Authors: David Isby
Islam has also been the rallying cry that brought together Afghans of different ethnicities and Pushtuns of different tribes to take arms against outsiders. The 1978–92 war against the Soviets and their Afghan supporters was perceived by the majority of Afghans as a jihad, a Muslim holy conflict.
17
The most significant divisions within the various Sunni populations, not limited to any single ethnolinguistic group, are between the practitioners of traditional Afghan Islam, heavily infused with Sufic practices (many of which have had strong political impacts such as the reverence to pirs, living saints, or the importance of Sufic brotherhoods as solidarity groups). These practices have stressed the importance of jihad but have also been historically resistant to its use to legitimate terrorism. Their opposition are those whose religious practices reflect the critics of Afghan Islam, including Islamists but especially those fundamentalists whose ideology includes elements emanating from the subcontinent (Deobandi) and Arabia (Wahabi or Salafist).
Prior to 1978, there were two primary sources of internal opposition in Afghanistan: Communists (supported by the Soviets) and Islamists
(that ended up being supported by Pakistan and money from outside the region). They were both opposed not only to what they saw as Afghanistan’s underdevelopment and the practices of rule from Kabul, but also to traditional Afghan Islam. The traditional Afghan Islam, marked by the relative tolerance of the clergy, rooted in their community and qawm rather than responding to a centralized national religious leadership or bureaucracy, was seen as part of the old Afghanistan that Communists and Islamists alike wished to overcome. The religious figures, along with the secular tribal and local leadership, the local khans, provided a set of autonomous checks and balances that neither opposition wished to accept.
For the Communists, there was to be no compromise with the old order. The Islamists, realizing they needed the intensely religious Afghan grassroots on their side, looked to a more gradual strategy of compromise and absorption.
Afghanistan’s Communists had been strong opponents of Afghan Islam when the two parties of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) emerged in the years before they seized power in the 1978 putsch. When the Communists seized power in the 1978 coup, they turned on the Afghan religious leadership, both because of their atheistic Communist ideology and because religion represented the competition for power and authority in Afghanistan. The Khalqi party, predominantly less-educated Pushtuns from rural backgrounds that resented its strong religious component, saw it as a backward remnant. Khalqis targeted families with hereditary claims to Sufic leadership—critical to religious leadership amongst Pushtuns—for arrest and murder in 1978–79. The more sophisticated urban, Kabuli, Dari-speaking Parcham party, installed in power by the Soviets in December 1979, tended to follow the Soviet central Asia model toward Islam, treating it as something that needed to be engaged with, to be controlled through subsidies and support as well as repression.
Another approach critical of traditional Afghan Islam was that of Afghanistan’s Islamists. They were modernizers and, in the years before 1978, were impatient with Afghan religion as, along with the tribal system of the Pushtuns, holding the country back. Afghan Islamists looked to
outside voices, especially from the Arab world, which looked to Islam to provide modernity and a shield against Western and Soviet cultural and political imperialism. Afghan Islamists also viewed the rising pre-1978 Communist threat in their own country with great alarm.
Islamism started as the central ideology of pre-1978 opposition parties. The Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (JIA) had its roots in Kabuli intellectuals. Its long-time leader was Dr. Burnhaddin Rabbani, a Cairo-trained theology professor. He retained the leadership of JIA through 1978–92 when it was one of the “Peshawar Seven” of Pakistan-supported Sunni Afghan resistance parties, and was the president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) that was formed from the Peshawar seven’s leadership in 1992. Though driven from Kabul by the Taliban in 1996, he remained the nominal internationally recognized head of state until after the US-led coalition intervention in 2001. Among the members of JIA were such major Afghan leaders as Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the foremost resistance leaders against the Soviets who, after fighting through Afghanistan’s civil war as the ISA defense minister, was assassinated in northern Afghanistan by Al Qaeda suicide terrorists just before the 9/11 attacks on the US.
