Part III
The Islamic Jihad
6. Muslim Youth
The development of an Islamic movement in a country depends on the mercy of God. When God wants to show mercy on a place, he orders the wind and clouds to gather and leads them to a specific point where he wants it to rain. There it rains, and immediately the land changes, and a movement is created in it. The soil breaks up, and life raises its head from that spot. The Holy Qur’an is like this, and the country and people of Afghanistan are like that fallow land.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar made this statement in a speech to Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the early 1980s. [1] As the leader (amir) of Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan (the Islamic Party of Afghanistan), one of the principal Islamic parties then fighting to overthrow the Marxist regime in Afghanistan, Hekmatyar was primarily concerned in his speech with condemning the leftist leadership in Kabul and its Soviet sponsors. However, the head of the most radical of the Afghan resistance parties also took time to inform his audience about the origins of his party as a student group at Kabul University in the late 1960s. This reminiscence of student days was not a digression or flight of fancy. To the contrary, Hekmatyar’s historical reflections had considerable significance in the context of Afghan national politics, for it was through history that Hizb-i Islami staked its right to rule Afghanistan. Thus, because the Muslim student organization could claim to have been the first group to have warned the nation of the dangers of Soviet communism, Hizb-i Islami could declare its preeminence among the various resistance parties in Pakistan and assert its leadership of the Islamic government that it hoped to establish in the homeland. And because so many of the group’s early leaders were arrested and martyred by the communists, Hizb-i Islami was able to justify its often controversial actions: its relentless control over party members, its summary execution of political opponents, its often ruthless attacks against rival resistance parties, and its sabotage of attempts at political compromise to end the interminable conflict in Afghanistan.
In Part Three, I am again concerned with history, specifically, the history of the Hizb-i Islami political party, and with how this organization, which began as a campus study group, was transformed into an authoritarian political party. Although Hizb-i Islami has faded in importance, it was the dominant Islamic political party in the period preceding and following the Soviet invasion, and more than any other group it was responsible for undermining independent regional efforts to overthrow the Marxist regime; it also created the organizational template adopted (more or less successfully) by other Afghan resistance parties, and it established the climate of distrust and division that has plagued the development of an Islamic governing structure in Afghanistan to this day. [2] Hizb-i Islami had an impact far beyond the number of its fronts, which were many, or the effectiveness of its military operations, which was considerable. Indeed, the party’s principal legacy was political not military, and it is my contention that, along with the Khalq party, which it resembled in many respects, Hizb-i Islami was responsible for prolonging the conflict by consistently destroying grounds for common cause within the resistance and within Afghan society more generally.
My interest here is not only how this particular party forged a dominant place for itself in the Afghan resistance during the early 1980s but also how the party deviated from more traditional forms of Islamic political practice, especially the clerical and mystical traditions that had been at the center of earlier antigovernment political movements, and how it helped to keep the various Islamic political factions disunited in the face of the Soviet invasion, thereby laying the groundwork for the eventual takeover by the Taliban militia. In keeping with the general pattern of this book, this first chapter of Part Three has both a biographical and a historical focus. My main concern here is with the development of a political party and ideology, and my principal strategy for dealing with that topic is to consider one man’s life in the context of the larger historical events shaping his personal career and the trajectory of the party during the last half of the twentieth century. The second chapter of Part Three examines the structural divisions within the Islamic political movement in the wake of the Marxist revolution and the role of Hizb-i Islami in exacerbating these divisions.
The life history at the center of this chapter belongs to a man known as Qazi Muhammad Amin Waqad, whom I met in Peshawar and interviewed once in 1984 and twice in 1986. “Qazi” means “judge” and is an honorific deriving from the fact that Muhammad Amin’s father was an Islamic judge and Muhammad Amin himself completed his studies in Islamic law and was qualified to serve as a judge. Muhammad Amin’s last name—“Waqad,” or “enlightener” in Arabic—is also significant, for it is a name he gave himself. Afghans traditionally do not have family names, but this lack began to create problems for those living in urban centers and mixing with large numbers of unfamiliar people, most of whom had similar names. Tribal Pakhtuns frequently dealt with this problem by using their tribe’s name as a family name, and the children of well-known fathers sometimes adopted their father’s name as a family name (for example, the sons of the Paktia tribal chief Babrak Khan became known by the name “Babrakzai”; sons of Mir Zaman Khan came to be known as “Zamani”). Others, however, among them many of the students who streamed into Kabul to attend the newly opened university in the 1960s and 1970s, made up their own last names (takhalus). Qazi Muhammad Amin was one of those students, and he chose a name that symbolically denoted the role he hoped to assume in the revolutionary political matrix that was emerging in his student years.
Although he served as the amir of Hizb-i Islami at various times during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Qazi Amin’s most familiar post was that of deputy amir (mawen), or number two man in the party. He held this position until resigning from the party in 1985 in protest over the acceptance of a Saudi-brokered political alignment that brought together the seven major political parties. Thereafter, he headed his own minor party but stayed mostly on the sidelines until a short-lived appointment as communications minister in the Islamic government that formed between the collapse of the Najibullah government in 1992 and the Taliban takeover in 1994. During the period of my interviews with Qazi Amin, the war inside Afghanistan was bogged down in what appeared to be a limitless stalemate; in Peshawar the resistance parties were engaged in their usual internecine disputes, and various outsiders—Pakistanis and Arabs in particular—were hovering around the edges of the action, trying to exert their authority. It was a time of corruption and of maneuvering for position—not a time of fervent conviction or inspired action.
Qazi Amin was very much in the middle of a scene that many people, outside observers and Afghans alike, were growing to loathe and resent. Ordinary mujahidin and civilians were getting killed, the refugees were sweltering in fetid camps, and—as far as I could discern—the party leaders were concerned primarily with their own interests and not with those of the people they supposedly represented. By the time I met Qazi Amin, I had already interviewed most of the party leaders and was convinced that the jihad would drag on endlessly and that the political situation would likely get more fragmented and corrupt before it got better. I was generally depressed with the whole situation and would not have been displeased had all the leaders been dispatched in a sudden accident.
Despite this attitude, I was able to muster some enthusiasm for meeting Qazi Amin, in part because I suspected that he might provide interesting links to historical figures like the Mulla of Hadda, whom I had already spent many months investigating (and whose story is told in Heroes of the Age). I had been informed that Qazi Amin was a Mohmand from eastern Afghanistan and that he was the son of a locally prominent judge who had also been a disciple of one of the Mulla of Hadda’s principal deputies. I also knew that, in keeping with family tradition and in contrast to most of the Muslim student militants who came to Islamic politics from secular schools, he had attended religious schools and had originally set out to follow the same conservative religious career path trod by his father.
The biographical facts that I had been told indicated that Qazi Amin’s life would provide a useful vehicle for looking at the transformations in Islamic political culture in recent years, but, given the general reticence I had encountered in other top leaders I had interviewed, I had no reason to think that this interview would prove any more enlightening. To my surprise, however, I found that Qazi Amin was quite welcoming in his attitude and sometimes even expansive in his answers. While I had a great deal of trouble getting detailed information from Hekmatyar and other radical leaders about their formative years, Qazi Amin allowed me to probe this area of his life and was not put off when I wandered into politically sensitive areas either. I didn’t always get satisfactory answers to my questions, but I never felt any hostility for having asked them.
At the same time, however, throughout the time I was interviewing Qazi Amin, it never left my mind that he was a top-level politician in a resistance organization whose mission was to destroy the government in the country next to the one in which I was then residing and whose political philosophy was equally antagonistic to the government of my own country (even if that government was at the time the party’s chief arms supplier). Kalashnikov-wielding guards were always present to remind me of Qazi Amin’s position, lest I forget, and the sometimes bemused but always wary cast of eye in his thickly bearded countenance continually reminded me of the status of the squat man sitting on the floor mat across from me.
Since Samiullah Safi and Qazi Amin are approximate contemporaries of one another (Safi being five years older than Qazi Amin, who was born in 1947), the life history in this chapter covers much the same historical period as that discussed in the two previous chapters. [3] Both stories also share a common regional focus in the Afghan-Pakistani frontier and certain prevailing themes, such as the transformation of older moral principles and organizational forms in the rapidly changing milieu of Afghan society. Despite these similarities, however, the two life histories share little else in either content or style. When I conducted my interviews with Samiullah Safi, he had been in exile for nearly two years, and he saw little chance of his returning to Pech. Consequently, our conversations had a somewhat elegiac quality to them, and I had the distinct impression that I was being used to record the completed story of another man’s life. My job, I perceived, was to get the story straight and to recognize in it the sense of moral coherence that the speaker intended to impart through his choice of words. During the course of the several hours of interviews—and I even hesitate to use the word “interviews” since it inaccurately represents the way he dominated our interaction and dictated the direction and flow of his reminiscences—I listened, nodded, and poured more tea.
The time I passed with Qazi Amin was invariably cordial, perhaps more so than that spent with Wakil, who was quite purposeful and at times even impersonal as he went about telling his story. But where I sometimes felt as though Wakil, despite his personally detached mode of presentation, was opening up chasms in his soul, my impression of Qazi Amin was that the more friendly he became in manner the more evasive he became in his answers. Thus, when Qazi Amin discussed his father’s life or his own early memories, his reminiscence flowed along without substantial prodding. However, when we began to drift into more contentious matters, such as the conflicts among the resistance parties, he often balked, providing a clipped reply and waiting for me to ask my next question. At the time of our interview, Qazi Amin was more engaged in the flow of political events. While Wakil was an exile from his home and the center of his own political gravity in Pech, Qazi Amin was right at the heart of the things in Peshawar, where the Islamic political parties carried out their business. What I didn’t realize completely then, however, was how at the time of our interviews Qazi Amin was also in decline. Like Wakil, Qazi Amin’s greatest influence was behind him; he would never again enjoy the degree of power and authority he wielded in the early part of the jihad. Like Wakil as well, Qazi Amin declined in importance largely because he was a hybrid—neither fully one thing nor the other. In his case, hybridity had to do with his having one foot in the world of the traditional cleric and the other in the world of radical student politics. Initially, being able to negotiate and maneuver in both these worlds was his strength and great contribution to the jihad, but when the fissures in the jihad proved too deep to cross he became peripheral to the interests of men more single-minded and ruthless than himself.
To reflect the differences that I sensed in the two interviews, I have chosen to represent them in somewhat different ways. Since Wakil’s interview consisted of a series of stories, I fashioned them that way, excising extraneous comments by others who might have been in the room (including myself) and, in some cases, taking out the noise, clutter, and repetitious filler that occasionally obscured the narrative contours of Wakil’s material. For Qazi Amin, however, I have retained the interview framework within which the life history emerged because it was always within this context that our conversations proceeded, and the question-and-answer format was never left behind.
My primary concern in this chapter is with the evolution of the Hizb-i Islami party, but before turning to that subject I provide accounts of Qazi Amin’s father’s career, the transformation of Islamic politics in the first half of the twentieth century, and Qazi Amin’s own early education. These sections of personal and political history help to contextualize developments while also providing a link between the earlier forms of religious dissent and those that were to emerge in the democratic period. Following these introductory sections, I use Qazi Amin’s personal history to examine the development of Hizb-i Islami up through the Marxist revolution. As a way of organizing this discussion, I divide this history into two principal stages: an initial period of campus-focused activism and peer engagement lasting roughly from 1966 until the official founding of the Muslim Youth Organization in 1969 and a second period of increasing radicalization between 1969 and 1978, during which time the Muslim Youth launched an abortive coup d’état against the government; the failure of this coup almost destroyed the party, but it also set the stage for Hizb-i Islami’s emergence as the most radical, secretive, and controlling of the Islamic resistance parties.
Early Histories
Interviewer (I):Would you please provide us with some information about your father, other family members, and your background?
Qazi Amin (QA):My name is Muhammad Amin. My father’s name is Muhammad Yusuf, and my grandfather’s name is Maulavi Sayyid Muhammad. We are from Ningrahar Province in Afghanistan. In Ningrahar Province, our home is Batikot, and we belong to the Mohmand tribe. Within the Mohmand tribe, we belong to the Janikhel branch. My grandfather served as the prayer leader [imam] of the village and taught Islamic subjects in the mosque school. I never saw him. My father was only about fifteen or sixteen years old when his father died. . . .
My grandmother belonged to a sayyid family [those who claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad] that lived in a place near Inzari of Shinwar. They were very wise people, and my grandmother was also very wise and able and knew how to educate her sons; so she sent all four of her sons, including my father, to India to educate them in religious studies. After being in India for some time, the older brothers sent their younger brother, Amir Muhammad, back home to serve their mother while they stayed on [in India]. One of the brothers died during this time, and the other brother returned home without finishing his education. But my father, Muhammad Yusuf, spent twelve years in India and completed his education . . . at the Deoband madrasa, which was the greatest center of religious sciences at that time. Everyone who could finish his education wanted to go there. . . . He spent two years in Deoband and graduated first in his class.
My father returned from Deoband in 1937 or 1938. . . . At that time, there was a custom in Afghanistan that the religious scholars who had graduated from Deoband or from any other madrasa in India would be appointed as judges by the government. In 1938, Mia Sahib of Kailaghu asked my father to accept a position as a judge. Mia Sahib was a judge and a very high-ranking religious scholar in the Afghan government of the time, so my father accepted the offer. First, he went to Gardez and later to Khost. Then he moved to Katawaz, and for some time he was in Ghazni. In the beginning, he was a lower-court judge and later became a provincial judge.
My father was a very accomplished scholar and had an attractive appearance, and when part of his body became paralyzed, people said to each other that it was because of the evil eye. He also had the power of eloquence in his speaking, and he knew a great deal about the political and social affairs of his time, especially the different tribal traditions. Because of this, when the government accepted him as a judge, they sent him to Paktia, which is a border province of Pakhtuns, and he was able to work successfully there—first as a lower-court judge and later as a provincial judge. He was a judge for a total of six years. In 1945, the sixth year of my father’s employment, I was born in Khost [Paktia Province]. So I am now forty years old. At that time, the Safis had started their war against the government in Kunar Province.
(I):What did your father do after he got sick?
(QA):After his sickness, my father spent the rest of his life in Kot. Even though the government asked him many times to go back to his job, he wouldn’t agree. We lived on the income of our land. We had oxen for plowing and also a tenant farmer to work on our land. Besides that, our father was the preacher in the main mosque, and he also had some students. But unlike other mullas, he didn’t accept any assistance from the people, and because of this, the people of the area called him “khan mulla,” the mulla who is like a khan. Our father was a mulla who had his own guesthouse and fed every kind of visitor there. We didn’t need anyone’s help. Our father always tried to help the people in our area settle their disputes, so our living standard was equal to a khan’s living standard. We had land, we had a guesthouse, and we could solve the problems of the people.
(I):Did your father have any kind of relation with pirs or Sufis like Enzari Mulla Sahib?
(QA):My father was a disciple of Pachir Mulla Sahib, who lived in Pachir, which is near Agam. I have seen him myself. He was alive until recently. His sons were martyred in the jihad: Maulavi Abdul Baqi and his other son. Pachir Mulla Sahib was a disciple of the Mulla of Hadda, and my father was a disciple of Pachir Mulla Sahib, who was a very prayerful and pious man. [Pachir Mulla] liked to lead the life of a simple man of God [faqir].
(I):You said before that your father was both a good preacher and was popular with the tribes. Did the government send him to work in the tribal areas because he was better able to control the tribes than a secular person would have been?
(QA):Yes, that was the way the government kept control of the tribes. In those days, the people were uneducated, and the military bases weren’t very strong, so the only way the government could keep its control over the people was by using religious scholars and popular tribal leaders. Military force was not enough. For example, the people of Paktia were uneducated, and the military bases were not strong enough to control the tribes. The government at that time was newly formed and still quite weak. Consequently, they had to depend on religious scholars and popular tribal leaders to maintain their authority over the people. On the one hand, religious scholars had spiritual influence and power, and as good orators and preachers of Islam they could easily find an esteemed position among the people. On the other hand, they had government authority, too. [4]
Qazi Amin’s description of his father’s life reveals some traditional patterns in Afghan religion. Following time-honored precedents, Muhammad Yusuf, while a young man, journeyed far afield for scriptural knowledge before returning to his homeland to assume the mantle of a respected cleric in the government. Like the young Najmuddin Akhundzada, who later became known as the Mulla of Hadda, Muhammad Yusuf had a religious background. He was, in fact, more favored in this regard than Najmuddin, for not only were his father and grandfather religious scholars, but his mother had also inherited sanctity as the result of being a member of a family claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad Yusuf, however, also had the same disadvantage as Najmuddin—of being left fatherless at a young age—and like Najmuddin and many other boys in similar circumstances, he responded by going in search of religious knowledge and the credentials that would allow him to establish his own identity and social position as a scholar.
All of this is familiar, and so is the fact that on completing his education Muhammad Yusuf returned to his home area to marry and begin employment in a local mosque as a prayer leader and teacher. This was not the route that Najmuddin took, but few had the inner disposition to lead the life of a mystic and ascetic who could forego family, wealth, and position to single-mindedly serve God. While he had mystical leanings of his own and became a disciple of a well-known pir, Muhammad Yusuf’s orientation was primarily scholarly, and his decision to return to his home to start his own madrasa reflects this fact. Traditionally, Afghan men of religion have combined elements of both the mystical and the scriptural in their lives. While in some settings Sufism and scripturalism tend to attract different sorts of adherents, who keep their distance from one another, most well-known Afghan mystics (including the Mulla of Hadda) have been respected scholars, and likewise most respected scholars have been themselves Sufi pirs or disciples of Sufi pirs. The decision whether to be primarily a mystic or a scholar is an individual one, but clear social incentives and disincentives come into play in each situation. In the case of Najmuddin, apparently very little pulled him back to his home area. He was from a poor family, and he would likely have ended his days as a poor village mulla if he had returned home. Muhammad Yusuf, however, was from a relatively prosperous family, which meant that, on his return from India, he had land and income waiting for him, along with the prospect of a socially beneficial marriage.
Another pattern that we see in the father’s life history that is less familiar, at least if we take the Mulla of Hadda and his disciples as our point of reference, is the scholar accepting employment with the government. As I discussed in depth in Heroes of the Age, the reputation of the Mulla and his closest followers stemmed in large part from their separation from and periodic opposition to the government, but such opposition became increasingly rare through the early part of the twentieth century as the government expanded and offered an ever larger number of religious scholars employment in its service. [5] In this sense then, Qazi Amin’s father’s life exemplifies the increasingly common trend toward the routinization and bureaucratization of religious authority—and the increasing irrelevance of religion as a force of political dissent through the first half of the twentieth century.
