:13 says, “People, we have created you male and female and made you nations and tribes so that you may come to know one another. The noblest of you in the sight of God is the most pious of you. God is knowing and aware.”
I could go on but you get the picture. Are the Taliban a kind of Muslim? Sure. Are they true to basic Qur’anic values? No. They have substituted later oral traditions for the Qur’an and have interpreted the latter in a militant way born of anti-colonial sentiment.
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Jim Fussell
Admin
For about four decades from 1933 to 1973, Afghanistan was a stable, tolerant society under a monarch respected by all the country’s various religious and ethnic groups.
Civil war came from outside military interference, not from within.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Zahir_Shah
EN.M.WIKIPEDIA.ORG
Mohammed Zahir Shah - WikipediaMohammed Zahir Shah - Wikipedia
Mark L Grantham
In my eyes, I see the same sort of behavior in the Pentacostal and Evangelical sects. Unfortunately, many people seem to equate the Taliban with Islam. I lived in Syria for 4 years, I was around the world of Islam, and the world of Christianity. These 2 worlds coexisted beautifully.
Shawn Lazar
Mark L Grantham Yes, my old neighborhood was razed, and the majority of my neighbors beheaded or enslaved by the local Victory Life Pentecostal Church.
Shawn Lazar
Mark L Grantham Yes, just the same. Like I said with the murder and beheading and rape and slavery and whatnot. I try to avoid Pentecostals at all cost, for fear of my life.
Andres Portilla Garcia
Muy interesante.
Sharon Smith
Since you are not Muslim, I think you're not qualified to compare the various sects of Islam, without bias.
Belinda Smith
Sharon Smith I agree to an extent, even if you are Muslim it really depends on your amount of understanding. Just like the different sects of Christianity there is that in Islam as well. So they’re will always be an amount of biases. Nevertheless, we can still learn and understand one another the most truest aspect’s of a certain type of Faith traditions within each of these sects.
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Maggie Meehan
Sharon Smith, having just finished a long comparison of Christian and Muslim relations from the beginning of Islam to the end of the 20th century, written by a Pakistani who identifies as humanist, I am glad to see your caution about bias. However I think this history is helpful.
Sharon Smith
Maggie Meehan please do not misunderstand. I said nothing to dissuade you from learning and trying to understand. My issue is with your Christocentic proclivity for biased judgement.
Maggie Meehan
My christocentric proclivity? I would certainly like examples of that!
Norlyn R Dimmitt
Sharon Smith, I'm a White Male, and the two primary subtexts of my life work are #GenderEquity and #RacialEquity. I can never entirely escape my blinders/bias, but I presume to know a lot about racism and patriarchy, from decades of attending to those systems of oppression.
I'm curious if you believe that women are capable of critiquing patriarchy, since it involves making proclamations about men from a women-centric "bias".
As a Christian who is deeply "Christo-centric", I'm also curious about how that translates to bias. Bias loses all purchase if we equate it with any frame of reference, since nobody operates outside a frame.
Isn't the right question whether or not a frame of reference is oppressive or liberating?
And if my "Christo-centrism" is liberating, while the Taliban's distortion of the Quran is oppressive, what does it mean to check my "bias"?
Do you believe that some frames of reference are morally superior to other frames?
www.CompassionateCitizens.us
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Sharon Smith
Maggie Meehan Not necessarily talking about you, personally. I don't know you well enough.
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Norlyn R Dimmitt You're using the wrong analogy, here. Women can criticize Patriarchy because we are victimized by it. The issue is "power", who has it, who abuses it and who wields it against whom, NOT gender or race.
And, as an Indigenous Black woman, you will never know as much as I do about racism or patriarchy than I do, no matter how much you study. My knowledge comes from both study and lived experience, which you can never know as a White Christian male in a world dominated by white supremacy.
Stop trippin.
Maggie Meehan
Sharon Smith; thank you for the clarification. It certainly was a surprise.
Sharon Smith
Maggie Meehan Don't get it twisted. Even if I don't know you well, I know you are Wyte and have therefore been indoctrinated to uphold whyte supremacy culture.
Norlyn R Dimmitt
Sharon Smith, I don't know if she was in fact indoctrinared, or when Maggie Meehan recognized and rejected indoctrination in white supremacy. Neither do you.
I know that I was indoctrinated, by my fundamentalist father, and I rejected it at age 11, 49 years ago.
I don't claim to be perfectly enlightened about racism and patriarchy.
But you seem to be painting every white person with the same brush, and seem more interested in criticising allies than collaborating with them.
How does this further the cause of #GenderEquity or #RacialEquity?
www.CompassionateCitizens.us
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Sharon Smith
Norlyn R Dimmitt You are doing a great job demonstrating why you are not my ally. …
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Norlyn R Dimmitt
Sharon Smith and you are demonstrating the art of alientaing actual allies. I've dedicated 26 years of my life to #GenderEquity and #RacialEquity, and am appreciated by many of the leaders in both of those causes, including civil rights leader Bobby Austin. So the problem is not me. I experience you as a bully (whether that is your intent or not), and I pray that you some day recognize that bullying is not restricted to white males. You do not have a monopoly on truth, and you do not win allies by deliberately offending them.
Belinda Smith
Norlyn R Dimmitt I haven’t followed the whole line of posts in this thread. However, I think the issue is that you are coming of as someone who is more knowledgeable than a person with lived experience. So, I am going to say that you might want to rethink your approach. Sharon’s lived experience definitely needs to be part of your understanding of what it means to be an ally. Trust me when I say, I’ve made this mistake myself. Sometimes, we should just sit back and listen to understand.
Norlyn R Dimmitt
Sharon Smith nobody can speak of any individual's viewpoint (other than their own) without bias and misunderstanding, never mind a group's shared beliefs. This does not invalidate the attempt to understand one another, which includes expressing what we believe about one another. I'm not sure that I understand the point of your critique. www.CompassionateCitizens.us
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Maggie Meehan
I am delighted to see this review and to learn of this book. The comparison between the broad subcultures of Islam and Christianity is essential for understanding the Taliban.
Sharing, thank you.
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