Who are the Taliban?

The Wahhabi Myth (TWM)- a website created two years after 9-11 to discredit links between Usama bin Laden and Salafism- states quite categorically that “…the Taliban are Deobandi Sufis.”

The Deobandi are Muslims of South Asia and Afghanistan who follow the fiqh (tradition of jurisprudence) of Imam Abu Hanifa. The name comes from Deoband, India, where the madrassa (religious school) Darul Uloom Deoband is sited.

According to Fuad S Naeem (Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition), Deobandi schools are completely orthodox and traditional, even though they oppose certain popular Sufi practices in the subcontinent. Their opposition though, needs to be seen not as a puritanical reform, but rather as an attempt to focus on essential Sufism.

Pinning the word “Sufi” onto Deobandi is about as useful as calling a madhhab (school of thought) within the Islamic family “monotheists“, since all Muslims are, by default, monotheists.

Are the Taliban then the offspring of a purely Deobandi upbringing? By all accounts, yes, but it is not as simple as it appears to be.

One benefit of TWM’s characterization of the Taliban as Deobandi Sufis is the implication that there exists different streams within that particular school.

The stream that concerns us is the one that has gained most from the imported ideology of Salafism. According to Ahmad Rashid (Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia), a gradual politicization of many Deobandi schools in Pakistan has been taking place in the last twenty years, which has resulted in a form of Deobandism that resembles militant Salafism and is far removed from the traditional Sufi piety of the school’s founders.

Soviet involvement
In many ways, it was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that provided Salafists with an opportunity to stamp their influence on the region. Muslims from all over the world, copiously backed by Saudi Arabian money and Pakistani intelligence, descended on Afghanistan to wage what was seen at that time as a jihad against a brutal occupation.

Many of the volunteers originated in the Muslim Brotherhood or other radical Islamist organizations. Saudi Arabia, which played host to prominent Brotherhood figures, organized both the new recruits, and disbursement of assistance through the Islamic Coordination Council . In Pakistan, Arab volunteers staffed numerous Saudi Red Crescent offices near the Afghan frontier.

The Arab volunteers also disproportionately gravitated to the Ittihad-i Islami (Islamic Union), led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf. Sayyaf was a Pushtun, but he long lived in Saudi Arabia, had studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, and spoke excellent Arabic. Sayyaf preached a strict Salafist version of Islam that was rabidly critical of Sufism in Afghanistan.

After the war, his activism found moribund support amongst Afghans, but did not completely go away. It resurfaced in Pakistan.

Ahmad Rashid says that the five key leaders of the Taliban were graduates of a single madrassa, Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak, near Peshawar which is situated in Pakistan but which was largely attended by Afghan refugees. This institution reflected Salafist beliefs in its teachings and much of its funding came from private donations from wealthy Arabs for which Usama bin Laden provided a conduit.

Yet, the signs of the Taliban’s evolving ideology only became apparent when, exploiting the bitter infighting between Afghan warlords, they took control of the states and provinces. One of the first things they instituted was the mass killing of the Hazara Shia, allegedly in retaliation for past aggression.

The scale of the Taliban’s response to the Hazara is indicative of a hostility that runs deeper than mere politicking. It was a position that had been carefully worked out, and relied on a selective choice of classical literature to justify what was really a genocidal hatred for Shia Muslims.

Upon the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, Mullah Manon Niazi was the first to articulate his movement’s priorities to the masses:

“Hazaras are not Muslim. You can kill them. It is not a sin.”

It is important to note that while relations between Sunni and Shia Muslims have always been stormy, only certain groups within the Sunni fold place an inordinate priority on this sectarian enimity, and have acted on it with violence.

Diplomatic ties
Having seized the reins of government, the Taliban then proceeded to impose Islamic law, or what they deemed to be Islamic law, on Afghanistan.

The new social order completely excluded women from public and political life. Their rights were regulated with rigorous zeal.

This was what Muhammad al-Ghazali once described as the “ascendancy of Bedouin fiqh.” What he meant by this term is that in much of contemporary culture, the world revolves around men and everything is channeled to their service.

At its peak, the Taliban regime was recognized by only three countries; the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The last is interesting because in many ways, the Taliban programs for social and religious reform mirrored the equally spectacular career of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, an 18th century preacher from Central Arabia whose activism had met with fierce opposition from the worldwide ulema (scholars).

Furthermore, Afghanistan was an impoverished country with only opium as a dubious source of revenue. Saudi Arabia’s links with the regime was, in all likelihood, an ideological one; a project for Saudi missionaries to work on.

The latter’s success could be seen in the similarities that blossomed between both regimes- and this was the fervent emphasis on conformity of external appearance and behavior.

In this, the Taliban was greatly aided by Usama bin Laden, whose personal charisma and wealth had drawn together a group of veteran Arab fighters. Calling itself al-Qaeda, or the base, members enthusiastically helped out in the transformation of the state.

In the wake of 9-11, the United States intensified its demand that the Taliban hand over Usama bin Laden, whose terror network is widely believed to be the mastermind of the terrorist attacks on New York. The language that America used was provocative and couched to humiliate the Taliban regime. Expectedly, the Taliban refused and in late 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan.

The invasion was a failure if one considers the primary mission to be the capture or liquidation of Usama bin Laden, but it threw up other interesting facts that should have put analysts on the alert.

The American Taliban
One of these revolves around a young American named John Lindh Walker; captured by US forces in Afghanistan with a group of Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters who had survived a bloody Mazar-e-Sharif prison revolt.

A rigorous Time Magazine investigation revealed that Lindh had received his Islamic education from Yemen, and had specifically inclined toward the Salafist stream when he was there.

When he returned to America…

…Lindh started to wear Arab, not Pakistani, dress. He also spent less time at the Mill Valley Mosque and began frequenting mosques in San Francisco where Salafi Yemenis worshipped. To reach the mosques on Sutter and Jones streets for Friday prayers, he would take a bus ride into the city, leaving the sunny hills of Marin County for the streets of San Francisco.

It is tempting to infer Salafism’s exclusivist blueprint from Lindh’s own preference for worshipping in a Salafist mosque, but this analysis is too simplistic because overt sectarianism is discouraged by some Salafist preachers, at least in public.

What is important here is Lindh’s own set of values, which he derived from the ideological underpinnings of the religion he had picked up from Yemen. It was this very ideology that caused him to shun Muslims in his hometown who did not share his Salafist tendencies.

Conceivably then, Lindh must have viewed the Taliban either as ideological comrades, or else, Muslims on the way toward what many Salafists are fond of describing as "the pure, untainted Islam of the Pious Predecessors".

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