The pattern of increasing cooperation between religious leaders and the states can be seen quite clearly by considering the case of the Mulla of Hadda’s tariqat (Sufi order). Following the death of Amir Abdur Rahman in 1901, his successor, Amir Habibullah, persuaded the Mulla to return to Afghanistan and treated him with great respect and tolerance. [6] The Mulla had been a vociferous opponent of Habibullah’s father, who had tried to arrest him. The Mulla escaped, but several of his disciples had not been so fortunate. Habibullah wanted to mend this break, and signaled this attitude in a number of ways, one of which was the exemption of religious leaders from paying taxes and, in some cases, the assignment to them of tax revenues. Because of the Mulla of Hadda’s standing as the most renowned religious figure of his day, Amir Habibullah gave him valuable land in the fertile valley of Paghman, a few kilometers outside of Kabul, and later issued a decree that the government’s tax receipts from the area around Hadda, which amounted to 3,500 rupees in cash and thirty-two kharwar of wheat, be given to the Mulla for the support of the langar where he fed his disciples and guests. [7] The state also allocated annual stipends to his principal deputies, including Sufi Sahib of Batikot, who received 2,500 “silver rupees,” and Pacha Sahib of Islampur, whose allowance included 1,400 silver rupees and twenty-one kharwar each of wheat and straw to support and maintain his langar and mosque. [8] While many religious figures appreciated this more favorable treatment, a number, including the Mulla of Hadda himself, recognized the potential danger entailed in accepting government largesse. Hadda Sahib even went so far as to return to the amir the land he had received, saying that it was the property of the people (bait ul-mal) and therefore forbidden to him.
Though Amir Habibullah’s efforts at placating traditional religious leaders appear at odds with his father’s style of rule, the same impulse toward consolidating monarchical authority was at its root. Where Abdur Rahman had recognized the necessity of strengthening the power of the center at the expense of religious and tribal leaders, Habibullah apparently believed that the balance of power had now shifted in the government’s favor and that the moment was auspicious for taking a more conciliatory approach focused on symbolic inclusion of dissident elements rather than forcible removal. [9] Whatever his motivation, one effect of his largesse to religious leaders was the decline of their popular authority. Acceptance of government funds for the upkeep of a langar was tolerable in most people’s minds, but the perception became increasingly widespread that some of the mullas’ deputies and their offspring were on the government dole and were more devoted to property than piety. [10] Given the unstable nature of charismatic authority, it is probably the case that the Mulla of Hadda’s tariqat would have declined with or without Habibullah’s assistance, but government interference certainly accelerated the process, as did the government’s practice of implicating religious leaders in local administration.
This policy was played out during the Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. In the decade and a half between the Mulla of Hadda’s death in 1903 and the outbreak of hostilities with Great Britain, various of the Mulla’s deputies, including Mulla Sahib of Chaknawar and Sufi Sahib of Batikot, had appeared from time to time among the border tribes to try to provoke an uprising against the British government in India. None of these efforts had created the sort of widespread disturbance that the Mulla of Hadda had helped to instigate in 1897, but the labors of the mullas were sufficient to keep the frontier in a state of nervous alarm for much of this period. [11] They also succeeded in keeping alive their own reputations as men of political action, but this was to change when their independent efforts were harnessed to the government’s cause in 1919.
Upon declaring jihad against the British, Amir Amanullah, Habibullah’s son and successor, immediately sought the assistance of religious leaders, including the Mulla’s deputies. By this time, many of those personally associated with the Mulla were getting on in years, but those who were still in a position to participate in this new jihad did so. [12] This time, however, they were not treated as independent leaders but rather were incorporated into the command structure as subordinates of Amanullah’s own representative, Haji Abdur Razaq Khan, who recognized the value of these spiritual figures for organizing the tribes. Religious leaders were a key ingredient in Abdur Razaq’s plan because of their ability to move across sometimes hostile tribal boundaries and coordinate activities among groups that might otherwise have only ill-will for one another. Razaq also understood that spiritual leaders had both the education and the trust needed to oversee the movement of weapons, ammunitions, and supplies to different locations and to keep rival tribes focused on the enemy rather than on each other. [13] The religious leaders went along with this plan because of their longstanding interest in combating British influence on the frontier, but their cooperation came at a cost. The Mulla of Hadda had been careful never to accept a subordinate position to the Afghan amir and in fact had contested the amir’s right to declare a jihad on the grounds that he was not a proper Islamic ruler. In the 1919 war with Great Britain, however, the Mulla’s deputies, who succeeded him after his death, not only conceded the right of announcing jihad to the state but also ceded their position as independent leaders of their tribal followers for the more circumscribed role of logistical coordinators charged with supervising operations at a middle rung in the chain of command.
While the organizational arrangements established during the 1919 war demonstrate the changing relationship of religious leaders to the state, the best illustration of the government’s harnessing of religious leaders to its own ends came in the ceremony that the government held following the conclusion of hostilities to commemorate Afghanistan’s “victory” over Great Britain. [14] The site of the ceremony was a field next to the Mulla of Hadda’s tomb. When the delegates to the assembly had all gathered, General Nadir Khan (later King Nadir Shah), who was Amir Amanullah’s representative, called on the members of the assembly to prove their readiness to renew the jihad against the British by signing their names on the inside cover of a Qur’an. As each leader signed his name, he was also asked to indicate the number of mujahidin he would provide and the area where he would fight. Nadir then presented them with engraved pistols and battle standards inscribed with Qur’anic verses. Playing the symbolic dimensions of the occasion to maximum effect, the government had decorated the meeting ground with black banners (a time-honored emblem of Islamic militancy) that had been consecrated at the shrine of Hazrat ‘Ali in Mazar-i Sharif, the principal shrine and pilgrimage site in Afghanistan. These banners were embroidered with religious motifs, such as the outline of a hand (symbolic of the five principal members of the Prophet’s house), the star and crescent, and the silhouette of a mosque.
The deployment of these symbols for the state’s purposes demonstrates the way in which Afghanistan was moving from a nineteenth-century kingdom to a twentieth-century nation-state. The symbols that we see arrayed on this occasion were traditional ones that governments in the past had also found it in their interest to use. So, to a certain extent, nothing new is going on here. However, if seen in relation to more general patterns of government centralization and administrative rationalization, the political performance at Hadda, with its skillful management of tribal and religious leaders, can also be recognized as one part of an overall consolidation of political authority in the hands of the government. In 1920, when the assembly at Hadda occurred, this consolidation was by no means complete, and in the years to follow religious and tribal leaders would make renewed assertions of independence, but the overall direction was toward increased government control and a more institutionalized role for traditional religious leaders. [15]
The general trend toward compartmentalizing religious leaders in the apparatus of state rule would appear to have suffered a major setback with the overthrow of Amanullah, which is generally thought of as a victory for conservative Islamic leaders over the social reformers who wanted to modernize Afghanistan and the high-water mark of religious influence in the affairs of state. [16] The legacy of that event is more ambiguous and complex than it might appear however. One of the interesting features of the movement that succeeded in toppling Amanullah is that its principal religious leader, the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar, had his base not in the tribal areas (as was the case with the Mulla of Hadda and his deputies), but in Kabul itself. It is true that most of the Hazrat’s disciples were Pakhtun tribesmen living in the tribal areas, but he himself chose as his base of operations the capital city. In the past, religious leaders tended to have regional power bases, but the Hazrats found that they could sustain a multiregional constituency from Kabul. This reflects the changing articulation of religious authority, as more and more of the Hazrat’s disciples were doing business in Kabul, and it became easier to stay in contact with his scattered deputies from the capital than from a rural location. The Hazrat gave up the security of having tribesmen close at hand and mountains nearby to flee to in case of government attack; however, he discovered that his larger base of disciples gave him protection, even in Kabul, since the government feared the agitation that would result if it tried to arrest a leader of his stature. At the same time, having established himself in the capital, the Hazrat was loath to see the dismantling of the state, even if he had been more than willing to help unseat the head of state. Thus, even though the overthrow of Amanullah unquestionably represents the moment when the expanding authority of the Afghan state received its most crushing setback (at least until the upheaval of the 1980s), the two consequences that stand out after the sound and fury of the uprising itself are put aside are how quickly the central government reasserted its authority in a form much like that which had preceded it and how quickly religious leaders like the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar acquiesced to this development and accepted an administrative niche within the structure of state rule. Kabul may have been overrun and the various palaces and offices of the government ransacked and looted, but those who had attacked the city quickly returned to their places of origin and resumed their former lives. Government bureaucrats reoccupied their offices. The army was put back together. Students took their seats in class as they had before, tax collectors returned to their rounds, and the fiery Hazrat of Shor Bazaar accepted a post in the new government, becoming the head of a council of clerics (jamiat ul-ulama), which was appointed to advise the government on religious policy.
In fact, neither the Hazrat nor the council ever wielded as much influence as they seemed prepared to do at the beginning of Nadir’s reign, when he reportedly availed himself of their counsel and accepted their authority in certain areas such as judicial sentencing and the oversight of government legislation. Likewise, in testament to the preeminence of the Hazrat, Nadir not only contracted marriage relations with his family but also gave the family a large tract of land for a new compound on the outskirts of Kabul. These privileges and perquisites, however, did not provide the ulama with the authority that they sought. Indeed, bringing them into the councils of power and even into the royal family itself seems to have gradually reduced their authority by diluting the importance of their relations with the people in the rural areas. Ultimately, once the throne was secure and the tribal areas were pacified, the king and his ministers gradually began to pay less attention to the advice and dictates of the council of clerics. While the state continued to pay stipends, build madrasas, hire judges, and otherwise ingratiate itself with religious leaders in material ways, it also came to pay less heed to their admonitions on social and legislative matters.
Since the government was not embarking on any radical reform programs that might have stirred the ire of religious leaders, they had little to protest; most clerics simply accepted the largesse offered them without complaint. The government’s generosity was of the calculated variety, however, and its principal objective appears to have been to forestall the religious establishment from uniting against the government in the future. While it was impossible for the government to prevent the appearance of charismatic malcontents like the Mulla of Hadda, it could limit their effectiveness by maintaining a stable of compliant clerics who could be called on to denounce outsiders’ charges and complaints. This strategy was in fact recognized by the very group that was implicated in the government’s web of generosity, as is indicated by the following statement made to me by the descendant of one of the Mulla of Hadda’s deputies who had served for many years as a judge in the Afghan court system:
[Prime Minister] Hashim Khan [1933–1946] encouraged the children of pirs to move toward the government. He wanted to enroll them in madrasas to turn them away from Sufi orders [tariqat]. Hashim also offered them good government positions and did his best to provide them with everything possible. In this way, he also strengthened his own position and power. He could claim that that pir or his sons are working for us or they are our subordinates and we pay them. In this way, Hashim gradually broke the people’s link [to the pirs]. [17]
Returning to the case of Qazi Amin’s father, we can see that while he was situated far lower on the ladder of prestige than the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar or the children of the Mulla of Hadda’s deputies, he too was affected by the changing balance of power. Like these more exalted luminaries, he was consumed with affairs of government, and when a tribal uprising appeared on the horizon, he and his fellow scholars naturally tended to take the government’s side and protect its interests. Thus, according to Qazi Amin’s recollection, his father helped to mediate three tribal uprisings—one among the Zadran tribe in Paktia Province, the Safi uprising in 1945 (about which Qazi Amin had little information), and an uprising among the Shinwari, which he believed occurred in the late 1930s or early 1940s. [18] The one traditionally independent political role that Qazi Amin’s father did perpetuate was in connection with the practice of amr bil ma‘ruf (calling people to proper faith and action), a role that the Mulla of Hadda and many of his deputies also performed. In this tradition, groups of religious leaders traveled from village to village, urging people to renew and purify their faith. Sometimes they also tried to convince the people to abandon customary practices, such as taking interest on loans and money in exchange for giving their daughters or sisters in marriage. The continuation of this form of proselytizing at a time when other political activities were discontinued would seem to reflect an interiorization of religious politics—a movement toward local social reform as opposed to the more dangerous and uncertain area of antigovernment dissent.
The Making of a Muslim Radical, 1959–1964
(I):Tell me about your early education and how you got interested in Islam as a career.
(QA):We are two brothers. My elder brother is Muhammad Yunus. He is eight years older than I. After my elder brother, my sister was born, and I was the last one. . . . Our life was a typical rural life. It was an ordinary village life. We were away from the city. My elder brother started his primary education under his father’s supervision, and he also attended the madrasas that were located close to our area. When I reached school age, I also started to study some elementary books of Islam. . . .
I was fifteen years old at that time. I didn’t attend any official madrasa, and I thought that I couldn’t finish my education at home. So, without my father’s permission, I came to Pakistan. I was sixteen years old, and I made up a story that I wanted to visit my uncle’s family in Kama. First, I went to Kama, and from there two other boys and four sons of my uncle joined me, and we all came together to Pakistan through Gandhab. Here, we stayed in an official [government] madrasa [rasmi madrasa]. My family found out where I was after six months of searching, and my brother came after me. He asked me, “Why did you come here?” I replied, “You know that there isn’t any suitable place for higher education in our area, and I have the right to continue my studies. I knew that father wouldn’t let me go to Pakistan, so I came without his permission.”
I had spent nine months in the madrasa. Then I went home and tried to convince my father to let me stay. I told him that I had gone to get my education, and eventually he allowed me to go to Pakistan for a second time. Again, I spent nine months here, this time at the madrasa in the Mahabat Khan mosque in Peshawar, where I studied some advanced books and learned calligraphy. At that time in the madrasa, they didn’t pay much attention to calligraphy. After that, the idea came to my mind that it would be difficult to continue my education in this foreign country. There was another problem also that if someone had graduated from [a school or madrasa in] Pakistan they would be criticized by the government. When I was a student [taleb] in the Mahabat Khan madrasa, the idea came into my mind that I had to go back to Afghanistan and register myself in one of the official madrasas of the government.
So in 1340, which is equivalent to 1961, I returned to Afghanistan after being in Pakistan for eighteen months. Then I applied to madrasa and took an examination. After successfully passing the examination, I went with my father and registered in the fifth class of Najm ul-Madares of Hadda. Although the usual period of study was seven years, I finished the program in six years. Since I was good at my lessons, I prepared myself for the examination of the eleventh class during vacation, and I passed and registered in the twelfth class.
(I):What were the rules for admission to the madrasa?
(QA):Generally, they admitted just those who had finished in the first, second, or third positions in their classes, and they also had to pass the examination. Recently, they have been accepting talebs from local mosques as well.
(I):Can you describe the program of study? Did you just attend classes in the morning, or did you have them in the afternoon as well?
(QA):Our lessons were conducted from eight in the morning until twelve noon. Since this was a religious school, the majority of the subjects were of a religious nature, but there were some other, nonreligious subjects like Pakhtu, Farsi, and Arabic. In the preliminary program up to class six, there were also mathematics, geography, geometry, and history. In the last year before my graduation, they added English to the preliminary program as well. There was also a little bit of modern science in the advanced program—courses like mathematics, geography, and social science—but the main subjects were religious.
(I):Did you take any interest in Sufism [tasawuf] at that time, and did you ever become the follower of a pir?
(QA):No, I didn’t pledge obedience [bayat] to any pir.
(I):Was this because you didn’t believe in it, or were there some other reasons?
(QA):I didn’t have faith in what they were doing then. The other side of Sufism is its spiritual side—doing zikr for Allah. [19] I believe in this side. It has a positive effect on people’s morale. I have some books about it. One of them gives directions for [making] amulets [tawiz] and [doing] zikr. I study [this book], but what the pirs are doing nowadays is simply deceiving people to get money, and this is condemned by Islam. They are using religion as a way of getting material benefits and power, which is a very bad use of religion. Because of this, I haven’t taken an interest in that kind of master/disciple [piri-muridi] relationship.
(I):What did you do when you graduated from madrasa?
(QA):It was a rule of the government at that time that they would employ some of the graduates as madrasa teachers and they would choose others to be judges. It seemed like a crime to the majority of people if someone wanted to go to university after graduating from madrasa. The people considered it frivolous and maybe even deviant. Despite this, I thought that my education was insufficient. I had to study more, and for that reason I asked my father about going on for more education. He asked me what kind of position the government wanted to give me after graduation from the madrasa. I replied that I could be a teacher now or a judge after attending a special one-year judicial course. He told me that being a judge was an important job: “It is my advice to you that you don’t need more education. You can attend the judicial course, and later you will be a judge, and it is enough for you.”
I didn’t accept his advice, however, and convinced him that I had to complete my education. I was the only graduate of the Hadda madrasa at that time who registered his name for the university examination. A total of twenty-four students graduated from the Hadda madrasa, and I was number two in my class. All my classmates rebuked me. Even our teachers criticized my action, especially Maulavi Fazl Hadi. He asked me, “Why are you going to go to the university? That is like a Western society there, and the people are decadent. So how can you—the graduate of a madrasa—go to such a place?”
(I):Why did you decide to go to university when no one else supported this decision?
(QA):I registered in the madrasa in 1961. Democracy came to Afghanistan in 1963, when Daud was deposed [as prime minister]. Afterward some of the political parties started their activities. For example, Khalq and Parcham began their work in 1964. The Afghan Millet party also began its activities at that time. So after democracy came to Afghanistan, we could get some information about political ideas, but the political awareness of our teachers was very low. I myself was not very aware when I was in madrasa, but, in spite of this lack of awareness, I and Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman [later a founding member of the Muslim Youth Organization], who was three years ahead of me, and some other close friends had a feeling of hatred toward the deviations and unjust activities of the government. . . .