A competing source of Afghan Islamism, though one in practice limited to Pushtuns, was the Hezb-e-Islami party. This shared JIA’s pre-1978 origins. However, by 1978 it had splintered into two parties, one led by Younis Khalis, a mullah with strong Khogiani Pushtun links from Nangarhar province and the other led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pushtun from Kunduz whose one-year attendance at Kabul University had earned him the honorary title of “Engineer.” Both of these parties were among the “Peshawar Seven.” The Hezb-e-Islami of Hekmatyar (HiH) became the largest single recipient of Pakistan-distributed outside aid to the Afghan resistance in 1978–92 and eventually became Pakistan’s “chosen instrument” inside Afghanistan until displaced from this position by the Taliban in 1996. The Hezb-e-Islami of Khalis (HiK) merged into other groups post-1992.
In reality, Afghan Islamist ideology had a limited impact with grassroots Afghanistan. Its leadership figures, with their roots among Afghanistan’s elites, found that to have mass appeal, they needed
to adapt to more traditional Islamic beliefs and practices and with tribal and other loyalties that the Islamists opposed. Hekmatyar’s difficulty in carrying out such adaptation was among the reasons he has remained unpopular in the southern Pushtun heartland, where Sufic-influenced Islam and tribal loyalties remained strong. Despite having strong support from Pakistan, he was unable to gain the degree of support from Afghanistan’s Pushtuns that the Taliban had in 1996–2001.
Another source of opposition to traditional Afghan Islam is represented by Islamic fundamentalism. This looks at traditional Afghan practices and Sufic influences as syncretic accretions, with roots in the subcontinent or pre-Muslim society. Fundamentalism influences on Afghan Islam were represented by Deobandi and Wahabi or Salafist approaches, brought in from madrassas abroad and supported with foreign money. Fundamentalists may embrace the tools and technology of modernity; but they are not modernizers, looking instead to achieve the pure Islam of the distant past, with the Shias seen as the most damaging polluters of the pure spring. The Afghan Taliban has been, from their origin, fundamentalists, representing their leaderships’ schooling in Deobandi-influenced madrassas in the FATA. This underlay much of their hostility to Islamists in Afghanistan during the 1992–2001 civil war.
In the 1980s and 90s, the critique of Afghan Islamic practice was embodied in the Taliban’s Deobandi-based version of a maximalist Islamic ideology that emerged from the refugee camps. It was linked in this with what is termed Wahabism in Afghanistan, a movement that had been imported into Afghanistan to “reform” traditional Afghan Islam—with little success—in the years before 1978. Saudi financial assistance was accompanied with a strong push to spread its intolerant and restrictive Wahabi form of Islam, alien in any case to Afghanistan, with disastrous results. Saudi and Gulf money has subsidized the building and operations of maderi in Pakistan that produced the Taliban and other extremists now threatening the stability of Pakistan. During the 1980s, Wahabism became important, especially in the refugee camps and in madrassa in Pakistan, because of foreign funding. An autonomous Wahabi “kingdom” appeared in the Kunar valley.
Because these influences were strongest in Pakistan and because the
Afghan exile population there was predominantly Pushtun, these outside influences were strongest amongst Pushtuns. Among non-Pushtuns, the Tajiks continued to be closer to traditional practices, despite the Islamist views of many of their political and military leaders. The Shia Hazaras went through a bloody sub-national civil war in the 1980s which saw supporters of Iran’s Islamic Revolution trying and failing to seize power in the Hazara Jat, but succeeding in killing or driving into exile many of the Hazara’s traditional religious and secular leaders.
Even though the Taliban’s ideology was hostile to traditional Afghan Islam, they were able to accommodate many of its grassroots believers in 1992–2001, using shared Pushtun ethnolinguistic links. But, during the Taliban’s 1996–2001 rule from Kabul, the increased influence of Al Qaeda and the importance of Arab funding meant that the Taliban paid more attention to the practices of outside supporters and less to that of their Pushtun clients, contributing to the loss of legitimacy the Taliban experienced among many Pushtuns by 2001.
The Afghan Taliban first received Pakistan’s backing in 1994 and by 1996 had replaced HiH as Pakistan’s chosen instrument in Afghanistan. It was an attempt to continue Pakistan’s strategy of aiming at political control in Afghanistan through a new set of clients. President Benazir Bhutto and interior minister Nasrullah Babur were secular nationalists that had no problem with using Islamic fundamentalists as policy tools. Taliban’s leadership was drawn from Pushtun ulema (clergy), many with shared backgrounds in the war against the Soviets or in the Deobandi-influenced madrassas of the FATA. This leadership gave the Taliban a capability to mobilize Afghan Pushtuns, reaching across tribal and local lines.
