Taliban Islam

 It is a cliché to call the internet a wasteland. Yes, most of the activity on the internet is related to pornography, and too much of the rest is either political propaganda or trivia. But as the mainstream media has become clickbait and bothsiderism, the internet does provide access to thoughtful discourse. As my FB peeps know, I read Kevin Drum (now blogging at Jabberwocky) and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. For analysis of the Middle East and Islam, I’ve followed Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Michigan.

With the restoration of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mainstream media are focused on the fact that the Taliban are identifiably Muslim, without doing the hard work of explaining that practitioners of Islam are as diverse as practitioners of Christianity:

“You have your Kentucky snake handlers and your QAnon militants, some of whom carried guns at the Capitol insurrection. Then you have your mainstream Presbyterians and Congregationalists. You have your Order of the Solar Temple cult inside Catholicism. And then you have mainstream American Roman Catholicism. And we haven’t even gone into Evangelicalism in Brazil or all the different ways Christianity is practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. There, you have millions of ordinary Catholics and Protestants but also the virulent Christian terrorist organization, the Lord’s Resistance Army. If we go back in time, you have your Protestant Peasants War in the early 1500s in Germany. You get the picture.”

In the link below, Cole places the Taliban at the fringe of the Islamic world, which is a quarter of humanity. Here’s the nut graf:

“What I would say about the Taliban is that they are an outlier in the Muslim world. The old Taliban had been formed in seminaries of the Deoband school of Islam. I think of Deobandis as sort of like Haredim or ultra-Orthodox among Jews. The school developed in British colonial India and was a way for Indian Muslims to assert their identities against British Christian rule and the Hindu majority. It is a sectarian movement and the vast majority of Indian Muslims rejected it. Its seminaries in northern Pakistan attracted Saudi funding, and so some seminaries mixed Deobandi teachings with some ideas from the hard line, rigid Saudi Wahhabi movement. But the Taliban were also the result of the chaos and violence of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Many were orphans. They were misogynists, knowing few women. They were militant in a country of then 16 million where a million had died and three million had been wounded and 7 million displaced.”

Read the whole thing:

https://www.juancole.com/2021/08/taliban-prophet-muhammad.html