There was a rule in the madrasa then that the students who had reached the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth classes had to preach twice a week in front of a big gathering. Our preaching was different from the others. Sometimes we discussed the current political problems that the other mullas never talked about. We had some teachers in the madrasa who were against that sort of political awareness. There were some other people who didn’t know anything about political ideas and were unaware of that kind of political thinking or feeling. For instance, they didn’t know what jihad is, what politics or the movement is, and what the significance of the leftist parties is, what democracy is. We were in a very backward environment, and since I had a feeling about these things, I decided to go to Kabul University for my higher education. So it was in the university environment that I became aware in a good way about the problems of my country. [20]
Qazi Amin’s story begins much like his father’s (and that of so many other scholars before him) with the mandatory pilgrimage in search of knowledge. In his case, the act of undertaking this pilgrimage also entailed an act of disobedience since he did not have his father’s permission to make the trip to Pakistan. That such permission was not forthcoming is not surprising considering both the boy’s tender age and his father’s established position in society. Qazi Amin was not an orphan seeking social advancement as his father had been, and there were better career options close to home than there had been when Qazi Amin’s father was a young man. At any rate, Qazi Amin’s decision to leave his home shows early on his independent character, just as the later decision to return home shows his pragmatic bent.
At the time of his journey (roughly 1959–1961), Afghanistan and Pakistan were embroiled in a bitter dispute over the control of the tribal territories along the frontier. The status of the frontier tribes was an ancient source of acrimony, but the tensions had escalated further when Muhammad Daud became prime minister in 1953. As a result of this dispute, there had been occasional clashes between army units of the two nations, sporadic border closings, and much vituperative rhetoric flowing out of both Kabul and Rawalpindi. While it was still as easy as ever for local people to cross the border, it was not always expedient to do so, and Qazi Amin wisely decided to return home so as not to jeopardize his chances for either further schooling or future employment in Afghanistan. The fact that a young religious scholar from the border area would have government employment on his mind is one indication of the extent to which the balance of power had shifted in favor of the state.
In a few short years, Qazi Amin’s life would take an unpredictable turn that would make considerations of employment irrelevant; but in 1961 he was preparing for a career as an Islamic judge, and that meant applying for entrance into one of the government madrasas, whose graduates were being awarded an ever larger percentage of the judgeships in the country as well as the most sought-after teaching posts in government secondary schools. All of this seems unremarkable, unless we compare the course of Qazi Amin’s early education with that of an older scholar, like his father or, better yet, the Mulla of Hadda. Such a comparison makes clear the degree to which education was becoming both routinized and centralized. In the past, students had had to go far afield to gain the requisite training, but increasingly that was neither necessary nor, from a career standpoint, desirable. The government had always looked to religious scholars to meet many of its administrative needs, but from the time of Abdur Rahman on, and particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it strove to exert control over the process by which religious scholars were produced.
As revealing as Qazi Amin’s choice of career trajectories is for understanding the changing nature of relations between the state and Islam, an even more telling index of the government’s control over religious affairs is the fact that he received his preliminary training for later government employment in a madrasa built next to the Mulla of Hadda’s center. At the turn of the century, this very same center, whose grounds the government was now grooming, had been one of its primary sources of worry and irritation. In the Mulla’s day, the center at Hadda had been a pilgrimage site for disciples and scholars. Following the Mulla’s death, however, Hadda began a slow decline into ramshackle senescence. Given the renown achieved by the Mulla, it might have been expected that the center to which he had devoted a good portion of his life would have become a place of pilgrimage after his death, but Hadda, for reasons that are difficult to assess, failed to flourish as a shrine center. [21] During the 1930s and 1940s, the government, prompted by religious scholars, embarked on a program of underwriting the construction of madrasas in various regions of the country. In all, ten government-sponsored madrasas were established, and the graduates of these institutions went on to become judges, administrators in the Ministry of Justice, and high school teachers in the secular educational institutions that the government was then constructing with even greater avidity. [22] The madrasa at Hadda was not only established on the site of the Mulla’s center but was also named after him (the najm in Najm ul-Madares comes from the Mulla’s birth name, Najmuddin) and used his collection of books as the core of its library.
Although the Mulla was long dead by the time Qazi Amin arrived in 1961, the Mulla’s spirit, it seems, was all around and was often invoked. Yet one wonders what he would have thought of the government taking so prominent a role in the maintenance of his legacy. On the one hand, it was precisely the sort of development he had always advocated. The state needed to be guided by religious precepts, and what better way to ensure that it was than by providing religious adepts in each generation with education and employment. On the other hand, religious leaders had the responsibility to ensure that the government was not corrupt, and it was not always easiest or most reliable to seek such assurances from within, particularly in the absence of men on the outside decrying lost virtues and rallying the opposition. One can imagine that Hadda Sahib would have had good reason to worry, and the reason can be seen in the career choices of the offspring of his own deputies, the majority of whom pursued the path of Islam on the government payroll.
However, Qazi Amin’s generation was to prove different, for while its members were afforded the opportunities of a government-sponsored education, some were skeptical of the government’s good will and were inclined to challenge authority generally. As Qazi Amin’s testimony indicates, most of his classmates were not radically disposed. They viewed their education as the necessary means to the end of a decent government sinecure, and they were not inclined to talk back to those who were offering this largesse. But some, and Qazi Amin was among this number, were more aware of the political currents then beginning to circulate in the country and more cognizant of the limits of their own education.
In contrast to the situation at the time of Hadda Sahib, or even later during the movement against Amanullah, government opposition was no longer centered in the hinterlands but rather was focused in Kabul, within the narrow universe of the educated elite. During Qazi Amin’s youth, in the 1950s and early 1960s, the most vociferous opposition came not from the conservative side of the political spectrum but from the left. Several newspapers published briefly in the early 1950s advocated social reforms of a type that had not been espoused since Amanullah’s rule. [23] The most vocal of these publications demonstrated a willingness to attack not only the religious establishment but also popular religious practices, which many adherents of secular reform were ready to brand as superstitious and inimical to progressive ideals. This provocative attitude was dramatically demonstrated in a letter to the editor in which the government was criticized for spending money to refurbish the so-called mou-i mobarak (miraculous hair) shrine in eastern Afghanistan, which housed what was purported to be one of the beard hairs of the Prophet Muhammad. Clerical outrage over this letter led to public protests against the growing influence of secular reformers in Afghan public life, and the government responded in 1952 by banning Watan and other independent newspapers that were giving voice to these inflammatory challenges to traditional beliefs and practices. [24]
By the time Qazi Amin was finishing his education at the Hadda madrasa in 1968, leftist provocations were being revived through the efforts of leaders like Nur Muhammad Taraki and Babrak Karmal, both of whom had cut their political teeth working for progressive newspapers in the early 1950s. By and large, those living in the rural districts of the country were only dimly aware of leftist activities in Kabul, but news of a few episodes, like the mou-i mobarak incident, did reach the countryside and created a general though unfocused sense of alarm. Qazi Amin did not mention any incidents specifically, but he and his madrasa classmates were aware of the reputation of leftists in Kabul. They were equally aware that established Muslim leaders had proven ineffective in responding to these events, and in his own immediate context he could see the reluctance with which the ulama involved themselves in political matters. Older religious leaders had risen up to meet the challenges of colonial rule in India and of corruption and abuse in Kabul, but the current generation of religious leaders seemed more interested in maintaining their positions and their paychecks than in embracing their political responsibilities. Equally distressing, they appeared hardly to recognize the nature and extent of the challenge represented by leftist forces in Kabul, a challenge that would demand forms of redress unlike any that Muslims in Afghanistan had ever resorted to in the past.
While it is impossible to judge how politically aware Qazi Amin was during his madrasa days, it is interesting that he represented his resolve to meet the challenge presented to him as an act of defiance against his teachers and his father. Two paths were available to him. The first was the one for which he had been training all his life—the path of an Islamic judge, the path his father took before him and that he himself set out on when he followed his father’s example of seeking religious education in the subcontinent. This path was the one expected of him and the one that the majority of his contemporaries chose, but he rejected it in favor of the second path, enrollment in the university. Like Samiullah Safi, who felt the pull of the city and the allure of participation in the emerging political debate over national development, Qazi Amin recalled this turning point in his life in relation to the national political debate of the time, and he too framed his decision to join that debate as an act of disobedience, which links him not only to his contemporary, Samiullah Safi, but also to Taraki, to Samiullah’s father, Sultan Muhammad Khan, and to the Mulla of Hadda, all of whom likewise had to break from their fathers and the traditions of the past in order to become what they imagined themselves to be.
The Birth of the Muslim Youth Organization, 1966–1969
(I):What was the atmosphere like when you arrived at the university?
(QA):Our four years of university were the most important years of political involvement because democracy had just come into being and the parties were just starting their activities. The parties that were actively working at that time were Khalq, Parcham, Shula-yi Jawed, Afghan Millet, and Masawat; but among all of these the communists were the most active, especially in 1968, when I registered in the university. It was the time of political clashes and conflicts at the university. On that account, among some Muslim youth at the university the idea occurred to form a movement according to Islamic rules. I joined this movement in its first stages.
(I):Where were most of the students who attended the Faculty of Islamic Law [shariat] from and what kind of conditions did you find there?
(QA):I graduated from madrasa in 1968 and entered the School of Islamic Law at Kabul University in 1969. There was only one university in Afghanistan, and the students were from all parts of the country. Since the Faculty of Islamic Law admitted only graduates from religious schools, most of the students at the faculty came from Abu Hanifa Madrasa [in Kabul] and from [madrasas in] the northern parts of Afghanistan. There were only two students in the school from the Hadda madrasa, and there were very few students in general from other border-area madrasas. About 60 percent of the Islamic law students did speak Pakhtu however.
(I):What were conditions like in the university dormitory?
(QA):Kabul University had one dormitory, which could accommodate twenty-five hundred students. We were all living in the central dormitory of the university. About six students could live in one room, and I lived with students from different parts of the country. One was from Kunduz. His name was Yusuf, and now he is an official with Jamiat-i Islami. Two others were from Mazar-i Sharif. Some of the students in our room went to the Faculty of Islamic Law, but others attended different schools. . . . There was a mosque on the fourth floor of our hostel. The students who prayed there knew each other well. . . .
(I):In which faculty did the movement first begin, and later on how were relations established with other faculties?
(QA):When the Islamic movement began at the university, it wasn’t started through the efforts of one faculty’s students or teachers. It depended on the feelings, thoughts, and social awareness of everyone who joined the movement. The students who had deeply studied the goals of the communist parties and had the desire to struggle against the regime and the influence of the West and who could think clearly about the future of the country, these people felt a kind of responsibility to form an Islamic movement. It was a matter of feeling responsibility toward Islam for the future of the country. Since the students and teachers of the Islamic law school were studying Islam and knew a lot about it, their feeling of responsibility was stronger than that of others toward Islam and society. For that reason, a greater number of our students and teachers joined the movement and had a more active part than others. . . . Other members were from different schools like engineering, agriculture, medicine, and so on, but still the number of students in the movement from the Faculty of Islamic Law was more than from any other school. At the second level were the students of engineering, medicine, and agriculture. The students from other schools like literature were very few and also dull-minded.
(I):Was there one leader at the beginning?
(QA):The most active student of all was [Abdur Rahim] Niazi. He was among the senior students of the Faculty of Islamic Law, and in 1969 he had the first position in his class. He had a very active role in the movement. He was a leader in all the meetings and demonstrations and all the other activities of the Islamic movement. He was a good speaker, and a spellbinding preacher. His speeches had a strong effect on people, and he was able to attract people through his speaking. He always explained the weak points and defects of communist ideology and their parties. Because Niazi was from the Faculty of Islamic Law, people thought that the movement was limited to there. Some people even called members of the movement “mullas,” so they started to be called by this name. The Khalqis, for instance, always called them “mullas,” but actually the movement was spread throughout the university and involved students and faculty members from different schools.
(I):How did Abdur Rahim Niazi first organize the group? Did he meet with people privately, or did he bring them all together?
(QA):In the beginning, when the demonstrations and meetings of Khalq and Parcham and Shula were first going on, students with Islamic ideas became familiar with each other because they would argue with the communist students. Because of these discussions, the Muslim students came to know which ones had an Islamic ideology and hated communism and other colonialist activities. For instance, I knew Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman because we had graduated from the same madrasa, and we were aware of each other’s ideas and feelings. In the same way, Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman had also spent time with Niazi at Abu Hanifa madrasa—Habib-ur Rahman as a student, and Niazi as a teacher.
They knew very well what everyone’s ideas were, and when Niazi started the movement, he invited the students, like Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, whom he knew directly and in whom he had confidence. Then, in consultation with them, he chose other students from other schools who were also known to them, such as Engineer Hekmatyar and Saifuddin Nasratyar. They were known to have Islamic thoughts and feelings, and so were some others like Ghulam Rabbani Atesh, Professor [Abd al-Rab Rasul] Sayyaf, Ustad [Muhammad Jan] Ahmadzai, Sayyid Nurullah, and so many others. They were all known as Muslims and anticommunists, so Niazi brought them together and convened the first meeting in Shewaki.
(I):Do you know how many people attended that first meeting and when it was held?
(QA):We were about twenty to twenty-five people, and he discussed the issues and problems that we were facing. He said, “We are working individually everywhere; let’s come together and establish a regular way of working.” All the invited people agreed with him, and then we talked about the plan of how to work.
(I):Do you know the date of that first meeting?
(QA):It was toward the end of 1347 or at the beginning of 1348 [winter/spring 1969], but I don’t remember the exact day and month. . . . When these people came together, they organized groups of five persons each, and they were directed to make that kind of circle [halqa] wherever they found others in whom they had confidence. And they were told to give regular reports of their work to the head [sar halqa] of their circle. . . . Niazi always met with the heads of each of the circles privately, and sometimes they would bring new members to introduce them to Niazi or to have him answer their questions or explain the goals of the movement. He gave answers to their questions about different aspects of Islam, especially economic matters. . . . In private meetings, they trained the members how to discuss and explain their goals. There wasn’t enough time to write brief notes for them, but the members could use the books of famous writers. . . .
Unfortunately, Niazi was alive for just one year after starting the movement. He died in June 1970, so he lived just fourteen months after the beginning of the Muslim Youth Organization (Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman). He delivered a total of six speeches during that time—one was at Ningrahar University and another was in Qandahar. He had studied very deeply and was a very eloquent speaker. He had a full command of Pakhtu and Persian and could deliver speeches in both languages. There is no doubt that he was a very knowledgeable and extraordinary man. Every one of his speeches explained some aspect of the movement, like our goals, foreign and domestic policy, the quality and conditions of Islamic ideology. The speeches of other elder brothers of the movement like Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman or Hekmatyar were not equal to his speeches. Every time he spoke, it was like a lesson in theory for the members of the movement. [25]
The most important fact to keep in mind when considering the development of radical Muslim politics in Afghanistan is the place where it all began—the campus of Kabul University. Although originally established in 1946, the university was a small, scattered, and insignificant institution until the mid-1960s, when a major expansion was undertaken that included the consolidation of the formerly dispersed faculties onto a single campus. Bankrolled by large grants from the United States Agency for International Development and other foreign-assistance programs, the university added new classrooms and laboratories, as well as dormitories for the ever-increasing student body, whose numbers rose from eight hundred in 1957, to two thousand in 1963, to thirty-three hundred in 1966. Along with the infusion of money, students, and facilities came foreign instructors from the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union.
The most significant feature of the university, however, was not that it brought Afghans together with foreigners but that it brought Afghans face-to-face with each other. Never before had there been an opportunity for so many young Afghans to interact over an extended period of time with other young Afghans from different regions of the country. Despite efforts by rulers like Abdur Rahman to convince citizens that their primary identity was as subjects of the state, Afghanistan had remained a patchwork of disparate tribes, regions, sects, and language groups that was held together, at times rather flimsily, by strong men at its center and foreign enemies along its borders. The one institution that consistently worked to mitigate and blur the boundaries between groups was the army, but since many of the army units retained a tribal and ethnic cast and most soldiers were illiterate and poor, the influence of this institution was limited.
The university, however, brought together students from all over the country. Entrance to the university was difficult. A large number of students were from the elite—not all of whom deserved or desired to be in university—but many others made their way to the campus by dint of their own achievements in provincial secondary schools. And those who did make it were rewarded not just with an education and the prospect of a life lived outside the village but also with the prospect of being an instrumental part of the nation’s development. Never before had Kabul been so flush with funds. Never before had so much building been undertaken for the benefit of ordinary people. This munificence helped to inculcate in the students a sense of their own importance. So too did the fact that they had been dropped down in this exciting new place at a moment in the nation’s history—the period of the “new democracy”—when it appeared that just about anything was possible. These were exciting times, and it seemed to the students that they themselves were one of the things that was most exciting about it. That, anyway, was the perception. The reality, not surprisingly, was different.
In Heroes of the Age, I discussed the importance of location in the success of Sufi orders in the late nineteenth century. The Mulla of Hadda, as well as most of his principal deputies, situated their centers in areas interstitial to tribes and the state. Hadda itself was a barren area between the provincial capital of Jalalabad and the mountain fastness where the Shinwari, Khogiani, and other tribes made their homes. Most of the Mulla’s deputies set themselves up in villages in the Kunar Valley, where they were accessible to but not dependent on their tribal disciples, who were living in the mountains lining both sides of the valley. Interstitiality was equally important for the development of radical politics in the contemporary era, but in this case that interstitiality was located at the university campus.
Students from rural areas, who were accustomed to hearing only their native language spoken and to dealing primarily with kinsmen and others they had known their whole lives, were suddenly placed in tight quarters with people from different ethnic and linguistic groups. Most of the students were serious and valued the opportunity to be at the university, but a number had gotten into the university through family connections, and they had no interest in studying. Some of these students spent their time gambling and smoking hashish—which was less expensive and more readily available than alcohol—and in extreme cases students who didn’t want to attend a course on a given day coerced others into staying away, so the professor had to cancel the class.
The two places where tensions ran highest were the cafeteria and dormitories, both of which were severely overcrowded. Endless lines formed at meals, and students with reputations as tough guys cut into lines. Dormitories had only a few showers, and hot water was available for only a few hours during the day, so students had to sign up ahead of time for showers. Here again, some students abused their rights, daring the student who lost his place to protest. Many of these tough students were known to carry knives; one informant told me of witnessing a knife-wielding bully chase another student through the dormitory into the fourth-floor mosque, where other students were praying, and stabbing him in the shoulder. School administrators generally kept their distance in these situations, in part at least because some of the worst violators of school rules were the sons of well-connected men whom the administrators could not afford to offend. [26]
If, as I argued in Heroes of the Age, becoming a disciple of a Sufi pir was for some a response to the heartlessness of the tribal world, joining a political party was for students to some degree an antidote to the friendlessness and anarchy of the university. Students who were even moderately inclined to religious feeling, who had prayed regularly at home and wanted to continue this practice at university, were impelled to seek the company of likeminded students not only because of the corruption and abuse they saw around them but also because of the petty annoyances of leftist students who reportedly took great pleasure in making fun of the customs of the devout. Niazi and other founding members of the Muslim Youth offered a bulwark against what appeared in the concentrated atmosphere of the university to be a tidal wave of atheistic behavior. Niazi, intelligent and charismatic, held daily meetings after prayers, during which he discussed with younger students sections of the Qur’an and hadith and helped them interpret the significance of these passages in light of current events. Initially, these meetings did not have a specific political content and were not sustained by any organizational apparatus. When campus elections were held, Muslim students at first did not have a specific party affiliation, referring to themselves rather as bi-taraf, or “nonaligned,” but eventually the members of this group, recognizing their common interest in Islam, joined together as Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman—the Organization of Muslim Youth.
