By Julian Spencer-Churchill
The current controversy over whether to recognize and constructively engage the odious Taliban regime or isolate it continues to be guided by a general ignorance by secular Western elites of the important role of religious legitimacy in political Islam. Secular and progressive policymakers fail to recognize that political Islam is not doctrinally monolithic nor is it static and that the Taliban’s hardline variant of Islamic governance is ephemeral and will not survive in Kabul.
Unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, which exchanged legitimacy for peace, the contemporary regime will come under pressure to modernize, which opens up significant policy opportunities for aid donors. The catastrophically abrupt collapse of the Western-backed government in Kabul confirmed a complete lack of Western understanding of the dynamics of how to create political legitimacy in a traditional Muslim state. Secular state efficiency was never going to be sufficient because in Islamic societies, religious and political legitimacy are indistinguishable.
The military campaign and provision of services, however effectively executed, should have been accompanied by a third campaign of ideas. NATO’s failure to address the issue of political Islam in Afghanistan doomed its efforts to failure and continues to haunt western policy. The secular development strategy in Afghanistan was largely the result of domestic constraints in European countries, whose electoral constituencies were facing controversial political and cultural disputes over the impact of Muslim immigration.
More egregiously, Western states, and I know the cases in the US in particular, rejected proposals for the promotion or setting-up of religious institutes in Afghanistan, favorable to NATO, primarily for the engagement of religious public diplomacy. One can certainly anticipate the controversy of such an effort. At worst, it could have been seen as blasphemous or disingenuously manipulative. In academic writing, I had proposed the harnessing of Barelvi Islam for the NATO effort but did not venture into the realm of policy because I was assured the Western effort in Afghanistan was on an even keel.
My confidence was utterly unfounded, and I am now writing this post-mortem two decades too late. I have never been to Afghanistan. However, I did conduct foreign policy research in Pakistan for over ten years, starting in 1999, and came in close contact with senior military, political, diplomatic, intelligence and police leaders from three of the four provinces and Kashmir, complemented by activities at Fort Leavenworth and Coronado Island, and written extensively on the topic of Pakistan-Afghan relations.
My quick litmus test of whether an aid worker, contractor, civil servant, soldier, or diplomat had an inkling of the measures of regime legitimacy in Afghanistan was whether they could identify the particular “fiqh,” or Islamic legal tradition, of the Afghans, and in my experience, the vast majority, secular to the bone, could not. The most articulate and persistent extreme threat to establishing a democratic Islamic regime, like the prospective one in Kabul, are Takfiri militants, or those that believe that Muslim regimes revert to pre or non-Islamic society are illegitimate.
We need to say militant because ninety-nine percent of Takfiris have a non-violent philosophic and political strategy. Like the Mujahideen before them, the Afghan Taliban are under the influence of the orthodox Hanbali fiqh (legal tradition) emanating from the Gulf States, and this is because of the heavy funding support channeled through Pakistani evangelical movements like the Ahl-i-Hadith, as well as private individuals, and political parties like Jamiat-i-Islamia.
The latter party is based on a nineteenth-century South Asian Deobandi reform movement, which sought to use Arab Islamic orthodoxy to arrest the decline of Islam vis-à-vis the rise of political Hindusim in the sub-continent. Deobandism crudely dovetails with the goals of militant Islamic scholars supporting or in Afghanistan, seeking to justify resistance, but without the extra baggage of rebuilding the Mughal Empire.
The orthodox Hanbali tradition of the isolated Arabian Peninsula is streamlined, and Salafist (literarily fundamentalist) fits nicely with an illiterate or recently literate rural population, unburdened by years of accumulated Islamic scholarship and poetry that is typical of Afghanistan. The permissiveness in Afghan social culture, Pakhtunwali, of decentralized violence associated with an emphasis on tribal justice and honor, is compatible with the Hanbali fiqh’s simplified and occasionally strict legal code.
The influences on Sunni Islam experienced by the Afghan Pashtun in Afghanistan have elements of Persian mysticism, Turkish Sufism, but is primarily dominated by the Hanafi Fiqh, or legal tradition of South Asian Islam, and its main ritual tradition, that of Barelvi Sufism, with its emphasis on saintly worship. Barelvi Islam is far less prone to militancy than other traditions, but it has associated groups that have nevertheless engaged in acts of sectarian terror against Shiites and non-Muslims.
