The March of the Taliban: Lessons from Muslim History

By Yoginder Sikand

updated 5/24/2009

The fall of large swathes of territory in Pakistan’s lawless north-west to the marauding Taliban, who, through an agreement reached with the Pakistani authorities, are now forcibly imposing what they regard as shariah laws in the region, has added a new dimension to the convoluted politics of Pakistan, making that country’s problems even more intractable. At the same time, this worrisome development also highlights the continued and unresolved crisis of traditional Muslim political thought and its fundamental inability to come to terms with the demands of the modern age.

Classical Sunni Muslim political thought, which continues to inspire the bulk of the traditional clerics or ulema, is based on the notion of a pious ruler or amir who rules according to the rules of the shariah. He is to be assisted by a council or shura, consisting of pious men learned in the shariah. However, he is not bound by their advice, for, because of his presumed superiority in terms of piety and knowledge of Islam, he is assumed to know best. It is this fatal assumption that is the Achilles heel of traditional Muslim political theory, for, more often than not, the amir does not turn out to be the saintly personage that he is expected to be. There being no effective check on his powers, by the general public or even by the shura—in contrast to what the Quran would appear to demand—he very often turns into a dictator, who, as Muslim history amply illustrates, can easily twist Islamic injunctions suitably to legitimize acts of tyranny directed at Muslims as well as others. This is precisely why when self-styled champions of Islam like Pakistani Taliban chief and head of the Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Shariah-e Muhammadi, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, set about ruling in the name of the shariah, they inevitably turn into bloodthirsty tyrants. Sunni Muslim tradition, as it developed after the Prophet and began to deviate from his practice, generally acquiesced in tyranny, and leading Sunni ulema even went to the extent of forbidding revolt against a tyrannical Muslim ruler as long as he appeared to respect the shariah. This is one reason why Muslims and others who dare to oppose tyrants like Sufi Muhammad are so easily branded by the mullahs as ‘enemies’ of Islam.

Another major flaw of traditional Sunni political theory, and one amply reflected in the case of Sufi Muhammad and his band of followers, is the ardent conviction that people can be compelled to be ‘religious’ by a pious ruler, through the imposition of law and the threat of fierce punishment. This is reflected in the very name of Sufi Muhammad’s outfit, the Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Shariah-e Muhammadi or the ‘Movement for the Imposition of the Muhammadan Shariah’. True to its name, activists of the movement are now going about forcing people to abide by what they regard as the rules of the shariah, not hesitating to even kill them if they resist this imposition. Obviously, that is no way at all to endear even fellow Muslims to their cause, and is also a sure recipe for generating nifaq or hypocrisy—considered a major sin in the Quran—on a massive scale. In the long run, no regime that is based on forcing people to be ‘good’ can survive, as an experiment similar to Sufi Muhammad’s, the Tehrik-e Mujahidin, launched in the same unruly region bordering Afghanistan in the early nineteenth century by Syed Ahmad Barelvi and his deputy Shah Ismail, lionized as ‘Islamic heroes’ by almost all South Asian Sunni ulema, so tragically illustrates. Like Sufi Muhammad, Syed Ahmad, who styled himself as the amir of the Muslims, claimed to be establishing an Islamic system in the Pathan borderlands. Forcibly imposing his brand of the shariah on the unwilling Pathans, his experiment in Islamic utopianism ended in predictable disaster. The restive Pathan tribesmen joined hands with the Sikh rulers of the Punjab and rose up in revolt against Syed Ahmad and his followers, who were massacred in the ill-famed battle of Balakot, a town not far from where Sufi Muhammad today has set up the headquarters of his self-styled Islamic polity.

A third flaw of traditional Sunni political thought, and one strikingly illustrated in the case of Sufi Muhammad’s Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Shariah-e Muhammadi, is the equation of shariah or the divine path with traditional fiqh or jurisprudence as developed by medieval Sunni fuqaha or legal scholars in the centuries after the demise of the Prophet Muhammad. In the name of the shariah it is the rules of medieval fiqh of the Hanafi that Sufi Muhammad and his tribe of devoted followers are seeking to enforce. Of the values of justice, kindness, compassion and beauty, which numerous Sufis and other Islamic scholars regard as the essence of the divine shariah, there is not even the slightest trace in Sufi Muhammad’s frightening vision of the world. Betraying a tendency so marked in authoritarian Islamist thought, Sufi Muhammad’s brand of shariah has been reduced, in effect, to simply a set of harsh punitive laws.