Accounts of the origins of the Muslim Youth Organization differ depending on the political affiliation of the speaker, but it is generally accepted that Muslim students began to meet on the campus of Kabul University in 1966 or 1967 and that a group of students representing different faculties within the university formally established the Muslim Youth Organization in 1969. The founding members of the Muslim Youth were initially inspired by a group of professors in the Faculty of Theology, most importantly Ghulam Muhammad Niazi (not a relative of Abdur Rahim Niazi, though both were from the Niazi tribe), who had studied in Cairo in the 1950s and had come in contact with members of the Muslim Brotherhood during his stay there. Although Ghulam Muhammad Niazi and other professors did not take a direct role in student activities, they informed the students of movements going on in other parts of the Muslim world and provided them with a sense of how Islam could be made relevant to the social and political transformations everywhere apparent in the latter half of the twentieth century. [27]
This was an important requirement for many of the students, for as heady as it was to be at Kabul University during this period, it was also disorienting. Many of the students had never been far from their native villages before their arrival at the university, and for most of their lives Kabul itself had been little more than a distant rumor and a radio signal. In this context, many of the old ways—the customs and traditions that had bound together the villages from which most of them sprang—lost their vitality and their basic viability. What had given structure and meaning in the local community—the centrality of the kin group, the respect due senior agnates, the rivalry between cousins, the informality and warmth of the maternal hearth—were irrelevant in the university setting, where unrelated young people came together unannounced and unaware. In its earliest days, the Muslim Youth can be seen as a response to the experience of disorientation. In the beehive of a dormitory with twenty-five hundred denizens, groups of students sharing common interests began to gravitate to one another, and their association with one another helped stave off the loneliness and alienation that attended being strangers in a strange land. Significantly, the list of the founding members of the party included an even mix of Pakhtuns and Tajiks from a variety of provinces. Most of the students were Sunni, but there were a few Shi’a members as well, and this demographic mix speaks to the relative egalitarianism of the movement at this point as well as to its inclusiveness, both elements that would be lost as time went on.
In his life history of a religious scholar in Morocco, Dale Eickelman points out that some of the most significant educational experiences of his subject occurred outside the classroom in the peer learning circles that students formed among themselves. [28] The same could be said of Qazi Amin, and when I spoke with his contemporaries, the experiences they tended to emphasize as most memorable were also those they had in the company of their peers. [29] Even the stories of leftist provocation were told with a certain relish; it was clear that these incidents, which were recounted to indicate the immorality of the enemy, also were recalled with a sense of nostalgia. These provocations brought the movement into being, generated that first sense of righteous indignation and purposefulness, and led to a feeling of communal solidarity that the students had never felt before and that they had rarely felt since. [30]
Confrontation, Armed Conflict, and Exile, 1969–1978
(I):Do you remember any particular events from that period that you were involved in? Are there any clashes or demonstrations or other specific memories that you recall?
(QA):The first year, there was the problem of Asil [a leftist student] who was killed [by Muslim students] at the Ibn-i Sina High School. He was a student at Ibn-i Sina, and the Khalqis and Parchamis took charge of his funeral procession and carried his body around the city and brought him finally to the Eid Gah mosque. After this, demonstrations continued for some time, and the administration closed the university. As a result, we spent one more year in the program than was usual.
The next year, when the university started, another important event occurred. This event provoked the Muslims and caused the movement to become very strong, while the Khalqis and Parchamis were disgraced. There were some Russians who were teachers at the Polytechnic Institute. Their families also lived on the campus, and they showed their own films there. Engineer Habib-ur Rahman, [31] Engineer Matiullah, Engineer Azim, and Engineer Salam were all students at the Polytechnic at the time that the Russians showed a film there that was about godlessness [bi khudayi]. [In the film] there was a farmer who was plowing the land. He became thirsty, so he drinks some water and prays to God. After that, somebody else came along and helped him by giving him water and some other things. Then, this man asked the farer, “Did God give you anything? Of course, it was I who gave you the water and helped you, so there is no God.” During the screening of this film, while it was still running, Engineer Habib-ur Rahman threw something at the screen, and there was a confrontation. The film generated a lot of controversy, and the members of the circle stood against it. We criticized the showing of this kind of film, and we went to the parliament to protest. We also started protests at the university, and the Polytechnic students themselves demonstrated against showing this film.
About a year after this, another event occurred. During Ramazan, the communists threw the Qur’an from the window of a mosque that was on the fourth floor of a dormitory at the university. The next day, all the students saw the Qur’an lying on the road. The pages were torn, and it was covered with snow. This provoked the members of the movement. We felt the need for a more intensive struggle. In fact, we were revived by this action. On the occasion of such events, public meetings were always convened, and the late [Abdur Rahim] Niazi would deliver his speeches, which always inspired the young people to action.
In general, I was sympathetic to what was going on, but I only began to take an active role during an incident involving the Khalqis at the Polytechnic. It was the month of Ramazan, and the Khalqis had asked the government to keep the cafeteria open for students who did not want to keep the fast. But the government didn’t dare to let it stay open. Besides that, during iftar [the ceremony that occurs at sunset each evening during the month of Ramazan, when Muslims break the fast], some of the Khalqis deliberately insulted students who were observing the fast. So the conflict started between those students who observed the fast and those who didn’t.
(I):Did the top circle of the movement have relations at that time with people in any branch of the government, such as the military or any of the ministries?
(QA):In the beginning, our recruitment activities were confined to the university, but later, in 1970, it spread to all the schools in Kabul. For instance, I was responsible for organizing and inviting students at Khushhal Khan and Rahman Baba high schools. In this fashion, we divided all the high schools in Kabul, and everyone was working at a high school where he had some relationship and was training the students and organizing them into different cells [hasta]. We also divided up the provinces so that everyone was responsible for one or two. Everyone was aware where he should work, but it was just on the level of students and teachers. For instance, I went to Helmand and Qandahar several times for the sake of the movement.
(I):I have heard that your friend Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman was involved in the Pul-i Khishti demonstration that was organized by members of the ulama. Were you also involved in it, and what do you know about those events?
(QA):Maulavi Sahib didn’t even speak there. He just tried to persuade them informally, but it was not under our control. All [the demonstrators] were Afghanistan’s great ulama. We were just students at that time. We couldn’t control them. After much effort, Abdur Rahim [Niazi] was finally allowed to deliver a speech there twice among the mullas. I think maybe Maulavi [Habib-ur Rahman] might also have delivered a speech there once. Maulavi Salam delivered a speech, so eventually we were able to preach our ideas among them and state some of our principles. [32]
Beginning in the early 1970s, the halcyon atmosphere of the first period of political activity evaporated and was replaced by a situation that was a great deal more tense and fractured. The first reason for this change was certainly the unexpected death, reportedly from leukemia, in 1970 of Abdur Rahim Niazi, the charismatic leader of the Muslim Youth. While a number of other students were as actively committed to the movement as Niazi, none commanded the respect that he enjoyed, and no one could muster the authority that he possessed in determining the party’s direction. As a result of Niazi’s death, leadership within the party became more fragmented, and factions began to develop around particular leaders and within the different university faculties. These splits were not serious until the political situation became increasingly tense and polarized, and the young student militants had to decide on a direction for their campus study group: Would the group remain as a student organization or become involved in national politics? If national politics was the proper forum for the group’s activities, was their ultimate goal to influence debate on issues of national development or to win power for themselves? If their goal was to win power, should this goal be pursued through the parliamentary system or by alternative means, including the use of violence?
A second factor leading to the transformation in the party was the open hostility that existed between Muslims and Marxists on campus. Given their opposed ideological positions and their common objective of winning the hearts and minds of the student generation, animosity between Marxists and Muslims was inevitable, but the intensity of this feeling was undoubtedly exacerbated by a number of provocative actions initiated by campus leftists. In addition to the incidents already mentioned, I have been told other stories in which leftists ostentatiously ate food and smoked cigarettes next to Muslims during the month of fasting, kicked soccer balls at students who were praying outdoors, and defecated into the pots that students used for ritual ablution. Such provocations polarized the campus, leading even mildly religious students to feel as though they were under assault and motivating those who were politically inclined to action. Hekmatyar, who later became amir of Hizb-i Islami, described the situation this way:
In the university, which was a great center of knowledge and where the future rulers of the country were trained, nobody could use the name of religion. Nobody there could wear national clothes. . . . Nobody could keep the fast. . . . Nobody could have a beard in the colleges, not even in the Faculty of Islamic Law. When those from the Faculty of Islamic Law and other colleges came into the dining halls, from one side and the other, students would ball up food and throw it at them and insult them. In the high schools, the communists would ridicule anyone who had the feeling of Islam, [saying] that they were “backward sheep” who would progress as soon as they got to the university. They would tell them that when they got to the center of knowledge and civilization, they would recognize their path. There they wouldn’t care anymore about praying, fasting, and musulmani [Muslim practice]. [33]
Provocations, it has already been noted, were not original to the university. Back in the 1940s, leftists had protested the building of the shrine for the Prophet’s hair in Ningrahar, and, in the late 1950s, wives of leftist politicians began appearing in public without the veil as a direct challenge to religious leaders who decried such ethical breaches. [34] Both these events set off religious protests, including violent demonstrations in Qandahar in response to the unveiling. One such episode occurred in 1969, when the newspaper Islah published a cartoon viewed by religious leaders as disrespectful of the Prophet Muhammad. This cartoon depicted a man in an Arab-style turban, accompanied by nine veiled women, being turned away by a hotel manager who tells him: “Here there is no room for a man with nine wives.” Although not identified, the figure depicted in the cartoon was recognized as the Prophet Muhammad, and his belittlement in the cartoon was held up as an example of leftist sacrilege. A more significant outrage occurred in March 1970, when the Marxist Parcham newspaper published the poem “The Bugle of Revolution”; in it Lenin was eulogized using a form of invocation (dorud) traditionally reserved solely for the Prophet Muhammad. [35]
Where earlier provocations had resulted in scattered protests, outraged mosque sermons, and delegations demanding audiences with the king, “The Bugle of Revolution” inspired a more organized protest involving hundreds Muslim clerics, Sufi pirs, and members of saintly families who congregated in the Pul-i Khishti mosque in central Kabul to protest the poem and the growing influence of leftists in Afghanistan. The demonstration was originally supported by the government as a way of indirectly dampening increasingly militant leftist activities in the country. However, when the protest dragged on for more than a month with no end in sight and began to take an increasingly antigovernment direction, troops were sent into the sacred precincts of the mosque to break up the demonstration; the soldiers unceremoniously packed the protesting clerics on buses back to their provincial homes and arrested some of the demonstration organizers. [36]
A few of the student leaders of the Muslim Youth Organization, such as Abdur Rahim Niazi and Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, were peripherally involved in the Pul-i Khishti protest, but most of the members were excluded from playing a significant role because—unlike these two—they didn’t have the requisite madrasa training. This exclusion articulated a line of division within the Muslim political community that would loom increasingly large during the coming years—that between younger, secularly educated university and high school students and madrasa-trained mullas and maulavis. Likewise, the abortive Pul-i Khishti demonstration marked a turning point in the tactics of Muslim political activists. As members of the Muslim Youth Organization watched from outside as the mosque protest floundered and finally failed, many came to the conclusion that traditional religious leaders were unprepared for the changing political climate in Afghanistan, particularly the new modes of disseminating political propaganda and organizing popular movements that leftists parties were beginning to employ to great effect. In the opinion of many in the younger generation, demonstrations such as the one carried out at the Pul-i Khishti mosque only played into the hands of the government and the leftists, and the fact that the government had turned on the leaders of the demonstration (who had previously gained the tacit approval of the king) when the demonstration strayed beyond its official stated aims illustrated not only that the regime was untrustworthy but also that it was a major part of the problem. For weeks on end, the mullas and maulavis had made speeches to each other, while they waited for the government to respond. In the meantime, the king and his advisors were determining what action to take, and when they finally cracked down, the demonstration organizers had little popular support to draw on, no coordinated line of action to pursue, and finally no alternative other than getting on the bus and going home.
The Pul-i Khishti demonstration provided a fit ending to a half century of government co-optation of Muslim clerics. Beginning with Amir Habibullah, and with the exception of the decade-long reign of Amir Amanullah, the state’s policy toward clerics and pirs had been one of appeasement, a policy that proved to be far more effective than either Abdur Rahman’s style of confrontation or Amanullah’s plan of radical reform. Since 1931, the government had placated its religious critics, giving them grants of aid and land, funding their schools, and providing them with a largely symbolic role as overseers of state morality and law via the jamiat-ul ulama—the official council of ulama. The effect of these concessions was not only to dampen the independent spirit of the religious class but also to blunt any effort on its part to establish independent organizations that would be in a position to criticize or counter government actions.
In this respect, the men of religion were considerably more vulnerable than even the tribes, for they had no corporate existence as a group except insofar as the government provided venues for collective action. Despite the frequent boasts that I heard in interviews with clerics as to the superior quality of Afghan madrasas, the reality was that these schools were scattered all over the country and had little connection with one another except in the haphazard peregrinations of students moving among them. In Afghanistan, no theological center of activity was equivalent to Qom in Iran or al-Azhar in Egypt, which made organizing difficult. In the more distant past, the dispersion of schools had also made state control over the religious class more difficult, as firebrands like the Mulla of Hadda and Mulla Mushk-i Alam, the leader of the Afghan resistance to the British in 1879, could use their students (taliban) as runners to connect them to their allies and deputies. However, the expansion of government authority throughout the country, the improvement of roads and communication, and the gradual co-optation of religious leaders by the government contributed to the decline of the religious class as active participants in the political process, a decline that culminated in the anemic protest at Pul-i Khishti.
Following the abortive demonstration, and probably inspired by it, the government continued its efforts to bring religion under control. In 1971, the government set up a new agency, the riasat-i haj wa awqaf, which was intended to centralize the financial control of mosques and shrines throughout the country in one agency. Before the establishment of this directorate, the Ministry of Culture and Information had exercised some control over the two most famous religious shrines, the beautiful blue and white tile tomb in Mazar-i Sharif where ‘Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and fourth caliph, is purported to be buried and the shrine in Qandahar housing a cloak of the Prophet. With the founding of the riasat-i haj wa awqaf, however, the government intended to assume financial control of other established religious shrines and mosques, while also taking responsibility for building new mosques and appointing and paying imams, moazens [those who call people to prayer], and other religious functionaries. [37] In the words of Kamal Shinwari, who was the director of the agency from 1972 until the Marxist revolution, “We had the goal of bringing all of the ulama into the government organization,” while also assuming control of the endowments of the institutions they had previously run on their own. [38]
These efforts were undertaken with the approval of most of the clerics; they themselves participated in these initiatives and saw these measures as a way to ensure the financial well-being of religious institutions and religious personnel throughout the country. Prior to this point, many, if not most, mullas and maulavis had been dependent on the charitable contributions of local people, or they had been the hired help of wealthy landowners. While some shrines had endowments, often the only beneficiaries of a given shrine would be the descendants of the saint interred in its precincts, who would divide the income from associated lands and contributions left at the shrine among themselves. Few mullas or maulavis benefited from these arrangements, just as few mosques had endowments of land large enough to make them sustainable without additional assistance. So the desire of the ulama to regularize their income and make themselves less dependent on local people is understandable, but, at the same time, the fact that religious leaders could see their own best interests as allied with those of the government is a mark of how far they had moved in seventy years. It is difficult to imagine the Mulla of Hadda countenancing the establishment of the riasat-i haj wa awqaf unless it were independent of government oversight. As noted earlier in the chapter, the Mulla turned back to the government the sizeable parcel of land given to him by Amir Habibullah on the grounds that it was bait-ul mal, the property of the people, and thus not properly his to take (or the amir’s to give). More to the point perhaps, the Mulla recognized that financial entanglements with the state limited the independence of religious leaders and made them less inclined to fulfill the role he had played for so many years as the moral guardian of the community.
Seventy years later, Afghanistan was a different place. The balance of power had shifted in favor of the state, and the ulama had new aspirations for financial and social security that overrode their ancient commitments to defend the faith against the perturbations of state rulers who lost their way. But the Muslim Youth didn’t see it that way, and they didn’t have the same priorities or the same professional interest in securing a livelihood as the ulama did. For them, the actions of the ulama were a betrayal, and it was up to them, so they believed, to stand fast as the true guardians of the faith. One former Muslim Youth member from Paktika Province described their view to me in an interview in 1986:
Afghanistan was not a country without Islamic scholars. There were thousands of scholars, but we thought that when they didn’t point out the people’s needs, and when they didn’t point out the traitors and the tyrant in the country, and they didn’t point out the Soviet exploitation of Afghanistan, we thought that if people are hungry, they don’t want to hear stories about cookies and banquets—they want food. That was the need of the time. [39]
With Marxists on the university campus speaking out against the injustices of the government and addressing the needs of the people, the Muslim Youth leaders felt the need to demonstrate the relevance of Islam to the social problems of the country. The influence of Marxist ideology was readily apparent in a pamphlet written by Abdur Rahim Niazi in response to many questions he was hearing on what Islam had to offer in solving Afghanistan’s economic problems and how an Islamic government would ensure social justice (‘adalat-i ejtema‘i) for its citizens. [40] While most of Niazi’s pamphlet dealt with specific features of the Islamic economic system, such as zakat (religious tax) and sud (interest), the gist of his argument was that Afghanistan need not look to Marxism or any other foreign ideology to find the means of ensuring a better life for the poor:
In Islamic law, the emphasis is so much on mercy that when a Muslim sees a needy person, he immediately feels that it is obligatory for him to help him, and he is ready to give his share to the poor. God said (in surah dhariyat, verse 19) that the needy have a share in the riches of the wealthy, and therefore God loves those who help their friends, neighbors, travelers, and other people.
