|
Afghanistan's
Taliban Rebels Blend Islam and Maoism
By Franz Schurmann Pacific News Service, September 30,
1996
The West may fear the Taliban movement which seized power
in Afghanistan last week as Arab-inspired terrorists. In fact,
the Taliban, with their mix of Sunni Muslim beliefs and Maoist
"serve the people" doctrines, are more reminiscent
of Chinese communist revolutionaries. PNS associate editor
Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology
at the University of California, Berkeley, studied for two
years in Afghanistan. A noted scholar on China, Schurmann
also is author of a book on Afghan Mongols and reads widely
in the Arab- and Farsi-language press.
The fall of Afghanistan's capital Kabul to the Taliban rebels
has received far less coverage in the Western media than the
fierce violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet future
historians may well conclude that the Taliban victory did
more to change the world than the latest eruption in a conflict
that has lasted close to fifty years.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict grapples with the age-old
issue of using borders to separate hostile nations. The Taliban
send out a different message: when it comes to fundamentals,
borders don't matter. The Taliban have come to power in one
of Asia's most strategically located countries with one single-minded
aim: to redeem the entire Islamic world of one billion people.
The fundamentals that matter to the Taliban are creating a
moral society which they believe can come about only through
religion, specifically Islam. Their stunning victory in just
two years of fighting reflects the huge popularity of their
message. Wherever they fought in ethnically diverse Afghanistan,
they were feared by the warlords but welcomed by ordinary
people.
The word "taliban" is the Farsi-Persian plural of
the Arabic word "talib," student. Their movement
started in the late 1980's in Pakistan's numerous Afghan refugee
camps. But its roots lie in the revolutionary fervor that
gripped Afghan students during the 1960's. Like similar movements
all over the world at the time, Afghan students embraced Marxism-Leninism.
But unlike most of the others which focused on industrial
workers, Afghan students were deeply affected by Chinese Maoism
which preached an almost missionary moralism to any and all
poor.
When a brutal Communist government came to power in Afghanistan
in 1978, Marxism Leninism soured as an ideology among Afghan
youth. Many turned to Islam, the faith of the vast majority
of Afghanistan's poorest people. Students found that Maoism's
"serve-the-people" doctrines fitted in well with
Islam even as they found Mao Zedong's concepts of warfare
highly effective in resisting the Communist regime and then
battling post-Communist warlords.
The Taliban emerged as a new force in Afghanistan two years
ago when they swept away Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, Afghanistan's
most powerful warlord. Then they seized the country's westernmost
city Herat. Last week they claimed Kabul, thanks largely to
the help of civilian residents fed up with war and official
corruption.
International observers' key concern now is whether the Taliban
will content themselves with running their own country. Pakistan
fears the fact that the Taliban are predominantly Pushtun,
an ethnic group that comprises roughly half of Afghanistan's
population and a sizable minority in Pakistan (where they
also dominate the Pakistani army). Ever since 1947, successive
Afghan governments have demanded that Pakistan cede all their
Pushtun inhabited regions to form Pushtunistan, or a Greater
Afghanistan.
But the Talibans are not nationalists. They are devout Sunni
Muslims. They have offered the ethnic Tadjiks, their main
opponents in Afghanistan, positions in their new government,
in part because the Tadjiks are also Sunnis. On the other
hand, they denounce their Shi'a opponents as infidels. Because
of their fierce opposition to Shi'ism, the Taliban are loathed
by Iran -- as well as by Russia, India and independent Tajikistan,
which backed the now deposed Rabbani government in Kabul.
For ordinary Pakistanis, who are also Sunni Muslims, the Taliban's
fervent Sunni beliefs along with their Maoist serve-the-people
ideology hold strong appeal. Should Afghanistan gain a new
stability under a Sunni Islamic order, that appeal will be
greatly enhanced as Pakistan itself descends into a kind of
political madness.
Denounced and feared by the West as terrorists and "Afghan
Arabs" indoctrinated by Arab radicals, the Taliban in
fact are neither. They are dead-serious revolutionaries just
like Mao's Communists. Should they succeed in Afghanistan,
their impact will be felt not just in neighboring Pakistan
but in Tajikistan, Russia and India, where the vast majority
of Muslims are also Sunnis.
Ironically, Washington's first reaction to the Taliban victory
was mildly favorable, largely because of the Taliban's deep
animosity towards Iran. But should Taliban revolutionary morality
make inroads in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bosnia, the tables
will turn. The fear of an Iranian-led revolutionary Islam
will be as nothing compared to what a Taliban-led Islamic
tidal wave will be.
|
Pacific
News Classics: Afghanistan
Pacific
News Focus: Palestinian-Israeli
Relations