Ironically, some of these laws that Sufi Muhammad and his Taliban followers are now imposing, derived from traditional Hanafi fiqh, actually have no sanction in the Islamic shariah. One such instance concerns the so-called jizya tax that has been imposed on the hapless Sikhs of the territories that have now fallen into Taliban control. In a recent statement denouncing the levying of this tax, a group of prominent Indian Muslim leaders, including numerous notable Sunni ulema, pointed out that ‘The imposition of the so-called jizya is nothing more than extortion by an armed and lawless gang, which does not constitute a sovereign government or state or even an organ thereof.’ Taking note of the fact that the Taliban had demanded that the Sikhs cough up millions of rupees as jizya, the statement added, ‘As regards the huge amounts in millions reported to be demanded, these are arbitrary and exorbitant as the amount of annual jizya paid by non-Muslims in early Islam was merely one to one and a half dinar, which is 4.24 gram to 6.36 grams of gold. Moreover, this tax was payable only at the end of the year and not in advance.’ Hence, the statement concluded, ‘We regard this as an act of injustice incompatible with the letter and spirit of Islam and the international covenants accepted by all Muslim states.’

As this timely statement by important Indian Islamic scholars denouncing the atrocities of the Taliban committed on the Sikhs in the name of the shariah suggests, the shariah, which forms the basis of the vision of an Islamic society and polity, is itself subjected to diverse, indeed often mutually-opposed, interpretations. If for Sufi Muhammad and his tribe it is a harsh penal code that is to be forced down unwilling throats, to drag people to heaven against their will, as it were, to their Muslim critics, such as these Indian scholars, it is quite the contrary. Being open to multiple interpretations, the shariah is thus the object of heated contestation among Muslims themselves, and has been so ever since the demise of the Prophet. The task before socially engaged Muslims is to craft a contextually relevant understanding of this ambiguous concept so as to wrest it from cynical manipulation by the likes of the Taliban. This internal debate has been going on for centuries, but Muslims who wish to rescue their faith from peddlers of terror like Sufi Muhammad need to make their voices heard even louder today.

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*Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Social Policy at the National Law School, Bangalore

Visit Yoginder Sikand’s site at TwoCircles.net
—
Sukhia Sab Sansar Khaye Aur Soye
Dukhia Sahib Kabir Jagey Aur Roye

The world is ‘happy’, eating and sleeping
The forlorn Kabir Sahib is awake and weeping

SEE ALSO:

A brief history of the Taliban, Dr. Saleem Qureshi http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=1517
Afghan Pitfalls,  M. Shahid Alam http://world.mediamonitors.net/Headlines/Afghan-Pitfalls
Afghanistan: A War for Empire -  Not a Good War Gone Bad, Larry Everest http://www.counterpunch.org/everest10172008.html
Afghanistan: Obama’s Vietnam, John Barry & Evan Thomas http://www.newsweek.com/id/182650
Afghanistan, the Taliban and the United States, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq2.html
Afghanistan: The Taliban’s Rise To Power,  Alexandra Poolos http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1097442.html
The algebra of infinite justice, Arundhati Roy http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/29/september11.afghanistan
AlQaeda, Taliban, Hamas - Are they birds of a feather?, Abdul Cader Asmal http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/alqaeda_taliban_hamas_are_they_birds_of_a_feather/
Appeal to sign petition to the Taliban to honour the Pashtunwali code and release the Korean hostages http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/appeal_to_sign_petition_to_the_taliban_to_honour_the_pashtunwali_code_relea/
Barack Obama’s war: focus on beating Taliban and al-Qaida, Ewen MacAskill http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/28/barack-obama-foreign-policy-taliban-pakistan
Faceless Taliban Rule Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Syed Saleem Shahzad http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KA30Df01.html
Failed US foreign policy allowed Taliban to regroup http://www.paperarticles.com/2009/05/failed-us-foreign-policy-allowed.html
History of the Taliban: Who They Are, What They Want,  Pierre Tristam http://middleeast.about.com/od/afghanistan/ss/me080914a.htm
Pakistan another Iran?, Arnaud de Borchgrave http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/28/pakistan-another-iran/
Pakistan imposes Islamic law in Taliban stronghold, Saeed Shah http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/15/pakistan-islamic-law
Pakistan’s mystics in sights of Taliban, Chris Brummitt http://www.kentucky.com/524/story/805686.html
Return of the Taliban, Steve Coll http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/pakistan/alliance.html
Taliban Terror, Eric Margolis http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/taliban-terror.aspx
The Taliban’s Deadly Rise to Power, Molly Moore http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A38162-2001Sep15
The Taliban’s Islam http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Islam/2001/05/The-Talibans-Islam.aspx
Taliban’s Jizya on Pakistani Sikhs: Urgent Appeal to Deobandi Ulema to Issue Fatwa, Yoginder Sikand http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/talibans_jizya_on_pakistani_sikhs_urgent_appeal_to_deobandi_ulema_to_issue_/
Taliban’s Simplistic Islam No Answer To Afghanistan’s Problems, by S. Amjad Hussain http://www.twf.org/News/Y1997/Taliban.html
US encourages the Talibanisation of Afghanistan, Abid Mustafa http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/us_encourages_the_talibanisation_of_afghanistan/
U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil,  Julio Godoy http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1115-06.htm
What good friends left behind, John Pilger http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7