According to Niazi, Islam had all the necessary answers to the problems of society; if the government would institute zakat, not only would poverty be eliminated, but funds would be left over for public-works projects. The government, however, had failed to live up to its responsibilities under Islamic law, and the result was that “the number of poor people is increasing day by day.” On this point, “the Muslims and communists have little difference.” Where the difference does intrude is in the manner of solving the problem, for “according to communist ideology, the [wealthy] class should be eliminated from society in order to pave the way for the communist revolution.” The Prophet Muhammad, however, offered an alternative solution:
Fourteen centuries back, Islam taught a very revolutionary and logical lesson for [achieving] revolution. God said to do jihad in the path of God with honesty. The establishment of an Islamic government requires that kind of jihad. . . . Today truth has been replaced by tyranny, and the only way that has been left is to invite [dawat] the people to truth and untiring militancy in this path.
In the face of threats from increasingly vocal Marxist radicals and a complacent, sporadically despotic state, the Muslim Youth expanded its attempts to recruit new members to its cause, especially in government offices and high schools in Kabul and the provincial capitals:
For example, if I graduated and joined the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Finance or Trade, I would form a cell over there. If there was somebody before me, I was introduced to him, or he was introduced to me if he was junior to me. Since I was from the rural areas, I would approach family members and others from our area. If I knew there were fifteen people from our area in the city, I was approaching them—“Hello, how are you?” I was inviting them and providing materials. In this way, the party was organizing itself. [41]
In his interview with me, Qazi Amin mentioned some of the trips he made on behalf of the Muslim Youth, but I have also heard from others what it was like to be at the receiving end of such trips. One informant who lived in Kunduz, a provincial capital in northern Afghanistan, had his first contact with the Muslim Youth through a recent university graduate named “Mumin” (a pseudonym). This was in 1969–1970, while the informant was a student in secondary school. Everyday after class, Mumin waited outside for the informant and other students who were known to regularly attend mosque and therefore might be sympathetic to the Muslim Youth message. As Mumin got to know the students, he gradually began to talk to them about Islam and inquired about their attitudes toward a variety of political and social issues. Eventually, he offered the students a handwritten document that contained an explanation of modern scientific inventions from the point of view of the Qur’an and showed the ways in which the pursuit of technological progress was in keeping with scriptural belief.
Mumin was persuasive in conversation and impressed the students with his theological knowledge, which they believed was greater than that of the religion teachers they listened to in class. Over time, Mumin established solid relations with forty or fifty students from the high school, as well as from the local madrasa and the teacher-training school. Contacts with these students continued on a regular but informal basis for the first year, and every so often Mumin would supply the students with additional writings that they would then copy and distribute among their friends. Not until the second year did the informant become aware that Mumin was part of an organized political party. This revelation occurred in the spring of 1971, after local students belonging to the Marxist Khalq and Parcham parties held a public demonstration. From this point, Mumin began to operate more openly, bringing notes for the students to read and identifying the source of these writings as a group in Kabul named Jawanan-i Musulman—the Muslim Youth.
Having witnessed the humiliation suffered by the older clerics during the Pul-i Khishti demonstration, Muslim student leaders were determined not to endure the same fate, and they took elaborate measures to ensure that their nascent organization was not subverted or infiltrated. The former mid-level member of the Muslim Youth described the organization this way:
First there was a central committee, and it came downward to small cells [hasta]. These were divided in Kabul and in the countryside. Each of the university students was responsible for one high school. Others were responsible for one district or for a street. All the students were responsible for different areas outside the campus, including schools, madrassas, mosques. Two might be responsible for a big high school like Rahman Baba. Within the school, leadership of the cell was according to the understanding of Islam and the activism of the people in that school. [42]
Division of the party into small cells guaranteed that lower-level recruits, about whom the party leadership knew relatively little, would know the names of only a handful of other members and that these recruits would come to know more members only as they were vetted up through the party hierarchy. Above the level of the primary cell, which usually had between five and ten members, there was the halqa, or circle, composed of the heads of a number of primary cells. The heads of each of these secondary circles were also members of a tertiary group known as the hauza. The local hauzas far removed from Kabul were generally connected to the capital through regional and provincial councils; each of these councils sent a representative to the next level. The provincial representative was a member of the central council (shura), which was made up primarily of the first group of student leaders from the university. These layers of segmental organization provided insulation; even if a cell were infiltrated, only that group would be compromised because members were unaware of the membership of other cells.
Advancement within the party was also monitored to ensure that those who rose in position reflected both the political philosophy and the moral tone expected of members. According to one high-ranking member of the Muslim Youth whom I interviewed in 1986, there were degrees of membership: “Each step is passed based on one’s activism—the cell you belong to decides. The way you operate, the way you invite people [to join the party]. Personally, you could be watched by a member of the party. . . . I can give my personal view on a person’s relations, life, attitude toward the country—all of these things count.” [43]
Most of the members of the tertiary level—the hauza—were third- or fourth-degree members, and they were responsible for overseeing and ensuring the ideological and personal accountability of those below them in the party hierarchy. They were also responsible for nominating members for promotion; and they were required to sign each promotion form and ensure that the individual had performed in a way that merited advancement:
One condition was that you had to become a top student in school or university. It is a record that [in the late 1960s] numbers one to ten [in class rank at the university] were all members of the Muslim Youth. A second condition was that you had to memorize by heart each week a part of the Qur’an and hadith, and you had to write how many and what books you had studied. [44]
Members of the Muslim Youth carefully monitored each other’s behavior and reported their findings to higher-ups within the party who made decisions regarding promotion. The individual under consideration would not necessarily know those who were involved in his promotion, or he might know them personally but did not know that they were high-ranking members of the party. “When you are promoted to the next step, you are informed, and then [the leader of your cell] gives you another responsibility.” [45]
The Muslim Youth were continually on the lookout for new prospects but were wary of everyone and of the possibility of having the party infiltrated by Marxists or government agents. [46] One early party member, Sur Gul Spin, told me of the efforts made to check on the background of other members through their relatives, classmates, villagers back home. As he rose through the party ranks, he was given the responsibility of monitoring the behavior of the other forty-five students in his class: “If he belongs to another thinking, I can guess that this person is hard-core and this [one] is not hard-core, that [his way of thinking] is due to his brother. . . . We knew another person was regularly participating in the communist demonstrations, but just for fun. He didn’t invite a single man to that party.” While it was recognized that many students went to demonstrations because “they were the kind of place where you could talk about anything you wanted to, where you could yell ‘bullshit’ at anyone,” this was an indulgence the party did not allow its own members “even secretly, even in your heart.” [47]
While the party was obsessed with security, it did not back down from confrontation. The lesson that party leaders appear to have taken from the failed demonstration at Pul-i Khishti was not that demonstrations were unwise but that they had to be undertaken in a more calculated manner. In most cases, public protests by the Muslim Youth neither were targeted at nor demanded action by the state. Rather, they tended to be responses to actions of their Marxist rivals. Thus, when campus leftists initiated their various petty assaults on orthodoxy—showing offensive films, desecrating copies of the Qur’an, eating during Ramazan—the Muslim students took a more direct and violent line of action than their elders had at Pul-i Khishti or than they themselves had in the past. This line of action sometimes involved demonstrations, sometimes direct confrontations with the leftist authors of their discontent. These confrontations—some of which were initiated by the leftists, others by the Muslim students—led at first to scuffles and broken arms, later to broken heads, and finally to several deaths: in each case, according to informants, Marxists beaten or stabbed by Muslims.
The escalating combat between Marxists and Muslims culminated in May 1972 after a Western-trained professor at Kabul University reportedly denigrated the relevance of Islamic economic principles to contemporary problems. The classroom debate that ensued over these comments developed into a demonstration in which a member of the Maoist Shula-yi Jawed party was killed. The government responded by arresting a number of Muslim Youth leaders, including Hekmatyar, who had been one of the organizers of the demonstration. While these leaders were eventually released, the government was forever after wary of the potential threat from Muslim students. Well aware of the radical challenge that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood were making to the government in Egypt and aware as well of the influence that works by Muslim Brotherhood writers exerted on Muslim students at Kabul University, the government began to monitor the activities of the Muslim Youth in the last year of Zahir Shah’s reign. Surveillance increased even further after Muhammad Daud’s coup d’état in 1973, which led the Muslim Youth to move beyond recruitment and public protest to planning for armed confrontation with the government.
Daud’s coup d’état also marked the emergence of the Muslim Youth from the protective chrysalis of the university. While the university setting was crucial to the development of the Muslim Youth, it also presented certain difficulties; in particular, after a period of intense involvement with the party, members would graduate and then have to go out and earn a living. Many graduates stayed in Kabul, most working in government ministries, but others ended up in the provinces, teaching school or working in regional government offices. This dispersal of party members offered opportunities for expanding the base of the party, but it also made coordination of activities far more difficult.
In Qazi Amin’s case, graduation followed five months after Daud’s coup d’état. Although he had hoped to return to Najm ul-Madares as a teacher, the Ministry of Education sent him to eastern Ningrahar Province in the winter of 1974 to teach first in a primary school and then in a secondary school in Surkh Rud. He remained there for a year and a half, during which he recruited on behalf of the party, both in Surkh Rud and in neighboring areas. Because of his status as a madrasa graduate and the son of an Islamic judge, Qazi Amin was especially useful to the party in dealing with traditional clerics, and consequently he was sent on missions to Qandahar and other regions to meet with religious scholars, as well as with students and teachers:
I informed them about the non-Islamic policies of the Daud regime, and I told them that even though [Daud] proclaimed his regime as an Islamic republic, it was actually not Islamic at all. [I told them], “He is not a person who could bring Islam. He is pro-communist. The communists are involved in the regime and the hand of the Russians is behind all of them. The Russians want to vanquish and finish the Islamic movement through Daud’s regime. Then they have a plan to bring communists directly into power.” Some of the knowledgeable persons accepted these ideas. . . . Other brothers were involved in the same sort of activities in different provinces. We would establish some circles, meet with village chiefs and religious scholars, and put into effect some other programs as well. [48]
After he began teaching in 1974, Qazi Amin didn’t return to Kabul and had only limited contact with party members in the capital, but by this time most of the top leaders either had been imprisoned or had fled to Peshawar. In the winter of 1975, he established relations with exiled party members, including his old friend Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who were the senior members of the movement in Peshawar. That August, while Qazi Amin was still inside Afghanistan, party members, including Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, led unsuccessful attacks on government installations in Panjshir, Surkh Rud, Paktia, Laghman, and other provinces. According to Qazi Amin, the party was forced to take this action because of the government’s repression. Prior to the uprisings, more than 150 members had been arrested “without any reason. The only accusation against them was their membership in the Islamic movement. Until that time, we did not launch any attack or any other hostile action against the government. We didn’t even spread slogans or night letters [shabnama] against the government. For no reason, [Daud] pulled people from mosques, teachers and students from schools, and arrested all of them.” [49]
Though not directly involved in the planning or implementation of these raids, one of which occurred near his own home in Surkh Rud, Qazi Amin was implicated by association with some of those who had been arrested, and he escaped to the mountains. From there, he traveled by foot to Pakistan.
When Qazi Amin arrived in Peshawar, the movement was demoralized and directionless. The attacks had been intended to spark a nationwide uprising against Daud’s government, to occur simultaneously with a military putsch in Kabul. The Kabul operation never got underway, and, instead of provoking a popular rebellion, the students in the countryside found themselves under attack from the very people they had hoped to rally to their cause.When I reached Peshawar, Hekmatyar and [Burhanuddin] Rabbani [later head of the Jamiat-i Islami party] were both very sad and depressed. Hekmatyar became nervous and sick, and he had to go to Lahore to cure himself. They had been hopeful of bringing fundamental changes to the government through these operations, but they failed. They expected the people to support the uprising, and they were hopeful that they would be able to continue the struggle against the government in this way. But contrary to their expectations, so many stalwarts of the party . . . were arrested by the government. Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, for example, was arrested with twenty-five members of the movement. In the case of those members who managed to escape . . . the government put their close relatives in jail and tortured them. They tied their feet with rope and pulled them over the road from their houses up to the district administrator’s office. They suffered very grave hardships and endured many kinds of cruelty. [50]
Qazi Amin estimated that there were 120 families of refugees in Peshawar when he arrived, along with a few others in the tribal areas. During the next six months, another 1,200 families arrived from various parts of Afghanistan. For the most part, these refugees were the relatives of party members who had been arrested or killed for their antigovernment activities. Party leaders assigned Qazi Amin the job of securing tents, rations, and other basic necessities from the Pakistan government. While not exactly welcoming them, President Zulfiqar ‘Ali Bhutto did recognize the potential value of these young zealots as a blunt instrument against Daud should the Afghan president decide once again to contest the political status of the tribal borderlands or create other difficulties. Consequently, Bhutto provided modest subsidies to the exiles, along with some out-of-date weapons and basic training in their use. Otherwise, the former students were on their own, with most living in dingy apartments and scraping by on their subsidies, whatever funds they were able to bring with them across the border, and additional assistance from sympathetic political groups in Pakistan, such as the Jama’at-i Islami Pakistan.
At the same time, and despite the setbacks, plans went forward to renew the struggle to overthrow the regime of Daud and to establish an Islamic government once and for all in Afghanistan. At the center of these efforts was Hekmatyar, the erstwhile engineering student who was the only founding member of the Muslim Youth Organization at large after the debacle of the summer of 1975. As discussed in the next chapter, Hekmatyar’s leadership was controversial from the start. More than anyone else, he was responsible for converting the disjointed network of student study and protest groups into an authoritarian political party. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the party’s uncompromising militancy and obstinate refusal to cede pride of place in the jihad to any other group, be it the tribes and regional solidarities that controlled the anti-Khalqi rebellion in its early days or the other political parties that set up shop in Peshawar following the Saur Revolution.
Conclusion
The story of Qazi Amin’s coming of age bears a certain resemblance to the story previously told of Samiullah Safi’s formative years. Both men had strong fathers who were immersed in venerated traditions that their sons initially sought to follow. But while both men were born into the world their fathers had known, that world changed as they came of age. One feature of that change was the unbalancing of the tripartite relationship of state, tribe, and Islam that had long been the foundation of Afghan political culture; in the second third of the twentieth century that relationship had begun to tip lopsidedly in favor of the state. Growing up, Qazi Amin and Samiullah Safi had an idealized faith respectively in Islam and tribal honor, but their experience and education led them both to believe that they could no longer continue on the paths laid out for them by their fathers. It was not enough to be a religious teacher or tribal chief. The expansion of the state made the very existence of those positions tenuous, and so both sought new venues within which to redirect the state’s power. For Samiullah Safi, that venue was the parliament, which he viewed as the best place to push the state to become more responsive to the needs of the people. Going against the advice of his father, he ran for and was elected to parliament, but he found there a body of men all speaking for themselves with little commitment either to the institution itself or to the principles of democratic representation. When that institution was disbanded following Daud’s coup d’état, Samiullah began a long period of inactivity that ended when a second Marxist coup d’état gave him a second chance at reconciling the disparate strands of his life.
Qazi Amin’s story diverges from Samiullah’s somewhat in that the venue he chose for keeping alive the faith of his fathers was a political party of student peers. Qazi Amin made this choice at a time when the ulama were generally complacent or ineffectual in the face of growing challenges to and indifference toward religion, particularly within the urban elite. In an earlier age, someone like Qazi Amin probably would have become the head of a madrasa, a judge, or a deputy to one of the major Sufi pirs in the country, but religious education and Sufism were both in decline when he was a young man. The great Islamic leaders of old were dead, and most of those who inherited their sanctity as birthright were either content with the wealth handed down to them or ensconced on the government payroll. The choice for Qazi Amin was either to take the job offered to him and ignore the larger problems he perceived in the country or to seek a new institutional setting within which to defend Islam. The interstitial space of the university campus allowed the formation of novel sorts of groupings—students of Islamic law with engineers, Pakhtuns from the border area with Tajiks from the north, Sunnis with Shi’as, and all of them young people, unrestricted by the usual protocols of deference to elders.
Kabul University offered a context for youthful political zeal different from any that had existed before; it is probably not an exaggeration to state that at no other time or place was such a diverse group of young Afghans able to meet together and to formulate its own ideas, rules of order, and plans for the future without any interference from those older than themselves. Some of the senior members of the Muslim Youth did have connections with faculty mentors. Abdur Rahim Niazi, in particular, was reported to have had close ties with Professor Ghulam Muhammad Niazi, who had spent some time in Egypt, where he had been acquainted with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the prototype for many radical Islamic parties. However, presumably because they held government positions that could be taken away, Professor Niazi and other faculty members limited their role to private meetings with a few student leaders and never came out publicly in support of the student party. This reticence severely restricted their influence and also meant that as the confrontations on campus heated up, no moderating influence was available to push compromise or reconciliation. In certain respects, this experience was a liberating one, and it allowed new winds to blow into the ossified culture of Afghan politics. However, unhinged from traditional patterns of association, the student political parties were ultimately a disaster for Afghanistan, for as they were cut off from the past, living entirely in the cauldron of campus provocations and assaults, student radicals developed a political culture of self-righteous militancy untempered by crosscutting ties of kinship, cooperation, and respect that elsewhere kept political animosities in check.
The Muslim Youth, like their contemporaries in the leftist parties, abandoned (at least for a time) the ancient allegiances of tribe, ethnicity, language, and sect on which Afghan politics perennially had rested. In their place, young people took on new allegiances, professing adherence to ideological principles they had encountered only weeks or months before and swearing oaths of undying fealty to students a year or two older than themselves. These loyalties were kept alive through a paranoid fear of subversion. Only other members could be trusted; every other person was a potential spy, an enemy out to destroy the one true party of the faithful. Marxists and Muslims were tied together in ways they did not recognize at the time. Sworn enemies, they also needed—and ultimately came to be mirror images of—one another, linked together by their tactics, their fears, their confrontations, and their self-righteousness. Each believed that its enemies were wrong, that they alone held the key to Afghanistan’s future. Each side also believed that violence in advancement and defense of a cause such as theirs was appropriate and ultimately necessary.
