The Taliban’s rhetoric indicates the limits of the Islamist project
The Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan has reignited many fears. Will the group cast off its past of flagrant barbarity? As their fighters breached Kabul and their top leaders homed in on the presidential palace amid a tearful recitation of the Quran’s 110th chapter, I was transported back to a world I had visited earlier.
I had had a professional opportunity to embed with Pakistani forces in the Taliban holdouts in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa province in 2012. My interests didn’t boil down to geopolitical questions about how spectacularly Pakistan’s forces cleared many of these hideouts that they and the Americans had helped to prop up in the first place. I instead pivoted towards understanding my own faith in all its dimensions.
The Taliban has sought to convey a less dogmatic position on governance this time, vowing to avoid reprisal attacks and respect people’s basic rights. It’s early days still to tell whether this is a ruse for global acceptance or proof of reform. But irrespective of how it pans out, the Taliban’s apparent turning a new leaf highlights the limits of Islamism, and in particular, its most potent tool — jihadism. Many ordinary people are still confused about what Islam is, and isn’t. A simple acceptance of monotheism is the sine qua non of Islam, the faith. On the other hand, Islamism seeks to build more structures drawn from the normative aspects of the faith. Islamism and, by extension, jihadism are primarily a response to colonialism, imperialism and modernity itself. To that extent, Islam is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for violent modern-day jihad.
The effects of violent jihad have been egregiously felt across the modern world. This is not to suggest that non-Islamic sources of war have been any less lethal. The Fat Man and Little Boy obliterated at least 2,20,000 lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in singular strikes, nearly the same number of people killed in all of modern jihad’s history.
Jihad under Prophet Mohammed had ground rules. Combatants could take on only combatants, unless there was an explicit “command” from God. Mutilation and killing of women, children, old and the infirm were prohibited. Suicide is prohibited in Islam. Regardless of what is the right jihad, one finds compelling reasons why all Islamist organisations must shun jihad. The nature of problems faced by Muslims today are different from those 1,400 years ago, when Prophet Mohammed blazed through the sands of Badr or Al Khandiq following “direct divine sanction” to battle his enemies.
Islam is not compatible with modernity, defined by the ever-enlarging scope of universal freedoms, rights and equality. No religion is. But modernity’s underlying values are not repugnant to classical Islam. Concepts such as equality and democracy are not alien to Islamic aspirations (“White men are not superior to Black men and Black men are not superior to White men”, the Prophet said in his last sermon). Zakat is one of the earliest forms of economic redistribution known to humankind.
The Taliban has rejected the possibility of a democratic State. This rejection is un-Islamic. Islamic societies have been governed by institutions called shoora, an inflection of the word “mashwara” (discussion) from the Prophet’s time, and well before English philosopher John Stuart Mill famously described democracy as “government by discussion”.
By 2030, 60% of the world’s Muslims will continue to live in developing or least-developed economies and encounter problems wrought by unbridled capitalism, discrimination and neo-liberalism, rather than political subjugation. Fixing these problems will require mastery over modern economics and sciences, understanding of complex modern institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations.
The Taliban has no idea about how to claim the $9 billion of foreign reserves held by Afghanistan, for instance, mostly in assets abroad. But they will need that money soon. They can’t blow up human beings to access those cash piles. Muslims make up about 22% of the world’s population. But over a third of the world’s two-billion poor live in Muslim countries. The Quran enjoins Muslims to work to change their fortunes. This, today, means assertion of claims through a language of rights, rather than violent extremism.