The Hanafi fiqh could be described as South Asia’s equilibrium Islamic spiritual culture, optimized to survive in a highly competitive yet interdependent religious market, characterized by the close mutual proximity of the attractive alternatives of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity, and their variants. Muslim and Hindu Sindhis, also Barelvis, and Kashmiris in Pakistan, for example, share the same shrines and poets, without contradiction.
Sunni Afghans are mostly Hanafi and have been so since approximately the 1920s, which matters because of the prominent role of Islam in family law, and the political enterprise of Islam to create paradise on earth through just social laws. The popularity of Islamic law does not primarily sideline or compete with Western commercial and contract law, though litigation is very time-consuming in the latter, but rather against feudal law, which is seen as favoring privileged and landed elites, and therefore a constant issue for Islamic scholars promoting justice.
The Taliban’s composite Hanbali fiqh cum Deobandi philosophy is, consequently, very vulnerable and ultimately doomed to decline for four reasons. First, these traditions are alien to those segments of Afghanistan’s population that are not seeking to justify armed mobilization, particularly the urban population, merchants, and prosperous farmers. Second, the inevitability of increasing literacy and access to the internet will expose the cultural poverty of the Hanbali Fiqh when confronted with other South Asian religions.
Ninety percent of Afghanistan’s historical and current commerce is through Pakistan with India, so it cannot avoid exposure, and further infrastructural developments with Central Asia and Iran will further highlight these contradictions. Third, the growth of Hanbali movements among urban groups throughout South Asia has been stagnant for decades. Fourth, the Hanbali fiqh’s strictures against the worship of saints as intercessors run counter to local Afghan traditions. The Taliban face a never-ending problem of having to barricade their warriors’ cemeteries from grandmothers who sneak in praying for the health, fortune and fertility of their children.
This vulnerability was exploited by the British Raj, with the result of a remarkable loyalty by the Muslim British India Army, despite a century of religious enticements by Russian, German, and especially Turkish and Arab authorities. The British achieved this by providing heavy subsidies to established local shrines. Nor is Sufism toothless: when Afghan leader Amanullah Khan (1919-1929) unsuccessfully attacked the British in 1919, in 1929, the latter exploited a retaliatory revolt by the mystic leader of the Afghan Naqshbandiya, Bacha Saqqao, a Sufi faith within the broader Barelvi tradition.
In the resulting chaos, the British then permitted a rebel Afghan general to raise an army in the sanctuary of the British controlled Pashtun areas and to descend into Kabul and overthrow the government there. The first revolt against the contemporary Afghan regime, credibly thought to have been encouraged by support from Pakistan’s Frontier Force in 1973, was led by the mystic leader Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani of the Hizb-i Tawheed, who had secured considerable influence within the Afghan military.
The Qadiriyyas and Chistis are other similar mystical movements with broad appeal in mainstream Afghan society. The British East India Company and the subsequent British Raj inherited a system of incentives and punishments from the Mughal Empire and benefitted from the cooperation of other landed elites already patronizing the pirs and shrines. The district employees in the British-Indian Civil Service were typically fluent in the local language and were often members of families employed for two or three generations.
It was these instruments of policy that kept Punjabi garrisons loyal to the British Raj and facilitated the creation of Pakistan, despite Hindu and Muslim opposition. A more contemporary example, Pakistan exercised its ideological influence initially through Jamiat-i-Islamia, a Leninist-structured Pakistani religious party, which had extensive independent contacts with Islamist groups throughout South Asia. Pakistan shifted its patronage to the more pliable Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, particularly for recruiting militants through refugee camp madrassahs.
Afghanistan has been lost at tremendous cost. There are, however, innumerable ongoing campaigns against Takfiri militants across the globe, and this defeat is an abject lesson on the importance of equipping combatant commanders and nation-builders with the appropriate instruments to fashion stable and peaceful societies. Political authorities must convince western taxpayers that the essential value of investing in Islam is not a betrayal of secular values.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, former army engineer officer, and has written extensively on Pakistan.