The religious moralism and suspicion that first took root in the soil of the new democracy at Kabul University reached its full flowering a decade later in Peshawar with the rise to power of Hizb-i Islami. The constant attention to the behavior of others that was evident in the first generation of Muslim student activists was extended in the second generation, as Hizb members watched how they and others dressed—Hizbis could be identified by the neatness of their clothing and the white skullcaps (jaldar) that most wore—how long they and others wore their hair and beards, and whether and how often they attended mosque and which mosque they frequented. In Kabul, there had been an element of play in the actions of the Muslim Youth. They were engaged in a game of “gotcha” with Marxist students that was played in the insulated confines of the university campus. After the coup in 1978, however, the game turned deadly serious, and the monitoring that went on in Peshawar was no longer associated just with party promotion but with disgrace and sometimes assassination.
The evolution of Qazi Amin’s increasingly revolutionary persona can be glimpsed in the three photographs contained in Figure 11. The photographs are all studio shots taken at different stages of Qazi Amin’s early life—the first when he was a taleb in his late teens at the Hadda madrasa; the second when he was a student in his early twenties at Kabul University; and the third when he was in his thirties and a leader of Hizb-i Islami. The three photographs, which Qazi Amin provided to me, are simple head shots of the type that could be used for an identity card. In the first, he looks like a typical madrasa student, with a sparse, patchy beard and cheap cotton turban. The second photograph shows a man more concerned with his appearance. The turban is gone. His hair is neatly combed and the beard trimmed close to his face. The coat and tie were common in pictures of university students of that period, but the beard also tells us of his commitment to Islam, as more secular students almost always favored a mustache or clean-shaven look. In the third photograph, the suit coat remains, but the tie—which is identified with Western fashion—has been jettisoned. Though we cannot see the rest of his clothes, it is likely that the Western-style trousers he wore at the university have been replaced by traditional pantaloons (shalwar). On his head is the sort of karakul cap favored by mid-level Afghan government officials, which the man in the picture could be were it not for the full, untrimmed beard. This is the look Qazi Amin continued to favor in later years, except that the karakul cap was replaced by turbans—sometimes white, in the fashion of Muslim scholars, sometimes of the dark, striped sort worn by Afghan tribesmen (Fig. 12).
11. Qazi Amin (courtesy of Qazi Amin).
12. Qazi Amin speaking at the dedication of a new high school, Kot, Ningrahar, post-1989 (courtesy of Qazi Amin).
Perhaps more interesting in these photographs than the changes of look and style is the set of the eyes. The boy in the first photograph looks at the camera with guilelessness, his eyes wide; perhaps he is facing a lens for the first time. The young man in the second photograph seems at once more self-confident and earnest but also more affected and aware of his appearance. His back is noticeably straighter, and one suspects that he is looking not only at the camera but also at his future. The third man is identifiably the same person as in the other photographs, but he has gained a solidity that was absent before. That solidity derives partially from the fact that he is heavier now and has a longer, darker beard that curls out from his cheeks and down over his collar. It derives also from the lambskin cap, which seems to push down on his head. But even more it comes from the look in his eyes—fierce, resolute, and unwavering. This is not a man who you would imagine spends a lot of time laughing. It is a man focused on the task in front of him, a man used to making decisions and ordering other men around. It is also a man of conviction—a man determined in his course of action, a revolutionary.
Notes
1. This speech was recorded on a tape cassette given to me in the fall of 1983 by an Afghan informant who was unaware of when, where, or to whom the speech was delivered.
2. Olivier Roy noted that in 1980 most foreign observers would have agreed “with varying degrees of reluctance that the Hizb was the backbone of the resistance” (Roy 1986, 134).
3. While the age difference between Wakil and Qazi Amin was slight, it was not insignificant. When Wakil was a student, political organizing on campus was still fairly covert, and confrontations between Muslim and leftist students were still restrained. Such restraint was no longer in evidence by the time Qazi Amin began his university career, and this lack of restraint undoubtedly influenced the choices that he made and that were forced on him.
4. Interview, May 29, 1986.
5. Edwards 1996.
6. When Hadda Sahib made his first appearance at court, Habibullah is said to have offered a dramatic gesture of respect to symbolize his favorable attitude toward Islam:
When Sahib-i Hadda went to the court of Amir Habibullah Khan for the funeral [fateha] of Abdur Rahman, Amir Habibullah, Nasrullah Khan [Habibullah’s younger brother], Inayatullah Khan [Habibullah’s eldest son], and other ministers were standing to receive him when he came with his deputies. Since Amir Habibullah Khan was worried about this meeting, he offered his seat to him, and Sahib-i Hadda sat there [on the throne]. After he had recited two or three verses of the Qur’an, he forgave Habibullah Khan and prayed for the prosperity of Afghanistan and Islam. When he left the court, he told one of his disciples that he had brought some water and had washed his feet in front of the Amir and his ministers. Someone asked him why he wanted to wash his feet. He replied that it was because the court had become colored by the blood of Muslims and his feet had become bi namazi (polluted and unacceptable for prayer).
This account was told to me by Khalilullah Khalili. Ustad Khalili was a particularly useful informant on matters having to do with the evolution of the state during the twentieth century. His father, Mustufi Mirza Muhammad Hussain Khan, occupied a high position in Habibullah’s cabinet [mustaufi ul-mamalek], and Khalili himself served as one of the principal ministers in the short-lived administration of Bacha-i Saqao and later became a close confidant of Zahir Shah.
7. 1 kharwar = 80 ser. 1 Kabul ser = 7 kilograms.
8. These figures come from interviews conducted with offspring of Sufi Sahib and Pacha Sahib, as well as from government decrees (firman) in their possession.
9. One expression of this new strategy can be seen in the elaboration of national and specifically monarchical rituals under Habibullah. At his coronation, for example, the amir eschewed royal for Islamic symbolism by having the khan mulla, the chief religious figure in the court, perform the act of installation in the style of the Sufi dastarbandi (ceremony of succession) rather than in a more regal manner. Thus, just as a pir has a white cotton turban wrapped around his head when he succeeds to the head of a Sufi order, so Habibullah adopted the same simple ceremony for his own investiture. Thereafter, the khan mulla emphasized the religious character of the ritual by presenting the new ruler with a copy of the Qur’an, some relics of the Prophet Muhammad, and a flag from the tomb of an Afghan saint.
Vartan Gregorian points out that Habibullah instituted a new Afghan holiday, National Unity Day, intended to commemorate the conquest of former Kafiristan: “The holiday, which was celebrated annually with much pomp and ceremony, had both a religious and a political character, honoring at the same time Afghan unity and the divinely ordained Afghan monarchy.... In this light, the conquest of Kafiristan was hailed as a triumph of Islam over foreign intriguers and Christian missionaries, aliens who had been determined to convert the Kafirs and thereby subvert the territorial integrity of Afghanistan” (1969, 181–182).
10. During the course of my interviews in Peshawar, I heard frequent complaints about the decadence and corruption of various deputies and their offspring, and when I inquired why Sufism had declined in importance, the most frequent response I received had to do with the way in which different pirs had abandoned the pious lifestyle and lost the respect of the people.
11. On the 1897 uprisings, see Edwards 1996 and Ahmed 1976.
12. The deputies who participated in the 1919 jihad included Pacha Sahib Islampur, Haji Sahib Turangzai, the Mulla of Chaknawar, and Mia Sahib of Sarkano.
13. Abdur Razaq instituted a number of logistical innovations to help counteract the weaknesses of the tribal system of warfare. Among these innovations were a rotation system that ensured that every tribal section would have men present at the front at all times, a plan for ensuring adequate food at the front, the establishment of command centers at designated locations, and the establishment of transport groups to get supplies to the troops. For details on this campaign and on Razaq’s life, see Zalmai 1967.
14. The war, which is known in Afghanistan as the jang-i istiqlal, or the war of independence, was a short-lived and mostly half-hearted affair on both sides. With the exception of the Afghan attack on the British garrison at Thal, where a “lucky” cannon shot exploded an ammunition dump (Khalilullah Khalili, interview, April 26, 1983), the fighting proved inconclusive. However, the Afghans did receive concessions from the British that allowed them a degree of independence in the conduct of their foreign affairs, and, as a result, they considered the desultory campaign a victory.
15. See Kushkaki 1921, 205–208.
16. On the reign of Amanullah and the abortive reform program that led to his overthrow, see Gregorian 1969, Poullada 1973, and Stewart 1973.
17. Interview with Maulavi Ahmad Gul Rohani, son of Ustad Sahib of Hadda. Prime Minister Hashim Khan, the brother of Nadir Khan, acted as the chief policymaker and regent for King Zahir Shah from Nadir’s death in 1933 until 1946, when his brother, Shahmahmood Khan, took over.
18. Qazi Amin knew the most about the Shinwari upheaval, which he said centered around Shinwari leader Muhammad Afzal’s right to keep fifty militiamen whose salaries were paid by the government. Qazi Amin believed that Afzal was holding out for increased privileges from the government, and when he didn’t get his way, he attacked the local government base and set up his own government. Because his father had lived a long time in the Shinwari area, he was in a position to mediate between the government and Afzal, who eventually gave up his opposition. According to Qazi Amin’s description, the government’s treatment of Afzal and his family has similarities to the treatment of Sultan Muhammad Khan and his family after the Safi uprising: “He was in prison a short time, and after that he couldn’t go back to Shinwar. The government gave them houses and plenty of property in Kabul. It was good for them to some extent because they were living in good conditions in Kabul, and they could educate their children there. Now all their children are educated. When democracy came in 1964, they were also allowed to return to their own area.”
19. Zikr is the principal ceremony associated with Sufism. Disciples gather in a circle around their pir and chant in unison a phrase from the Qur’an. As disciples advance in their spiritual understanding, their pir gives them new phrases to learn and chant.
20. Interview, May 29, 1986.
21. The success of a shrine complex has less to do with a saint’s accomplishments in life than it does with his accomplishments after death, and the most successful shrines have usually been those that have managed to create a name for themselves curing one or another of the major illnesses and setbacks that befall people—be it infertility, snakebite, or scrofula. Despite the Mulla’s many miracles in life, his shrine at Hadda apparently never earned a reputation for engendering miracles after his death, and the flow of pilgrims visiting Hadda gradually began to decline. As it did, the interest the mulla’s deputies took in the center seems to have decreased as well. At least that was the case with Pacha Sahib of Islampur, whom Hadda Sahib himself had designated as the keeper of the langar. For reasons that remain unclear, Pacha Sahib relinquished his title to the langar and turned over its keys to Ustad Sahib, who was the only one of Hadda Sahib’s principal deputies to stay on in Hadda after his death and who already had been given responsibility for maintaining the library. Over time, the langar ceased regular operations, and the only other activity at Hadda’s center that appears to have continued was a yearly reading of the Qur’an during the month of Ramazan (which was significant not only as the month of fasting in the Islamic calendar but also for being the anniversary of the Mulla’s death).
22. The government-sponsored madrasas in Afghanistan were Madrasa-yi Abu Hanifa (Kabul), Dar ul-Ulm-i Arabi (Kabul), Dar ul-Ulm-i Rohani (Paktia), Fakhr ul-Madares (Herat), Madrasa-yi Jama-i Sharif (Herat), Najm ul-Madares (Ningrahar), Madrasa-i Mohammadia (Qandahar), Dar ul-Ulm-i Asadia (Balkh), Dar ul-Ulum-i Abu Muslim (Faryab), and Dar ul-Ulum-i Takharistan (Kunduz). During my interviews, informants offered dates ranging from 1931 to 1944 for the founding of the madrasa at Hadda. I have not been able to clarify which of these dates is correct, although I tend to believe the testimony of one particularly reliable informant, who stated that the Hadda madrasa was built in 1937.
23. The three biweekly newspapers published in 1951–1952 were Watan (Homeland), Angar (Burning Ember), and Nida’-yi Khalq (Voice of the Masses); Dupree 1980, 495; Bradsher 1985, 38; and Reardon 1969, 169–170.
24. See Dupree 1980, 495–496.
25. Interview, April 23, 1984.
26. Nasim Stanazai, interview, Peshawar, July 7, 1992. The same and similar stories were told to me by a number of former university students. The details sometimes differed, but the theme of antagonistic relations was always the same.
27. One of the issues that Afghans of different political persuasions debate is the exact role of Ghulam Muhammad Niazi and other professors in the development of the Muslim Youth. Thus, members of Jamiat-i Islami Afghanistan, which is headed by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former professor at Kabul University and a colleague of Niazi’s, say that the professors were secretly overseeing the Muslim students’ activities, first through Abdur Rahim Niazi and then through Engineer Habib-ur Rahman. The position of Hizb-i Islami, however, is that the professors chose to avoid direct involvement in student politics for fear of losing their sinecures. Since most of my informants are members of Hizb-i Islami, the interpretation offered here is more reflective of the Hizb-i Islami view of history. For an interpretation of Muslim Youth history that is more in keeping with the Jamiat-i Islami version, see Roy 1986, 69–83.
28. Eickelman 1985.
29. When my informants spoke of the classroom, it was generally to note the very different techniques that the foreign instructors brought to Afghanistan, such as the system of professors lecturing and students taking notes, and also the relative informality of many of the foreign instructors and their openness to debate and discussion—qualities that were apparently not often found in Afghan teachers, who tended to be more authoritarian in their dealings with students.
30. The Moroccan peer learning circles discussed by Eickelman differ from those that I studied in that they appear to have been significantly more “preprofessional” than their Afghan counterparts. Thus, the Moroccan peer learning circles served as a context in which young scholars acquired “the additional knowledge considered essential for men of learning and the practice necessary to develop competent rhetorical style.” In Kabul University circa 1968, however, the peer learning circle functioned less as a forum for fashioning polished scholars than as a place of protection and instruction for young Muslims who felt alone in the impersonal environment of the university and beleaguered by the rising tide of leftist activism on campus. Many of those who attended these meetings had little background in formal Islamic studies, but they did share a sense that Islam and the traditional values associated with it were in peril.
31. Engineer Habib-ur Rahman and Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman were both founding members of the Muslim Youth Organization.
32. Interview, April 23, 1984.
33. This quote is from the cassette cited in Note 1 above.
34. One finds occasional reports from this period of religious clerics throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women whom they encountered on the streets of Kabul. I have never been able to ascertain whether these stories were true or whether they were examples of antireligious propaganda disseminated by leftists.
35. The poem to the glory of the “land of Lenin” and the “miracles of the life-bearing revolution” ended with these lines:
For this matchless achievement We send DORUD to that pioneer party, And to the heroic people. We send DORUD to that great leader, The Great Lenin.
Quoted in Dupree 1970, 23.
36. Among the leaders of the demonstration were Miagul Jan, the son of the Mulla of Tagab, Maulavi Miskin from north of Kabul, and Mir Abdul Satar Hashimi from Logar. Among those I interviewed who were involved in the Pul-i Khishti demonstration were Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujaddidi; Maulavi Habibullah, a.k.a. Kuchi Maulavi from Logar; Maulavi Fazl Hadi from the Shinwari district of Ningrahar; Maulavi Wala Jan Wasseq from the Khogiani district of Ningrahar; Maulavi Amirzada from Laghman; and Maulavi Abdul Ahad Yaqubi from Helmand. Most leaders were not treated harshly when the demonstration was broken up, but Maulavi Wasseq, who was a government official at the time of his involvement in the demonstration, claims to have been imprisoned for almost three years. He told me that for one month of his imprisonment he had a skewer thrust through his tongue as punishment for his outspokenness.
37. Some positions, including caretaker of some shrines, were hereditary, and those holding them couldn’t be dismissed by the government. In such cases, one-tenth of the income from the shrine generally went to the caretaker, while the other nine-tenths went to the shrine itself. Under the riasat-i haj wa awqaf, the government took the nine-tenths portion of the income and allowed the caretakers to keep their tenth.
38. Interview, March 22, 1984. Also according to Shinwari, another initiative of the riasat-i haj wa awqaf was the centralization of control over the annual pilgrimage (haj) to Mecca. From this point on, the agency was to designate how many and who would be allowed to go on pilgrimage each year, while also arranging transportation, collecting fees from the pilgrims, and handling all the government paperwork. In 1972, eighteen thousand Afghans were allowed to go on haj.
39. Interview with Sur Gul Spin, Peshawar, May 25, 1986.
40. The only copy of Niazi’s pamphlet I have been able to find is a reprinted version that appeared in the Hizb-i Islami newspaper al-Sobh (no. 23, March 1986). The pamphlet, titled “The Importance of Economy in Islam and Communism” (ahmat-i eqtisad dar islam wo komunīsm), was originally published in Pakistan in 1970 around the time of Niazi’s death. See also Edwards 1993b.
41. Interview with Sur Gul Spin, Peshawar, May 25, 1986.
42. Ibid.
43. The levels of membership were formally designated as sympathizer (ham nawai), supporter (hamkar), candidate (candid), and member (ruqan). Interview with Sur Gul Spin, May 25, 1986.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Fear of infiltration was not unwarranted. According to a number of former Muslim Youth members, a student named Moqtadar, who had been accepted into the organization, provided information on the party’s leadership and activities to the Ministry of Information. He and other government informers were blamed by some for the arrests of Engineer Habib-ur Rahman and the failure of the uprisings in 1975.
47. Interview with Sur Gul Spin, May 25, 1986.
48. Interview, April 23, 1984.
49. Ibid. See Dupree 1978, 2–7, for an eyewitness account of the insurgency in Panjshir. Dupree, who happened to be in Panjshir when the Muslim Youth attacked, describes the confusion of the moment, the naiveté of the insurgents, and the rumors that circulated after the fact.
50. Ibid.
7. Fault Lines in the Afghan Jihad
When I interviewed Qazi Amin in 1984, we met in the nondescript, concrete building on the outskirts of Peshawar that he used for his personal office. There were many such buildings on the western fringe of Peshawar, which was in the midst of a massive construction boom, a result of the influx of arms, money, and drugs that followed in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the migration of more then three million refugees to Pakistan. Qazi Amin’s office was on the floor of a ground-level room looking out on a scraggly garden. There were no chairs or couches. He sat cross-legged on one of the three uncovered foam mattresses that lined the sides of the room. His briefcase doubled as his desk, and on a short pine table off to the side he kept stacks of books, mostly on religious subjects, including one that advised which suras of the Qur’an to recite for different disorders such as insomnia and marital discord. There was also a box of teacups and saucers ready for guests, a telephone close at hand, a bell that he used to summon his servant or assistant, and a notepad with Hizb-i Islami letterhead stationery and an official stamp, which he used to authenticate the letters and directives he sent out to various subordinates and associates. I also noted a large hole in the upper corner of one wall, I assumed for the eventual installation of an air conditioner. Construction in Pakistan was so frenzied at that time that builders rarely planned ahead or worried about the end use of their buildings. Consequently, in many of the homes and offices I visited, I found similar gaping holes made after the fact to accommodate wiring or gas fixtures or air-conditioning units.
