Taming the Taliban
Faisal Bodi outlines the Muslim backlash against the "wild men of Islam" who, he says, have become an "embarrassment for the Ummah".
Ummah News, March 27, 2001

Earlier this month Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s self-proclaimed Amir al-Mu’mineen, ordered that 20 cows be slaughtered as expiation for the group’s tardiness in destroying the giant Buddha’s of Bhamiyan. He presented the sacrifice as a religious penance but most of the world saw it for exactly what it was: an insult to the injury already caused by the destruction of some of Afghanistan’s most historic statues.

The slaughter fell into a now well-established pattern of relations between the Taliban and the international community. For every Taliban excess, there is a western reaction, which in turn provokes a more extreme response from the Taliban, followed by another wrenching-up of Western positions. And so it continues with no sign of any break in the cycle.

And with each new incident our ever-shrinking and freshly scandalised world looks to the rest of the Muslim ummah for an explanation. Does Islam encourage the denial of education to women? Does it force people to wear beards and veils? Does it recommend cultural vandalism?

So far the answers to these questions have reinforced the vicious circle. Not comfortable with condemning our co-religionists we have sought a perilous refuge in the old maxim that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So the Taliban have got off scot-free while we indulge our collective pique at western hypocrisy.

Privately, many Muslims have felt compromised by the Taliban’s antics ever since they beat a path to Kabul and into the international spotlight. But they have avoided saying so publicly in deference to Muslim brotherhood or a knee-jerk distrust of the West.

Bhamiyan appears to have changed all that. From the high towers of Islamic learning to the man on the Cairo omnibus, the reaction in the Muslim world has for the large part been consistent with what one would expect from a religion that has usually preserved and even maintained all other cultural and religious expressions.

The Muslim community, its leaders included, have come out of the closet. Two leading Islamic jurisprudents, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Nasr Farid Wassel, and the Qatar-based Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi (who flew to Afghanistan on behalf of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in a vain last minute bid to halt the demolition), deplored the demolition saying the Buddhas were part of humanity’s heritage and formed no threat to Islam. Malaysia’s Maritime and Archaeology Museum and Nusantara Museum put up a ransom of $1 million for the Taliban to preserve the statues. Even the three countries that alone recognise the Taliban regime, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, felt moved to voice their disapproval.

These voices represent the beginnings of a controlled backlash against a group that has become an embarrassment for the ummah. But the road ahead is a long one and patience is the key.

Despite near-universal criticism for their actions, the wild men of Islam have remained impervious to all counsel. The continue to recruit their own retrograde interpretations of religion to justify their uniquely extreme actions. Most interestingly, when these come under challenge, they fall back on the line that this is an "internal affair."

There is something almost self-delusional about such a claim. Nothing about the Taliban is organic - it never has been from day one. Conceived by the Pakistani.military as a client force they have faithfully served their master in trying to foster the stability needed for the oil-rich former southern Soviet republics to consider building a southward pipeline through Afghanistan to the Indian ocean. This also explains why the Taliban have received the patronage of Saudi Arabia and the UAE who both see the Pakistani route as a way to forestall a western pipeline through arch-rival Iran.

The Taliban’s religious inspiration is far from home-grown either. Their intellectual base lies hundreds of miles away in the north Indian town of Deoband, home of the once-reputed but now intellectually decrepit Dar ul-Ulum or ‘house of knowledge’.

Founded in 1867 as a response to the loss of Muslim political hegemony, the institution was forced to forego politics in favour of a community built around a system of education. It stayed apolitical until the latter part of the last century when some of its students re-embraced jihad for the first time since it was allowed to fall into abeyance after the suppression of the 1857 Sepoy mutiny against the British Raj.

Aside from jihad, their leap from a19th century Islamic education system to the modern political arena has been an unmitigated disaster. A hundred years-plus of human thought and development appear to have passed the students of Deoband by. Locked into theological straitjackets they are ill-equipped to make sense of a modern world in which knowledge has exploded and where it is no longer arrived at only through their ossified Islamic disciplines.

The other external factor in the conservatisation of the Taliban is of course, the West, whose policies have made them more insular and reactionary. One of the group’s unsung successes has been the near-total eradication of Afghanistan’s poppy crop at great financial loss to itself. Rather perversely however, instead of drawing international plaudits the regime finds itself the victim of harsh UN sanctions. While these are primarily a US stick with which to beat the Taliban into giving up Osama bin Laden they are also selective and unacceptably harsh.

While the Taliban crave international recognition, so much so that they have reportedly considered a proposal that would see Osama Bin Laden extradited for trial in a third country, they are loathe, both for reasons of populism and principle, to bring in the Muslim world’s Che Gueveres. Whatever residual credibility the Taliban has with its co-religionists derives from its stubborn refusal to give up a man who has become a symbol of resistance to western excesses in the Muslim world.

These double-standards are the West’s achilles heel in dealing with the Taliban. It is plain fantasy, or arrogance, for the West to expect the Taliban to bring in Bin Laden while it continues to bomb and starve innocent civilians in Iraq, and indeed in Afghanistan itself with UN sanctions, and leave Israel maintain its occupation of Palestine. So long as this hypocrisy continues, Muslims will treat the Taliban with more sympathy than they merit. Two wrongs don’t make a right, of course, but the weightier point here is that the West is in no position to be casting any stones.

Take for example the Imam of Delhi’s Grand Mosque asked his Eid al-Adha congregation why such a loud international outcry did not ensue when Hindu extremists razed Ayodhya’s historic Babri Mosque in 1992. His sentiments were echoed by many a Muslim authority and organisation in the west. From Australia, the Islamic Information & Services Network of Australasia congratulated the Taliban for cocking a snook at the world. In the US a popular Wahhabi speaker, Sheikh Ali Timimi, could not hide his happiness. "It brought a joy to my heart that I have not felt for a very long time," he said in an analysis that gave the Taliban the backing of Islamic law.

These voices remain a minority but they cannot be ignored for aside from a total lack of confidence in the west to deal with the Taliban they express a latent sentiment rooted in the very concept of Ummah. The Taliban may be a black sheep in the family of the Ummah but they are family nonetheless. And nobody casts out family members – they give them counsel.

The encouraging thing is that this episode has brought otherwise silent Taliban dissenters out of the closet, intellectuals like the Kenyan Prof. Ali Mazrui, and the US-based Prof Azizah Al-Hibri, in addition to some of the highest-ranking Muslim jurisprudents. It is these figures who must take the lead in showing them the way. The Taliban are not going to be brow-beaten or bombed into submission; in fact experience shows that confrontation will only edge them further to the fringes.

Muslim history is littered with the gravestones of aberrations like the Taliban. And more often their epitaphs have been of reactionary political movements. Indeed on Afghanistan’s own shifting-sands many a ruling power has come a cropper. The Taliban are no religious recidivists; they know they will head the same way they unless they haul themselves into the 21st century.

Despite the latest blemish, their CV does show promise. The Taliban’s successful assault on opium cultivation and their commendable 1999 handling of the Indian Airlines hijack show that they are not averse to good counsel. It is the listening instinct we need to cultivate in the Taliban instead of attempting to drag them kicking and screaming in our direction.

Faisal Bodi is the editor of Ummahnews and a freelance British Muslim journalist

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