Hello and welcome to a reading from The Taliban – Afghanistan’s Most Lethal Insurgent Group, written by Mark Silinsky and published by Praeger, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing in New York, New York. This reading is brought to you by Kensington Security Consulting, where we bring education to national security.
The Mind of the Taliban
The Taliban’s mindset is an amalgam of ethnic, geographic, historical, and religious elements. The Taliban’s religious principles are framed by three fundamentals: Salafism, Deobandism, and Sharia. These elements overlap and intertwine. All three are expressions of puritanical and political Islam, which resurfaced in the late 20th century and today tests the grit of the Arab Spring throughout the Middle East.
Salafism is an Islamic revivalist philosophy intended to purify Islam of Western and modern contaminants. To the extent the Taliban offered a coherent political philosophy during its 1996-2001 rule, it was based on a reactionary, fossilized, and absolutist belief system centered on the world of Mohammed. Salafists strive to recreate the world they imagine their prophet lived in. This requires expurgating elements of modern society that, in the Taliban’s view, are superfluous, degenerate, or, in any way, contrary to the immutable teachings of the Koran.
Not all features of modernity are discarded. To spread their ideology, Salafists use state-of-the-art technology. In this spirit, the Taliban moved early to erase all non-Islamic influences in Afghanistan. They targeted Afghanistan’s internationally recognized art treasures and, with modern artillery, blasted the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan from the hills in which they were carved. Though the world was stunned by the Taliban’s demolition of the statues, few Salafists openly objected. "We are not against culture, but we don't believe in these things (the statues). They are against Islam," Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed breezily declared.
Certainly, not all Muslims supported the Taliban’s position. Muslims ruled Afghanistan for over 1,300 years and did not destroy the Buddhas until the Taliban. There were other instances of premeditated destruction. Uncertain that Afghanistan was sufficiently purged of non-Islamic cultural impurities, senior mullahs ordered a spree of destruction throughout Kabul’s museum in March 2001. A group of cudgel-wielding Taliban shattered antique limestone statues that had been excavated across the country, carefully restored, and acclaimed as universal artistic treasures. The vandals were led by the Taliban’s Minister of Culture.
The Taliban’s outlook is also shaped by the Deobandi movement, a particular South Asian Salafist philosophy. Deobandi refers to both an Islamic seminary and an Islamic philosophy that extends far beyond the town of Deoband in northern India. It is one of Sunni Islam’s more influential schools in South and Central Asia and continues to issue edicts, or fatwas, based on Muslim law. It is an extreme, highly legalistic view of Islam that governs most of a Muslim’s daily activities. Rules include what type of pet a Muslim can own, when and where he is allowed to fly a kite, how often he should bathe, what type of clothes he should wear, and myriad other daily activities. Life’s conduct can be divided into two basic categories - permitted or prohibited. This Taliban theocracy fuses orthodox strains of Islam, Wahabbism from Saudi Arabia, and the Deobandi philosophy, which is taught in Pakistan and lavishly funded by Saudis.
Deobandism also has paramilitary elements. The school in Deoband mandated military training to groom its seminary students to be warriors of Islam. The seminary, Darul Uloom, or House of Knowledge, has been dubbed “Jihad University.” Deobandi thinking was born of nationalistic and religiously reactionary fervor following the Sepoy revolt in the mid-19th century, which is often called the Indian Mutiny. It rejected the Indian Civil Service and the adoption of European tastes, mannerisms, and secularism among the Indian elite. It remains decidedly opposed to all elements of modernity, western life and thought, and democratic norms.
The ideological foundation of the Taliban was built of Deobandi Islam. The architect and avatar was Mullah Omar. Although he had not finished his studies, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar was afforded an honorary degree by the seminary because, as one luminary noted, "he left to do jihad and to create a pristine Islamic government.”
The Deobandi philosophy is unique, but in many ways fits into the agenda of today’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has strong Salafist underpinnings. Bin Laden was very attracted to Islamism, or political Islam, and promoted the teachings of its leaders. The term Islamism refers to a modern variant of Islam, which was developed and spread by the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Ikwan. From a nucleus of disaffected Egyptians led by a Sufi schoolteacher in the late 1920s, the Brotherhood sought to supplant secular society with Islamic rule. The Brotherhood became a global, dynamic, and expansionist force by the end of the 20th century. The Brotherhood, which would inspire the leaders and core cadre of al Qaeda worldwide, fused philosophical elements from other 20th-century authoritarian movements. It thrives in the 21st Century and challenges emerging democratic elements in the Arab Middle East.
The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, whose writings heavily influenced bin Laden, was the Brotherhood's preeminent intellectual. As Qutb explained, it was insufficient for individuals to reform themselves. Islamic mandates ordained that an Islamic heaven be created on earth. Only a completely “good” state, by which he meant a Sharia state, could produce good men. He was executed in 1966 but is still celebrated throughout the Islamic world. Much like bin Laden, the often-quoted Qutb saw Islam as incompatible with modern pluralism. As a middle-aged exchange student in Colorado in the late 1940s, Qutb, soft-spoken and diffident, came to see the new American superpower as Islam’s greatest enemy.
In his extensive writings, Qutb appropriated terminology from the two radical socialist and utopian philosophies- National Socialism and communism - but rejected their atheism. He held solidarity with Hitler’s homicidal anti-Semitism. After the war, his main enemy became a soulless and capitalist America. He derided American churches as brothels, jazz music as primitive, and American women as vixens. His portrayal of American culture as vacuous, aggressive, and bigoted would resonate with Muslims, as well as leftists, and would become a recurring trope in the propaganda of both.
This model of American aggression and degeneracy became more common in the 1950s among Islamists and European intellectuals. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Islamist Arab nationalists made common cause with international leftists. Despite their strikingly opposing views on religion, women, and general politics, Islamists and leftists were strongly united in their hatred of the United States and Israel. Bin Laden, with his theatrical flights, would militarize this sentiment and bring it to Afghanistan.
Bin Laden introduced the Brotherhood's ideas to the Taliban. Had he a rival in imparting Islamist ideologies in Afghanistan, it would have been Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian ideologue and strategist who died young. Azzam was born near Jenin in 1941 and graduated from the Sharia College at Damascus University in 1966, when Palestinian nationalism was becoming a potent force. After the 1967 War, Azzam became active in several Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza and the West Bank and embraced Salafism. He had a sharp mind and earned graduate degrees from Al Azhar University. In 1979, he joined the first wave of Arab, anti-Soviet Jihadis in Afghanistan. In Peshawar, Pakistan, he made his mark as an inspiring Islamist recruiter and rhapsodist. The paladin’s famous dictum was, “One hour of jihad in Allah's path is better than 60 years of praying.” He and his two sons were killed in a massive car bombing in Peshawar in 1989. His assassins are not publicly known today.
Both Azzam and bin Laden were members of the Islamic Brotherhood. Bin Laden’s connection to the Islamic Brotherhood became clearer in September 2012, when his successor and longtime associate Ayman Al-Zawahiri recalled a quote from bin Laden, "I was banished from my own organization. I used to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood, but they banished me." According to Zawahiri, bin Laden was too much of a maverick for the Brotherhood, whose leaders told the Saudi, "You’re banished." Bin Laden pithily responded, "Fine."
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