The struggle within by Waliullah Rahmani
Fifteen years ago, I remember hearing that the Taliban had occupied Kandahar. An old Hazara man with a long beard and mustache by the name of Malik told us the news at our local mosque. He said BBC radio was reporting that the Taliban had just seized Kandahar.
Malik and the rest of the village men were overjoyed at the news. They were tired by the decades of war they had just lived through, first fighting the Soviets, and then their fellow Afghans during the civil war and chaos that ensued after the Soviets pulled out. Every single villager was more than ready to buy into the news that the Taliban were in fact the soldiers of Islam they said they were. They so wanted to believe their promises they were going to finally bring peace to this war-torn country.
They could not have been more wrong. Lucky for Malik, who died two years later, he never lived to see the horror of what the Taliban really brought to Afghanistan. Never could he have imagined the depravity of their vision.
Malik and the villagers never saw the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam coming. Their strange beliefs — a mixture of the harsh Salafi and Deobandi views of Islam — were nothing like the Islam they believed in and practiced. They could not have predicted that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that the Taliban would proclaim would be the most inhumane system of governance that the modern world has yet to see.
The rest of the world would not immediately grasp the horror of the Taliban either. It took the 9/11 attacks for the world to sense the danger the Taliban posed, as their friendly government hosted the al Qaeda planners who plotted and carried out the attacks, but even then the world would miss the full extent of the danger the Taliban posed.
The Taliban were quickly ousted in late 2001 and Western confidence was restored. Western weapons had disposed of any threat that the Taliban could pose. But the West, like the Hazara villagers in the mid 1990s, could not have been more mistaken. It will take more than modern weapons to dispel the Taliban.
Though the international community figured out the economic and political components of the Taliban’s appeal, they failed to appreciate the power of the Taliban’s ideology.
Unlike the Arab fighters who had gone before them to help the Afghans root out the Soviets, Western forces then occupying Afghanistan never adequately took into account local sensitivities with respect to Islam, the true source of the Taliban’s power. Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian leader of the jihad against the Soviets, made sure his Arab forces respected local traditions and asked his men not to offend their Afghan comrades by praying in a style that would not be understood by them.
Azzam understood that in order to win the battle, the men had to be united in faith. He enjoined his men to refrain from their Wahabbi and Salafi ways and instead show solidarity with the Afghans by praying with them in the local Hanafi tradition. The Arab fighters should help the Hanafi Afghans win their battle against the Soviets before they should try winning the war for their version of Islam.
The international community would have been wise to follow suit when it came time for them to enlist Afghans in their battle against the Taliban. Even though in Afghanistan’s new constitution, the Hanafi and Jafari schools of Islam are cited, the Salafi influence — never imposed — has managed to grow in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s Salafi Islam can now be seen in the suicide attacks and the spread of the Hizb ut-Tahrir inside the country.
Today, the struggle for Afghanistan cannot be won by the world’s militaries. Nor will peace negotiations eliminate the threat that intolerance poses. Nor will this threat go away with a strong leader. The ultimate battle is to recover the soul of Islam.
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