What do you know about the Talibans?!
Whenever you hear the news about the Taliban, what goes through your mind? Are they as ruthless as the news portrays them, or are they just misunderstood people doing what they think is right?
Let’s start this article with an interview from Conversation Weekly. Ali Olomi, a historian of the Middle East and Islam at Penn State University, was asked about the origins of the Taliban, and he said this:
While the Taliban emerged as a force in the 1990s Afghan civil war, you have to go back to the Saur Revolution of 1978 to truly understand the group and what they’re trying to achieve.
Well, let me tell you this: the Saur revolution, or sowr, in the Dari language (a word that represents the month in which the revolution took place), is a sour topic for Afghanistan, especially during that period. That was when the then president, President Mohammed Daoud Khan, was overthrown in a coup by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a group of people that believed in Marxism-Leninism ideology.
He had organized a coup, known as the 1973 Afghan coup d’etat, against his cousin, the then King Mohammed Zahir Shah, overthrew him, and established a one-party system under the Republic of Afghanistan. He was the first president of Afghanistan.
Looking through the 1973 Afghan coup d’etat, it should be noted that, with the help of the PDPA members, Mohammed Daoud was able to organize this coup, but after he took office, his priorities shifted very far away from the principles of the PDPA, which led to his assassination in the Saur revolution.
As president, he was bent on unifying a part of the Pakistani people (the Pashtun people) with Afghanistan, but this would involve him disregarding the international border line (also known as the Durand line) between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This led to a lot of fights and bombs orchestrated by Afghanistan and retaliation from Pakistan.
The PDPA were communist (although in the public eye, they were known as national democracies or socialists), but they had different political ideologies that divided them into different factions, the biggest being the Parcham and the Khalq. After the Saur revolution, Nur Muhammad Taraki of the Khalq faction became the leader of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (renamed after the assassination of Daoud), but with his leadership came a lot of reformation that mostly subdued the traditional and Islamic laws that had been in Afghanistan, like the eradication of illiteracy (that is, increasing education for both men and women), abolishing the Sharia law, abolishing feudal practices such as forced marriage and bride price, land reform, and increasing the minimum age for marriage. These reforms were seen as un-Islamic and an approach to adopting Western culture in the rural part of Afghanistan.
The Taliban (also known as students in the Pashtun language) emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan (source from the BBC news website). Throughout Mohammed Taraki’s regime and after his assassination, there was unrest in Afghanistan, with people with differing opinions. This continued into the 1980s, with the Mujahideen warlords making life difficult for civilians. The Taliban rose through all that struggle and took power from these warlords.
Initially, their takeover was seen as a victory and a momentum that could stop the warlords from exaggerating their power over the civilians due to their first response to a local warlord, in which they promised security and religious fervour (source: Britannica). But it changed after they installed policies that included the exclusivity of women from public life, harsh punishment of criminals, and destruction of non-Islamic artistic relics.
It is worthy of note that the Taliban are a group of students that were primarily taught in traditional Islamic schools. Mullah Omar was one of the teachers in this school, and he believed that he had a revelation that he should fight against the happenings in Afghanistan. He took up the mission by organizing his students and using them to fight against the Mujahideen warlords.
As of this moment (2024), the Taliban have overthrown the central government and are now ruling the country. They kept on fighting and recruiting members after they were overthrown in 2001 by the United States of America (USA) and took back Afghanistan after overthrowing the central government in 2021. During their second anniversary (on Tuesday, August 15, 2023), in Herat, a crowd of Taliban supporters chanted: Death to the Europeans, death to the Westerners, long live the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, death to the Americans (source: Al Jazeera news website).
In other news, the women in Afghanistan (aged 12 and above) are no longer going to school. The Taliban claim that they are trying to create a situation in which the girls would go to school in a safe and secure place under Islamic laws, but when will that situation be achieved? It’s been three years since the takeover, and the women are still sitting at home.
This can serve as a breeding ground for suicide, forced marriage, rape, and an increased crime rate (especially for those women who are the sole breadwinners of the family). To understand this situation, try putting yourself in their shoes.
