Excerpts from the book by Ahmed Rashid about Taliban and Osama bin Laden
Andries krugers Dagneaux
wounded yesterday and their family and friends in the USA.
If Osama Bin Laden hosted by the Taliban or groups around him is one
of the conspirators behind the yesterday's attacks or its inspirators
then it is clear that these atrocities have a sectarian background. In
this post I want to pay attention to the sectarian origins of the
Taliban.
Hereunder are some excerpts about Bin Laden and the Taliban from an
excellent book by a journalist from Pakistan, Ahmed Rashid.
"The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar remains an enigmatic
mystery. After the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban are the most
secretive political movement in the world today." page 5
"Afghanistan was in state of virtual disintegration just befor the
Taliban arrived at the end of 1994. The country was divided into
warlords fiefdoms...." page 21
"There is now an entire factory of myths and stories to explain how
Omar mobilized a small group of of Taliban against Kandahar warlords.
The most credible story, told repeatedly, is that in the spring of
1994 Singesar neigbours came to tell him that a commander had abducted
two teenage girls, their heads had been shaved and they had been taken
to a militry camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Talibs
who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the
girls and haning the commander...
...Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against
the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked no reward
or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to
set up a just Islamic system." page 25
"Islam has always been at the very centre of the lives of ordinary
Afghan people. ....But no Afghan can insist that the fellow Muslim
standing next to him prays also. Traditionally Islam in Afghanistan
has been immensely tolerant - to other Muslim sects, other religions
and modern lifestyles." page 82
"Eighty per cent of Afghans belong to the Sunni Hanafi sect, the most
liberal of the four Sunni (1) schools of thought." page 83
"Before the Taliban, Islamic extremism had never flourished in
Afghanistan" page 85
" The Taliban interpretation of Islam, jihad and social transormation
was an anomaly in Afghanistan because the movement's rise echoed none
of the Islamicist trends that had emerged thorugh the anti-Soviet war.
The Taliban were neither radical Islamicists inspired by the Ikhwan
(2), nor mystical Sufis, nor tradionalists. They fitted nowhere in
the Islamic spectrum of ideas and movements that had emerged between
1979 and 1994. ....
...
The Taliban represented nobody but themselves and they recognized no
Islam except their own. But they did have an ideological base -an
extreme form of Deobandism, which was being preached by Pakistani
Islamic parties in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The Deobandis, a
branch of Sunni Hanafi Islam has had a history in Afghanistan, but
the Taliban's interpretation of the creed has no parallel in the
Muslim world.
The Deobandis arose in British India, not as a reactionary but as a
forward-looking movement that would reform and unite Muslim society as
it struggled to live with in the confines of a colonial state ruled by
non-Muslims.
....
.....The Deobandis aimed to train a new generation of learned
Muslims who would revive Islamic values based on intellectual learing,
spiritual experience, Sharia law and Tariqah or the path. ...The
Deobandis took a restrictive view of the role of women, opposed all
forms of hierarchy in the Muslim community and rejected the Shia (3)-
but the Taliban were to take these beliefs to an extreme which the
original Deobandis would nefer have recognized. .. By 1879 there were
12 Deobandi madrassas (4) across India and Afghan students were
plentiful .... By 1967 .. there were 9,000 Deobandi madrassas across
South Asia. " page 87-88
"The Taliban have clearly debased the Deobandi tradition of learning
and reform, with their rigidity, accepting no concept of doubt except
as sin and considering debate as little more than heresy.
...
....the Taliban are vehemently opposed to modernism and have no
desire to understand or adopt modern ideas of progress or economic
development. The Taliban are poorly tutored in Islamic and Afghan
history, knowledge of the Sharia and Koran and the political and
theoretical developments in the Muslim world during the twentieth
century. While Islamic radicalism in the twentieth century has a long
history of scholarly writing and debate, the Taliban have no such
historical perspective or tradition. There is no Taliban Islamic
manifesto or scholarly analysis of Islamic or Afghan history. Their
exposure to the radical Islamic debat around the world is minimal,
their sense of their own history is even less. This has created an
obscurantism which allows no room for debate even with fellow Muslims"
page 93
"..Education for boys is also at a standstill in Kabul because most of
the teachers are women, who cannot work. An entire generation of
Afghan childeren are growing up without education. " page 106
" The Taliban's uncompromising attitude was also shaped by their own
internal political dynamic and the nature of their recruiting base.
Their recruits - the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proletariat
from the war and the refugee camps - had been brought up in a totally
male society. In the madrassa milieu, control over women and their
virtual exclusion was a powerful symbol of manhood and a reaffirmation
of the students' commitment to jihad. Denying a role for women gave
the Taliban a kind of false legitimacy amongst the elements. 'This
conflict against women is rooted in the policical beliefs and
ideologies, not in Islam or the cultural norms. The Taliban are new
genration of Muslim males who are products of a war culture, who have
spent much of their adutlt lives in complet segregation from their
communities. ...' said Simi Wali, the head of an Afghan NGO.