The tension between fundamentalism and traditional Afghan Islam for many years proved a limit on the resurgent Afghan insurgency, but by 2008–10 the Afghan Taliban, well funded and using effective propaganda, had been able to infiltrate or bring over many of the Sufic brotherhoods in southern Afghanistan and influence what was being preached in mosques throughout Afghanistan.
Because Afghanistan is decentralized and lacks a tradition of a state-supported unitary national ulema or religious leadership, the nature of Afghan Islam is largely determined at the grassroots level. There is no
single question more important for Afghan stability than “to whom do you listen?” at the mosque. Religious authority—either local, reflecting tiers of kinship, tribe, or qawm, or that of more remote figures (especially Sufic leaders) that can have a broader appeal—is important to provide legitimacy for any actions or change, secular or religious. This authority had been in the hands of major figures connected with Sufic orders (such as Pir Sayid Ahmed Gailani and Sayid Sibghatullah Mojadidi, both of whom led one of the seven Peshawar-based Sunni Afghan resistance parties in the 1980s) or their local counterparts, pirs, ulema and sayids. Afghanistan’s Shia, especially in the Hazara Jat, have a structure of religious authority separate from Sunni practice, one largely unsupported by pre-2001 Afghan governments. These religious authorities have all been challenged by the emergence of new generations of Afghans (and ulema) that have been affected by Deobandi influences from the subcontinent (the original Taliban leadership were educated in madrassas in Pakistan) and other sources of radical Islam.
The Afghan conflict against the Soviets in 1978–92 was remote to the West. Yet its impact on Afghan life and society cannot be overestimated. To Afghans, it is what the Great War was to Europeans and the Patriotic Fatherland War to the Soviets. Among the many lasting impacts has been the tendency to associate change, reform and modernization with the enemy and what is permanent and resistant—to change as well as conquest—with Islam and Afghanistan.
Islam has increased importance in Afghanistan as both a unifying and a dividing factor. The damage to Afghan society inflicted by the conflicts of 1978–2001, the refugee camps, and the exile experience has led the diverse and divided Afghan people to turn increasingly to Islam (encouraged by the policies of Pakistan and foreign donors from the Islamic world). Today, Islam has a assumed a greater importance in Afghanistan than it did in the years before 1978. Conflict also brought religious radicalization (as well as state failure) to Afghanistan.
This trend towards radicalization has increased the Islamic role in society as well as its political-military impact and has contributed to the greater role of Islam in Afghan life, culture, and politics today compared with “the Golden Age,” the generation before
the conflicts started in 1978. Purely secular solutions, ones that cannot be legitimated in Islamic as well as Afghan terms, are often ineffective, regarded with hostility or as foreign impositions. But change in Islamic practice is also generally viewed with suspicion, as reflected by the limited acceptance of Wahabi influence despite decades of well-funded efforts from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to push their practices on Afghans.
The current government in Kabul is formally called the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime it displaced was called the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Its 1992–2001 legal predecessor was called the Islamic State of Afghanistan. There is no doubt Afghanistan is Islamic in its nature and government. But its current form differs greatly from what was seen under the Taliban. The current conflicts will determine who will define what is Islamic and therefore what is Afghan.
Legitimacy
Today, Afghanistan has become a nation defined as much by its conflicts as its land, it peoples, and its faith. Conflicts in Afghanistan are fundamentally about legitimacy. Understanding what makes up legitimacy in Afghan terms—who can get, who lacks it—is as vital to understanding the conflicts as are maps to the terrain. A successful regime must be able to legitimate itself in Afghan and Islamic terms. Legitimacy has been the high ground on which the battle for the future of Afghanistan is waged.
“You can’t buy Afghans, you can only rent them” is a cynical view of Afghan politics. Yet there are two important qualifications to this: they do not stay rented, and not everyone can rent them. In the 1980s, all the Kremlin’s armed forces, gold, and political skills could not create a regime that worked in Afghanistan because of the widely held perception by Afghans of the ab initio illegitimacy of the Soviet presence.