Afghan Taliban’s inroads into Pakistan

Although the first incursion of Islam into India was in the early days of the religion, when the young General Khalid bin Walid invaded the Indus delta. But he did not establish a presence there. The more meaningful entry of the religion was by way of Sufi teachings when some of the saints accompanied the conquering armies that came down the mountains of Afghanistan into the vast riverine plains of India and established a series of dynasties there that lasted until the eighteenth-century arrival of British merchants. Sufism from the very early days of Islam has been an essential aspect of Islam in Afghanistan. It has been part of the region for 1300 years. Afghan kings were traditionally crowned in the presence of great Sufi masters who were not always loyal to the monarchy. Many Sufis banded together in 1919 to overthrow King Amanullah. Sufism suffered during the first Taliban rule when some of the holy men were imprisoned, even tortured.

Judging by the extensive coverage of developments in Afghanistan by the press in the West, what was being watched was not only the extreme economic deprivation the country was likely to face. What was also being viewed was the impact on society of the use of Islam for regulating life in the country. The Taliban may give the impression that they speak with one voice for they don’t. Those who are poorly educated or not educated at all tend to believe in a highly restrictive Islam especially when it refers to the role of women in society. These people get their religion from preachers in small mosques that dot the Afghan countryside. Men go to these places not only to say their daily prayers. Mosques are also the meeting places in a society where homes are not generally open to outsiders. Called the imams, the preachers who live and work in the village mosques are poorly educated with little or no knowledge of the outside world. Their only qualification is the ability to recite from memory the Quran in Arabic without understanding the content of the holy book.

There is now a third group of Afghans who are likely to influence society they have left behind. These are the members of the various diasporas that Afghans have formed in Western Europe, North America and Australia-New Zealand. Many of these people are professionals with proficiency in medical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and information technology. Ashraf Ghani and the group of people who worked with him belonged to this group. Those who are well educated view Islam as a force that can move with time.

I saw for myself the primitive version of Islam being used for guiding the populace in their everyday conduct during a brief visit Kabul several years ago. This I did at the invitation of then President Ashraf Ghani who had worked with me when I was at the World Bank. I was put in the oldest palace in the presidential complex in the heart of Kabul. The compound has three palaces, one of which Ghani used as his residence and his office. He called in his assistant and told him to walk me through the two palaces that were not being used for official purposes. “You will notice how much money was lavished on these palaces when a succession of kings were living there,” he said. The following morning, I was given a walk through. Most walls were decorated with very expensive tapestries. Looking closely at them I noticed that all human faces had been cut out. I asked my guide why that was the case. He said it was done by the Taliban since according to them human face could not be represented in any form; it was un-Islamic to do that.

There are indications that this time around, the Taliban may adopt a milder form of Islam in the way they govern. This approach may be to ease the restrictions imposed on the fledgling regime by the West. One step they have taken is to open the museums in the country to visitors. Those who adhere to the extremist version of Islam believe that history began only after the arrival of Islam from Arabia. Afghanistan has a rich history; there are artifacts that go back to the time before Islam arrived in the country. During their brief tenure in office in the 1990s, the Taliban destroyed the world famous 1,500 year-old statues of Buddha that had been carved into a large mountain side in a place called Bamiyan. It didn’t matter to the Taliban rulers that these larger than life statues had the protection of Unesco’s world heritage programme. During the Taliban’s five-year tenure, an estimated 70 per cent of the Kabul museum’s collection of 100,000 pieces was ransacked or looted. In its heyday, the museum was a gem of Afghan culture, open six days a week and filled with visitors eager to see its collection of artifacts. The museum was established in 1919 but moved to its current, much larger building the early 1930s.

Fabio Colombo, a conservator who led a restoration project at the museum in the years following the removal of the Taliban in 2001, remembered how attendance at the museum grew gradually after the Taliban left. According to one newspaper account based on a conversation with Colombo, “… by 2019, the last full year that he was there, he said the museum was absolutely full of people. For many of the museum’s visitors, it was their first time learning about the country’s history and culture that not affiliated with Islam. Colombo also recalls thousands of fragments and shattered pieces of artifacts being scattered across the museum’s floors. ‘We tried to recombine and put so many sculptures back together’, he said.”

According to Samiullah Nabipour, the former head of the cinema department of at Kabul University who has left the country, the Taliban, now under the influence of not only village clerics but also of relatively more modern segments of society, may be less intolerant of anything they view as un-Islamic.

Omaid Sharifi, an Afghan artist and activist who is now based in Virginia, also talked to the press. “There is no positive news for artists or for art and culture,” he said reflecting on how the Taliban painted over murals made by his artist group, ArtLords. However, the Taliban put a public statement that expressed sentiments that were very different from those that were common in the 1990s. “As Afghanistan is a country replete with ancient artifacts and antiquity, and that such relics form a part of our country’s history, identity and rich culture, therefore all of us have an obligation to robustly protect, monitor and preserve the artifacts,” said a statement issued by the Taliban. That notwithstanding, music in public areas has been banned, street murals have been painted over and what’s aired on radio and television is limited, devoid of what would be called entertainment.

Given the close contact that exists between the Pashtun populations that inhabit the Afghanistan-Pakistan divide, what happens in one county impacts the other. If, as suggested above, this time around the Taliban Islam is more relaxed in its social mores, it would have positive consequences for Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 10, 2022.

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