When Qazi Amin was at home, his bodyguards lounged in the room next to the office, where one of his assistants could be found punching away at a Persian typewriter. Outside, the garden was filled with young Afghan men who milled about while awaiting the opportunity to meet with the leader. Some would request his assistance in getting a ration card or an increase in their allotment of food supplies or a family member admitted to a hospital; others were there looking for a job or funds for one worthwhile project or another. In the compound of every major and minor leader in Peshawar, a similar scene took place every day, and Peshawar was full of leaders—from the heads of the Afghan parties to the directors of the parties’ myriad committees, directorates, and offices. And there were the hard-eyed commanders, just in from the provinces and trailed by a pack of scruffy-looking mujahidin, making their way from office to office in search of the weapons and supplies they needed to go back for more fighting. Peshawar was full of leaders, but as everyone knew, no one was in charge.
In this chapter, I examine the evolution of the Islamic party infrastructure in Peshawar, focusing in particular on the transformation of the Muslim Youth Organization into Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan and the role of Hizb in fashioning the fragmented and vituperative refugee political culture of the mid-1980s. Trying to conduct fieldwork in this environment (for eighteen months from 1982 to 1984 and for six months in 1986), I found the profusion of parties puzzling, particularly since Islam had seemed such a taken-for-granted but politically insignificant part of Afghan society a decade earlier, when I lived in Kabul. I also found all the party business and the readiness of Afghans to speak of it, usually in disparaging terms, something of a bad joke and not easy to take seriously. On one level, it seemed like so much individual bickering and power grubbing—all sound and fury, signifying nothing. But it was there, the political culture of the moment, and I spent most of my time trying to make sense of it. In retrospect, I attribute greater importance to the political machinations swirling around me back then. Specifically, I see that they made possible the rise of the Taliban, for that movement was a direct response to the infighting within the Islamic resistance, which was becoming increasingly bitter during the period I was conducting research. The fissioning of the resistance climaxed after the Soviet pullout in 1989, when the parties were engaged in an armed struggle for control of Kabul. However, the process that culminated then had its origins in the period between the Marxist revolution of 1978 and the founding of the radical (seven-party) and moderate (three-party) alliances in September 1981. This was the formative period of the Islamic resistance—when the fault lines that later sundered it first revealed themselves—and it is vital to understand what transpired then in order to make sense of what happened later.
In preceding chapters, I discussed several factors in the early ascendance of Islam. Here, I take up the matter of how the Islamic jihad failed. Specifically, I am concerned with how there came to be ten separate parties in Peshawar, all claiming to represent Islam, all claiming to represent the best interests of Islam, all working to advance their own interests and to undermine the interests of their rivals. [1] In previous encounters between Islam and the state, a variety of religious figures had often been involved, but they generally were in agreement about the meaning of Islam and about the sect or school that was most entitled to paramount status. Thus, leaders like the Mulla of Hadda and Mulla Mushk-i Alam, who played a prominent role in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), could unite other religious figures behind them, in part because they thought of themselves and were thought of by others as scholars, Sufis, and reformers—not as potential kings. During the early stages of the counterrevolution against the Khalqi government, however, the façade of Islamic unity crumbled as philosophical differences became magnified and rivals competed for power among themselves with greater alacrity than they showed in their prosecution of the conflict with the Kabul regime.
Muslims generally agreed that a cornerstone of their faith is the principle of God’s singularity. For Muslims, God is one, indivisible, and eternal, but the preeminent characteristics of the Islamic resistance in Afghanistan were multiplicity, fragmentation, and impermanence. The evolution of this disjuncture can be traced through a series of sequential ruptures that occurred between 1975 and 1980, in each of which an effort at unifying the resistance was followed by confrontation and the establishment of a new political party. The creation of new factions followed familiar patterns related to the particular nodes of Islamic authority that had long existed in Afghanistan as well as to more recent innovations. The flight to Peshawar brought together representatives of all the Sunni Islamic traditions active in Afghanistan, and while these representatives were all more or less dedicated to the cause of jihad, they had different approaches and often violent disagreements with one another over who should lead the jihad and how it should be conducted. [2] At the time, it seemed that many of these tussles were the result almost solely of personal ambition rather than of more meaningful social and political divisions, but it is clearer today—especially since the emergence of the Taliban—that these disputes had a larger significance than was then apparent. In what follows, I describe these divisions in the chronological order in which they occurred, the principal personalities involved, and the relationship of particular disputes and ruptures to the evolving structure of Islamic authority in Afghanistan.
The Last Sufi
Daud’s coup d’état initiated a new era of politics in Afghanistan. Though groups like the Muslim Youth had been involved in violent demonstrations prior to the coup, the focus of most of their anger was the leftist student groups. From this point on, however, attention turned to the government itself, and the major concern became how to unseat President Daud himself. The Muslim Youth Organization was not alone in changing direction. Other underground Islamic political parties also began making plans to overthrow the government. These included three parties with strong links to the military officer corps that joined forces as Hizb-i Tauhid (the Monotheism Party) under the leadership of a Sufi pir named Maulana Muhammad Attaullah Faizani whose life story interweaves traditional and modern elements in a unique way. Born in 1924 in western Herat Province, Faizani grew up in a family of miagan (descendants of a venerated saint) and religious scholars, from whom he gained his primary education, and he later chose to attend the teacher-training college in Kabul. [3] Faizani began teaching in Herat in 1947 but quit after a few years, first to travel to other Muslim countries in search of Islamic knowledge and, then, for three years, reportedly to live a life of purification, fasting, and meditation in a secluded cave. After this period of ascetic retreat, Faizani resumed his traveling and ended up in Mazar-i Sharif, where he became enmeshed in his first political controversy after delivering a sermon in which he criticized the corrupt practices of clerics, government officials, and feudal landlords.
This incident led to the first of several arrests resulting from his defamation of those wielding power. Between prison stays, Faizani established a Sufi khanaqa, or center, near Pul-i Khumri in northern Baghlan Province, where he managed to secure a growing following, particularly among teachers, students, and mid-level military officers and government officials. He also attracted the attention of local clerics, who resented his popularity and accused him of claiming to have extraordinary spiritual powers. These accusations led to another arrest and a two-year prison term. Undeterred, he participated in the organization of the Pul-i Khishti demonstration shortly after his release in 1969, which resulted in his fifth stint in prison, this time for a year and a half. When he was released in 1970, Faizani remained in Kabul, where he set up a library near the Pul-i Khishti mosque and presided over weekly zikr ceremonies. Faizani’s library and zikr circle attracted numerous visitors, including Muslim Youth leaders like Engineer Habib-ur Rahman and Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, and many government officials and military officers. When Daud executed his coup d’état, Faizani was initially supportive, as he had long opposed the corruption of the monarchy, but he became increasingly pessimistic about the direction in which Daud was leading the government, and this pessimism led to his association with Hizb-i Tauhid. Despite the involvement of several high-ranking military officers, Hizb-i Tauhid was short-lived, as its plans for a coup d’état against the government were uncovered. Faizani was once again imprisoned, along with a number of his principal disciples and supporters, and he was still in prison when the Khalqis took power in 1978. Though his exact fate has never been ascertained (some disciples believe he is in occultation), it is probable that he was executed with other political prisoners before the Soviet invasion in 1979.
Maulana Faizani is one of the most interesting and enigmatic figures in contemporary Afghan history. In many respects, his life story is an updated version of the Mulla of Hadda’s; the Sufi elements of his story are numerous—the period of youthful wandering followed by a lengthy retreat from society, the fearless disregard for secular authority, the clashes with traditional clerics and government officials, the claims of supernatural powers, the devotion of his disciples. [4] All these are standard features of saintly hagiography, but Faizani was a man of the modern age as well. Educated and knowledgeable about science and technology, he differed from many traditional scholars and Sufis in wanting to integrate spiritual and secular forms of knowledge. In a time of general decline for Sufism, when most of the established saintly families had lost their influence and clerics either ignored science or claimed it was an infidel trick, Faizani espoused a mystical theology that embraced science and technology as ways of understanding and appreciating God’s creation.
For Faizani, science and politics were important and necessary activities, though he claimed that both were secondary to spiritual enlightenment, which had to precede and govern them. Only a person with knowledge of God could fully comprehend science’s capabilities or the political needs of the moment, and the way to achieve that knowledge was first and foremost through study of the Qur’an and the Sufi practice of zikr. Even this process, though, was susceptible to refinement of a modern sort, as one of Faizani’s disciples explained:
In this age due to the progress and advance of science and other technological fields the spiritual methods have also changed. For instance, we are able to travel the distance [that used to take] one month in one or two hours. Similarly by adopting new methods we can gain spiritual understanding in a very short time. In this advanced age of science there is very little need for seclusion, and physical hardship. In old days it took many years to attain self-purification. Nowadays we can gain the inner purification in a very short time, provided we put into practice the teachings of Maulana Sahib [Faizani]. [5]
Faizani was threatening to traditional clerics not only because of his synthetic approach to spirituality and science but also because of his ecumenical openness to people from a variety of backgrounds. A native Pakhtu speaker, he wrote mostly in Persian, and his followers included many Shi’as as well as Sunnis like himself. Hizb-i Tauhid, the party he helped to form after Daud’s coup, was equally inclusive, bringing together sectarian groups that had formerly worked separately from one another. [6] After Faizani’s arrest, no other Afghan religious leader was able to unite Sunni and ShiShi’aa followers, and, with his arrest and the breakup of Hizb-i Tauhid, activists from these two principal Islamic sects tended to go their separate ways and have remained disunited to the present. [7] For a brief time, the Muslim Youth did manage to hold the loyalty of some Shi’a students, but most of the prominent Shi’as in the Muslim Youth also worked with Faizani and were arrested with him after his failed coup attempt. Thereafter, the Muslim Youth remained solidly Sunni in orientation and made few inroads in Shi’a areas. Some Shi’as would later come to Peshawar seeking arms from the Sunni parties in control there, but the alliances struck in this context were strictly pragmatic. No leader since Faizani has been able to engender true cross-sectarian loyalty, and these divisions are more pronounced now than ever before.
Faizani probably enjoyed his greatest support among military officers. He used the traditional zikr circle as an avenue not just for spiritual enlightenment but also for political organizing. In tapping into the officer corps in this way, Faizani was following a longstanding tradition of Sufi association with the military, a tradition that went back at least to the turn of the century and that had periodically generated considerable paranoia within the government. [8] Indeed, one of the early points of contention between Amir Amanullah and the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar and other prominent Sufi pirs in the mid-1920s was the amir’s attempt to forbid members of the military from active participation in Sufi circles. Amanullah recognized the conflict of loyalty that could emerge when officers swore fealty to both their secular leader and a spiritual mentor, a conflict that played itself out when the Hazrat and other leaders called on their disciples within the military to take up arms against the king. Many believe that Daud faced the same threat from Faizani and his followers. Although, ultimately, Marxist cadres in the military undid Daud, many believe that the Muslim officers were more politically active—if also less fortunate—than the Marxists. The arrest of Faizani and many of his leading disciples forestalled this burgeoning movement, however, effectively crippling Muslim organizing efforts within the military and ultimately making it far easier for Hafizullah Amin to intensify his recruitment within the officer corps in the years leading up to the Saur Revolution.
Another feature of Faizani’s leadership was his ability to appeal to younger people. Some of Faizani’s surviving disciples contend that he was closely aligned with Abdur Rahim Niazi, the founder of the Muslim Youth Organization, and that it was Faizani who originally convinced Niazi to enroll in the university in order to recruit students away from Marxism to the Muslim cause. This assertion is impossible to prove, but there is evidence that Engineer Habib-ur Rahman, probably the leading member of the Muslim Youth after Niazi’s death, was a Faizani ally. A number of informants have told me that Rahman was a frequent visitor to Faizani’s library and zikr circle and was at least aware of, if not involved in, the organization of Hizb-i Tauhid’s planned coup d’état. He was also among those arrested when the coup d’état was uncovered, and he was executed with other plotters in 1974.
After Engineer Habib-ur Rahman’s death, the Muslim Youth turned away from alliances of this sort, keeping to themselves and trusting no one other than those whose loyalty to the party was assured. They also took to disparaging Faizani and his role in the Islamic movement. Thus, when I asked members of Hizb-i Islami who had previously been in the Muslim Youth about the activities of Maulana Faizani, I generally received condescending replies: Faizani was an old-style pir who had his disciples engage in the Sufi practice of repeatedly reciting God’s name in zikr circles rather than organizing them politically:
In seeking spiritual reform as a prelude to political reform, Faizani was in fact following a venerable Sufi adage that jihad against infidels or corrupt rulers was the “lesser” jihad compared with the “greater” spiritual jihad that the individual carried out against his own baser instincts and motivations (nafs). To the Muslim Youth, however, talk of “greater” and “lesser” jihads only mystified what was going on in the country, and this confusion made it easier for leftists to gain an advantage.Faizani’s approach to political things was different from that of the Muslim Youth. We were trying to challenge the communists right away in the university. We said that if we wait until every Afghan becomes a religious scholar, it will take ages, and then finally we will all become communists. So now is the time: if you don’t stop the spread of communism on the university campus, you won’t be able to stop it tomorrow. . . . Our belief was that the Russian plan was to bring communism through the educational institutions and to bring intellectual communism to Afghanistan. They were giving a lot of Afghans scholarships because of their long-run plans. . . . Hundreds of Faizani’s own men went to the Soviet Union for training. When Daud was toppled [in 1978,] no one knew what had happened except the Muslim Youth, who explained to the people that it was a Soviet move. [9]
When I was conducting research in Peshawar in the mid-1980s, I could identify only two of Faizani’s disciples who had escaped arrest. They had become active with other parties, not having the wherewithal or support to organize a movement of their own, but they maintained their loyalty to their absent spiritual mentor. Both disciples believed that Faizani was still alive, despite the prevalence of reports indicating that he had been executed either by President Daud or after the Khalqi takeover. One of the men told me that he thought Faizani was possibly in a state of spiritual occultation, waiting for the right moment to return. [10] The other man believed that Faizani might have been taken to the Soviet Union but that he could use his supernatural powers to come back whenever he chose. This disciple told me that Faizani was, in fact, the “deputy of the messiah of the end of time” (khalifa-i mahdi akhir al-zaman) and could not be contained, controlled, or killed by any secular power. So he and other true believers waited patiently for Faizani’s reappearance, when his true status would be revealed and the mess in Peshawar would be set right. [11]
The most interesting aspect of these stories is how they connect to a venerated tradition of Sufi hagiography. In Heroes of the Age, I recount several stories regarding the Mulla of Hadda and his deputies that also involved miraculous escapes from prison and other acts of defiance against the state. Faizani’s disciples kept that tradition alive, but in my experience they were the only ones to do so. In the many interviews I conducted, I never heard any stories like these concerning any other contemporary religious figure, though I knew that the stories themselves were still remembered from the past because I collected a large number about the Mulla of Hadda and his circle during this same period, as well as miracle stories about common mujahidin who had been martyred in the fighting. [12] It seemed that the kind of mystical power associated with the saints of the past and the veneration that went along with it were almost entirely absent from popular attitudes toward the leaders of this jihad and that Faizani was perhaps the last of the breed of old-style Sufi saints to whom were attributed supernatural deeds and powers. As discussed later in this chapter, heredity leaders of Sufi tariqats like Sibghatullah Mujaddidi and Sayyid Ahmad Gailani would emerge as significant players in the Peshawar milieu, but their leadership was based on their being offspring of famous pirs rather than on any mystical power or charisma of their own. Faizani, however, was a self-made Sufi from the premodern mold whose reputation rested on his personal magnetism and spirituality as well as his political activities, and no comparable figure has emerged since his arrest and disappearance.
| • | • | • |
Faizani is largely a forgotten figure today, but it is worth remembering him, if only to note what the Islamic jihad did not become. While there would be many subsequent attempts to establish a unified Islamic front in the wake of the Soviet invasion, Faizani’s was the first and, in many respects, the most genuine, in that his following extended across regional, sectarian, class, and professional lines. It is impossible to know whether this alliance would have stayed together if Faizani had managed to escape to Pakistan. Probably its success would have depended on the survival of certain of his key disciples, notably General Mir Ahmad Shah Rizwani, his leading follower in the military, and Engineer Habib-ur Rahman, his leading ally within the Muslim Youth. With the arrest of Rizwani, networks within the military became severed. Rahman’s arrest left the leadership of the Muslim Youth in the hands of Hekmatyar, who was not known to be interested in Sufism or sympathetic to alliances with other Islamic groups, preferring instead to stake out control of the jihad for the Muslim Youth alone.
Likewise, Faizani would probably have found Peshawar a less sympathetic place to operate than Kabul, and not just because of the fractious political climate that developed in Pakistan. Faizani was fluent in Persian, and though he himself was a Pakhtun from the Kakar tribe and had many Pakhtun followers, his core group of disciples was from Kabul and the Persian-speaking regions. Peshawar, however, was overwhelmingly, even belligerently Pakhtun, and Persian speakers felt themselves at a disadvantage there. Pakhtuns newly arrived in Kabul from the provinces were often made to feel that they were country bumpkins. However, Kabul was a more welcoming city than Peshawar, and even the roughest Pakhtun could eventually feel at home there. Indeed, several generations of rural Pakhtuns came of age in the tribal boarding schools of Kabul, learning Persian and becoming a part of the city’s cosmopolitan culture. Peshawar was a less inclusive city that incubated Pakhtun chauvinism, which is a reason why one saw relatively few non-Pakhtun refugees on the streets of Peshawar during the 1980s. The need for weapons and supplies ensured that Tajik, Uzbek, and other non-Pakhtun mujahidin groups would come and pay their respects to the party bosses. However, they tended not to stay long, and they rarely brought their families with them; when they did, they usually settled them in refugee camps in the Mardan and Hazara districts, as far from Peshawar and the Pakhtun tribal areas as possible.