Taliban leaders repeatedly told me that if they gave women greater
freedom or a chance to go to school, they would lose the support of
their rank and file, who would be disillusioned by a leadership that
compromised principles under pressure. " page 111
" 'To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their
representative in Afghanistan,' Bin Laden said later. .... ' There I
received volunteers who came .. from all of the Arab and Muslim
countries. .. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money
by the Saudis. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in
Afghanistan, but we had to fight on all fronts, communist or Western
oppression,' he added. " page 132
"A US State Department report in August 1996 noted that Bin Laden
was 'one of the siginificant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist
activities in the world'.
.....
In early 1997 the CIA constituted a squad which arrived in Peshawar
to try and carry out a snatch operation to get Bin Laden out of
Afghanistan. The Americans enlisted Afghans and Pakistanis to help
them but aborted the operation. The US activity in Peshawar helped
persuade Bin Laden to move to the safer confines of Kandahar. On 23
February 1998, at a meeting in the original Khost camp, all the groups
associated with Al Qaeda issued a manifesto under the aegis of 'The
International Islamic Front for jihad against Jews and Crusaders'. The
manifesto stated that seven years the US has been occupying lands of
Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsular, plundering its
riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing
its neigbours, and turning its bases in the peninsular into a
spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples'.
The meeting issued a fatwa. 'The ruling to kil the Americans and
their allies- civilians and military- is an individual duty for every
Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to'. "
page 133-134
"....Increasingly, Bin Laden's world view appeared to dominate the
thing of the senior Taliban leaders. All-night conversations between
Bin Laden and the Taliban leaders paid off. Until his arrival the
Taliban leadership had not been particularly antagonistic to the USA
or the West but demanded recogniton for their government. "page 139
" ...The Saudi export of Wahhabism (5) has now boomeranged back home
and is increasingly undermining the authority of the Royal Family.
Osama Bin Laden's critique of the corruption and mismanagement of the
regime is not falling upon deaf ears amongst the Saudi population. And
unless Afghanistan moves towards peace, dozens more Bin Ladens are
ready and waiting to take his place from their bases inside
Afghanistan.
For Muslims everywhere the Saudi support for the Taliban is deeply
embarrassing, because the Taliban's interpretation of Islam is so
negative and destructive. Increasingly, Western popular perception
equates Islam with the Taliban and Bin Laden-style terrorism. Many
Western commentators do not particularize the Taliban, but condemn
Islam wholesale for being intolerant and anti-modern. The Taliban,
like so many Islamic fundamentalist groups today, divest Islam of all
its legacies except theology - Islamic philosophy, science, arts,
aesthetics and mysticism are ignored. Thus the rich diversity of
Islam and the essential message of the Koran - to build a civil
society that is just and equitable in which rulers are responsible for
their citizens - is forgotten.
The genius of early Muslim-Arab civilization was its multi-cultural,
multi-religious and multi-ethnic diversity. The stunning and numerous
state failures that abound in the Muslim world today are because that
original path, that intention and inspiration, has been abandoned
either in favour of brute dictarorship or a narrow interpretation of
theology. " page 211-212
Glossary
1. Sunni - One of the two main forms of Islam followers who
recognize the first Caliphs
2. Ikhwan - Muslim Brotherhood set up in Egypt in 1928 with the aim
of bringing an Islamic revolution and Islamic state
3. Shia - One of the two main forms of Islam, followers of the party
of Ali
4. Madrassa - Koranic school
5. Wahabbism - Stict and Austere movement within Sunnism begun in
Saudi Arabia by Abdul Wahab (1703-1792 as a movement to cleanse the
Arab bedouin from the influence of Sufism (mystical form of Islam)
There is much more interesting and important background information
about Bin Laden and the Taliban in Rashid's great book.
Ahmed Rashid "Taliban" ISBN 0-300-08902-3 (paperback) Yale Nota Bene
Publishing House 2001
Mattius Pedersen
(Andries krugers Dagneaux) wrote:
>First I want to express my sympathy with all people who got killed and
>wounded yesterday and their family and friends in the USA.
>
>If Osama Bin Laden hosted by the Taliban or groups around him is one
>of the conspirators behind the yesterday's attacks or its inspirators
>then it is clear that these atrocities have a sectarian background. In
>this post I want to pay attention to the sectarian origins of the
>Taliban.
>
>Hereunder are some excerpts about Bin Laden and the Taliban from an
>excellent book by a journalist from Pakistan, Ahmed Rashid.
>
>"The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar remains an enigmatic
>mystery.
Pretty soon he's going to be blind........or dead......
Byron Walter
here would take time to read it as well. That book does much to explain why
we've come to this point.