Faizani might have overcome the problem of language and ethnic background on the strength of his personality, but he would also have had to confront the fact that Sufism of the sort he practiced had little purchase in the refugee world created in Peshawar. During my research, I visited a few Sufi pirs who oversaw zikr circles, but these were generally low-key affairs, held sporadically in out-of-the-way camps and mosques. The only other pir who combined spirituality and politics and enjoyed general respect was Miagul Jan, the son of the Mulla of Tagab, who was one of the Mulla of Hadda’s principal deputies. Many people told the story of how the communists unsuccessfully tried to bomb Miagul Jan in his mosque and how his disciples carried him on a bed all the way to Pakistan. The tone of these stories was invariably respectful, even sometimes rather awestruck, but as the story implies, Miagul Jan was an old man when he fled Afghanistan, and, shortly after his arrival in Pakistan, he left to spend his few remaining days in Mecca. In 1983, I attended the “turban-tying” ceremony (dastarbandi) by which his son was anointed as his successor. However, the son, while respected, clearly was not venerated with the same fervor as his father had been, and he did not have the kind of intensely devoted following his father enjoyed.
With the exception of Sibghatullah Mujaddidi and Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, who are discussed later in the chapter, none of the pirs in Peshawar had any significant role in the jihad, and it seemed to me that the personalistic ties of respect and deference that had traditionally bound disciples to their pirs no longer mattered as much as they once had, except to the few scattered souls who still found individual solace in Sufism. [13] A Sufi pir like the Mulla of Hadda developed over many years a base of support that allowed him to mobilize thousands of disciples to take part in any battle he thought worth fighting. These battles are what is remembered best about the Mulla and others like him, but it is forgotten that preceding these conflicts—and making them possible—were years of daily encounters between the master and his disciples. Devotees of the pir would travel long distances to his center, eat from his langar, and wait to sit in his presence in order to receive a few minutes of his time. In Peshawar, this kind of spiritual devotion was not in evidence, and party leaders like Hekmatyar ensured that a new model of relationship would take hold in its place—the model of the authoritarian political party.
The Radicals
Following the failure of the Faizani coup d’état and the subsequent arrests of numerous Muslim militants, leaders of the Muslim Youth Organization and other well-known Muslim figures fled to Peshawar. Among the refugees were Qazi Amin’s old friend and mentor Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, Hekmatyar (Fig. 13), and one of their former professors at Kabul University, Ustad Burhanuddin Rabbani (Fig. 14). A Persian-speaking Tajik from northern Badakhshan Province, Rabbani had studied at madrasas in Afghanistan, graduated from the Faculty of Islamic Law in 1963, and then was employed to teach at the university. In 1966, he traveled to Egypt to study at al-Azhar, from which he received a master’s degree in Islamic philosophy. While in Cairo, he became familiar with the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and, on his return to Kabul, devoted himself to translating into Persian various works by Sayyid Qutb, the chief theoretician of that organization. He also resumed his position at the university and became closely associated with his fellow professor, Ghulam Muhammad Niazi, whom he served as secretary in 1969 and 1970. After Professor Niazi’s imprisonment in 1974, the government reportedly sent police to arrest Rabbani at his campus office, but he was warned ahead of time and managed to flee to Peshawar, arriving there a few months after Hekmatyar, Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, and other Muslim Youth leaders.
13. Qazi Amin (right) with engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Charasiab, post-1989 (courtesy of Qazi Amin).
14. Qazi Amin (with briefcase) with Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani (in dark suit coat), Saudi Arabia, n.d. (courtesy of Qazi Amin).
The most pressing issue for the refugees was deciding how to press their political agenda, and a split immediately developed between the younger group, which wanted to commence armed operations against the government, and Rabbani, who was more cautious in his approach and did not think the refugees were ready to begin an armed struggle. The dispute continued for some time, but while Rabbani was away in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1975, the student group went ahead and initiated the abortive attacks that led to the arrest of many of the top student leaders. The failure of this plot decimated the Muslim Youth, as a number of the chief figures in the movement were arrested and later executed by the government. [14] Of equal importance, the uprisings cemented a lasting rupture between what was to become the Tajik-dominated wing of the party (which became known as Jamiat-i Islami Afghanistan) and the Pakhtun-majority wing (which was to become Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan). At the center of this dispute were Hekmatyar, who had been a strong advocate of the attacks, and Rabbani.
A Kharoti Pakhtun from northern Kunduz Province, Hekmatyar was a student in the School of Engineering at Kabul University when he became one of the founding members of the Muslim Youth Organization. [15] Considered one of the most militant of all the Muslim activists, Hekmatyar was actively involved in many of the violent demonstrations that flared up on the campus of Kabul University in the early 1970s, including one in the spring of 1972 in which a member of the Maoist Eternal Flame party (Shula-yi Jawed) was killed. Whether he was responsible for this killing has been disputed, but there is little doubt as to his advocacy of violence in pursuit of political objectives. In the case of the uprisings carried out in 1975, criticism of Hekmatyar centers on the naiveté of the plan, its devastating impact on the party’s leadership, and the fact that, while strongly supporting the attacks, Hekmatyar—almost alone among the party’s student leaders—stayed in Peshawar rather than participate. Enemies of Hekmatyar have seen his noninvolvement as evidence that he wanted the uprisings to fail and its leaders to be captured so that he could consolidate his own power.
Another source of controversy and criticism of Hekmatyar concerns the purported existence of a military coup d’état that was supposed to happen concurrently with the attacks on rural government offices. According to one informant in Rabbani’s party, those who were involved in the provincial attacks were told that once they had succeeded in securing their objectives, they were to listen on the radio for word of the progress of the Kabul coup attempt. If the coup succeeded, they were to stay in place. If it failed, they were to leave their positions and make their way back to Pakistan. Those who participated in the uprisings were assured that as soon as the troops in Kabul heard that the provincial operations had begun, they would immediately mobilize their own assaults. But in fact there is little evidence that a military coup d’état was under consideration or even conceivable following the arrest of Faizani’s group. Engineer Habib-ur Rahman had been the Muslim Youth’s chief contact with the military, along with Hekmatyar himself, and since Rahman’s execution and Hekmatyar’s flight to Pakistan, it appears that military recruitment and mobilization had effectively ceased. In the view of many of Hekmatyar’s critics, the assumption that Muslim officers would mount an attack against the government when they heard word of the rural insurrections was no more than a wish, and on this feeble premise idealistic Muslim militants were sent off on their mission.
In their criticism of Rabbani, Hekmatyar loyalists contend that he was all along a moderate who had never had a significant role in the Islamic movement prior to his flight and therefore had no right to a leadership role in Peshawar. Rabbani, it was charged, was an apologist for the government who supplied articles to government journals and associated with government officials. Some have even declared, without apparent evidence, that Rabbani informed friends in the government ahead of time of the planned uprisings and thereby contributed to their failure. Rabbani’s involvement in the Islamic movement in Afghanistan prior to 1975 was a controversial issue, for precedence in the movement was one of the principal bases on which authority was premised. Hekmatyar’s assertion of preeminence in the jihad was grounded in the early militancy of the Muslim Youth, originally against Zahir Shah and then against President Daud. Muslim Youth activists were the first to recognize the threat of Soviet communism in Afghanistan, and they had called for a jihad against the government before anyone else. On this basis and despite their youth and lack of Islamic credentials, they claimed the right to lead the resistance.
For Rabbani, what counted more than anything else was his close relationship with Professor Niazi, as well as his own early involvement in the Islamic movement inside Afghanistan. Because of Niazi’s generally accepted status as the first Afghan to import the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt into Afghanistan, the question of who worked most closely with him prior to his arrest was a matter of great importance within the ranks of the Afghan Islamic leadership in Peshawar. [16] Members of Rabbani’s Jamiat party claimed that Rabbani was Niazi’s chief assistant, and while acknowledging that Rabbani’s activities were necessarily carried out discreetly because of his position as a government employee, they asserted that he was actively involved with Niazi long before the founding of the Muslim Youth Organization. Further, they noted that Rabbani’s role in translating works of Sayyid Qutb proved both his knowledge of and his commitment to Islamic reform, and they contended that he was selected as the leader of the original Jamiat-i Islami party in 1972 by a fifteen-member council that comprised “all active youths with leading members of Jamiat including Ghulam M. Niazi.” [17] Hekmatyar and other members of the Muslim Youth discount this history, maintaining that the Jamiat party was founded in Peshawar only after the split between Hekmatyar and Rabbani and that the person closest to Professor Niazi was his student Abdur Rahim Niazi. The elder Niazi, they argued, was an enlightened man, but because of his position he would not take an active role in political activities. This role was assigned to the younger Niazi, through whose leadership the Muslim Youth Organization was founded and the Islamic movement was begun in Afghanistan. Rabbani, in this accounting, was a minor figure, a colleague of Professor Niazi’s in the Faculty of Islamic Law, but not himself a significant actor in the drama then beginning to unfold.
These claims and counterclaims will never be resolved conclusively since most of the principals are dead and those still alive are entangled in political arrangements that compromise their neutrality. However, the relative merits of the different positions aside, the dispute demonstrates the importance given to history and lineal succession as different parties jockeyed for position in Peshawar. In a politically turbulent and uncertain environment, Hekmatyar and Rabbani each made claims of precedence, rooting these assertions in their connection to venerated ancestors who were dead and could not contest claims made in their names. For Hekmatyar in particular, the issue of precedence was vitally important because he had little else to offer by way of justification for his leading the jihad. Still in his twenties, from an insignificant family and tribe, and without any substantial religious education or even a college degree, the only basis he could offer for leadership in the jihad was his connection to an obscure student group, most of whose members were now dead. Rabbani had better credentials. He was older, a respected scholar familiar with both the traditional madrasa and the university, a man of experience who had studied abroad and spoke numerous foreign languages.
The fact that Rabbani’s partisans were forced to assert their leader’s historical link to Niazi can be seen, at least in part, as an indication of Hekmatyar’s success in dictating the terms of the debate over the right to leadership. It is also, however, a demonstration of the importance that lineality plays in Afghan culture. Lineality is the primary basis of tribal relations, just as it is in Sufi orders and madrasas, where claims to rights and privileges are premised on connections to respected mentors. In this light, the fact that both Hekmatyar and Rabbani wanted to prove their relationship not to a Sufi saint or a traditional religious scholar but to a little-known university professor speaks to the marginalization of the clerical establishment and the decline of the great saintly families. Regardless, this was one of the principal grounds on which Hekmatyar and Rabbani contested their claims to authority, and their inability to resolve their differences led to the first major rupture in the Peshawar-based community of Muslim refugees, as Hekmatyar and Rabbani became the heads of separate parties. [18]
This split occurred in the winter of 1976, at a time when Peshawar was beginning to fill up with Afghan religious leaders, among them Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani from Paktia, Maulavi Hussain from Pech, and Qazi Amin. The Afghan ulama in Peshawar were upset over the Hekmatyar-Rabbani rupture and as Qazi Amin indicates, joined together to try to heal this rift in their ranks:
We appointed a council of six people to try to find a compromise between Hekmatyar and Rabbani that would unite them. The council worked for about two months. The members of the council talked separately with each of them and asked them which one should be the leader. According to their own declarations, neither of them was ready to accept the other’s leadership, so the neutral members of the delegation, who had more authority, proposed that there should be a third choice for amir. . . . The delegation said that they didn’t want to choose the third person themselves. They had to confer with both sides to find a person that both of them would agree on. First, they asked Engineer Hekmatyar, and he mentioned two or three names. My name was among the names he mentioned. When they asked Rabbani to choose a possible third man, my name was again among the suggestions. Since my name was on the list of both of the opposed leaders, I was selected, and the dispute was solved. [19]
In this way on May 11, 1976, Qazi Amin was selected as the amir of the unified Islamic movement, which was given the name Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan. Both Hekmatyar and Rabbani agreed in the presence of the council to accept his leadership and merge their own factions within the unified party. Both were also included as members of the executive committee of this newly constituted party. [20] Though still small at this point, the Islamist movement that first developed at Kabul University seemed to have resolved its difficulties and put itself in a position to spearhead efforts against the Daud regime. Between them, Rabbani and Hekmatyar represented the faculty and student wings of the Islamist movement. That Rabbani was a Persian-speaking Tajik and Hekmatyar a Pakhtun was also significant for building a national front. So too was the fact that the executive council of the party included Maulavi Haqqani and Maulavi Nasrullah Mansur, who were more traditional clerics from Paktia Province, where earlier antigovernment movements had successfully developed, and Maulavi Hussein of Pech, the most important and visible representative of the reformist Panj Piri movement, which was influential in Kunar Province.
Qazi Amin’s role as amir of the party is of particular interest here. Clearly a compromise candidate, Qazi Amin was not exclusively associated with any one group, and his lack of ties was his greatest advantage. In Kabul, he had been an important, but second-tier member of the Muslim Youth, more closely aligned with Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman than with Hekmatyar. Even though he was associated with the student wing of the movement, he was madrasa-educated and a graduate of the Faculty of Islamic Law, which undoubtedly made him more acceptable to Rabbani as well as to the clerics on the council. Finally, the fact that he was still living in Afghanistan during the uprisings of 1975 meant that he was not directly implicated in the still-bitter dispute over who was responsible for that disaster. What Qazi Amin was not, however, was a strong leader who brought strategic assets of his own to the party. Qazi Amin’s role in the coalition was a traditional one for a cleric—that of the stana, or holy man, whose principal function was to mollify and mediate between the heavyweight factional leaders who otherwise would be at each other’s throats. Qazi Amin was a fundamentally decent person who was not likely to play any tricks or push his own agenda on the council. Throughout the years of jihad, when treachery became standard operating procedure for many leaders, Qazi Amin maintained a reputation for trustworthiness, and this quality more than any other apparently gained for him the honor of being the first amir of Hizb-i Islami Afghanistan and the leader who issued the first formal declaration (fitwa) of jihad against the Afghan government. This declaration was distributed widely within Afghanistan in the last year of Daud’s regime and spread the name of Hizb-i Islami throughout the country, so that when the Marxists succeeded in taking power in 1978, many ulama looked to this party and to Qazi Amin for leadership after they had fled to Pakistan.
During the time the party was united under Qazi Amin, the primary concerns were solidifying its organizational structure (a shura was established, articles of association and a manifesto were drafted, a party emblem was designed, and a newspaper was published), expanding its activities inside Afghanistan in order to establish more and more cells and branches, and attempting to generate financial support in the Arab Middle East—an activity in which Rabbani, with his command of Arabic, took the lead. The party also reportedly continued to pursue its political objective of overthrowing the government. The avenue of the military coup d’état was assayed unsuccessfully, but according to both Qazi Amin and Hekmatyar, the party did manage to dispatch hit squads to assassinate Afghan communist leaders. [21]Although most of the major leftist leaders were targeted, the only attack that ultimately proved successful was against the Parchami ideologue Mir Akbar Khyber. Ironically, this assassination precipitated the street demonstrations that led President Daud to arrest Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, who then launched the Saur Revolution in April 1978. [22] By this time, however, the united Hizb-i Islami under Qazi Amin’s leadership had broken apart, with Rabbani establishing (in the fall of 1977) Jamiat-i Islami as a separate party and Qazi Amin and Hekmatyar staying in Hizb-i Islami.
A major point of contention between Rabbani and Hekmatyar was Rabbani’s willingness to negotiate with the Afghan government. At the end of his tenure in power, President Daud was moving increasingly away from his Soviet allies and seeking new alliances with Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran. Rabbani spent much of the year prior to the Taraki coup in Saudi Arabia and reputedly was in contact with Daud’s minister of justice, Wafiullah Sami’e, an old friend and former colleague of Rabbani’s in the Faculty of Islamic Law. Rabbani’s discussion with Sami’e supposedly concerned the release of imprisoned activists in Kabul as a sign of the regime’s good faith. Despite this purported goal, however, which might have led to the release of many jailed members of the Muslim Youth, Hekmatyar opposed Rabbani’s initiative on the grounds that it would diffuse the jihad and lead to Daud’s remaining in power. Hekmatyar’s opponents counter that Hekmatyar didn’t want his own leadership undermined by the release of prisoners who had a better claim to leadership than his own. In any event, the effort—if it took place at all—proved futile, and the united Islamic front was already history well before the Marxists took power.
| • | • | • |
The feud between Hekmatyar and Rabbani that began before the revolution proved to be one of the defining fault lines of the Afghan jihad and the subsequent civil war. Underlying this feud were the personal ambitions and animosities of the chief protagonists, but there were other factors as well—notably the generational divide that lay between them. Hekmatyar represented a younger generation, which came of age in the political confrontations that tore apart the Kabul University campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hekmatyar’s reality was shaped by his experiences as a member of the inner circle of the Muslim Youth, and, for him, all issues, relationships, and options were judged in relation to the party, its ideological tenets, and its organizational interests. Rabbani, however, grew up in a less polarized climate. Politics were subordinate to studies for most of his youth, and they took on importance only gradually as he was exposed to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and then came back to Kabul to join colleagues in discussions about Afghanistan’s future. These discussions were less tense and urgent for Rabbani, who found time to translate documents, teach, travel to foreign countries, and learn other languages. Rabbani ultimately was more open to compromise than Hekmatyar, in part at least because he had wider experience in and awareness of a world larger than Afghanistan. Like many university students, Hekmatyar lived in a world defined by personal experiences and peer relations. As his experiences became increasingly antagonistic and his peer relations narrowed to the confines of the party, Hekmatyar came to see all compromise as potentially threatening to the welfare of the party and his own leadership, and therefore he believed that it had to be opposed.
Another underlying factor in the feud between Rabbani and Hekmatyar was ethnicity. While it would be an overstatement to say that it was a cause of the feud, ethnic division within the resistance became one of the legacies of the dispute. In its first campus incarnation, the Muslim Youth Organization included Pakhtuns, Tajiks, and members of other ethnic groups, and the group around Professor Niazi was equally diverse. However, over time, Hizb and Jamiat, the two parties that claimed the mantle of the early organizing activity at Kabul University, became increasingly polarized along ethnic lines. During the Taraki and Amin period, Hizb and Jamiat had commanders on their rosters representing the range of ethnic groups found in Afghanistan. Thus, in Pakhtun areas like Kunar, Hizb and Jamiat mujahidin groups existed side by side in nearly every locality, and the same was true in Tajik-majority Kohistan, north of Kabul, and many other regions as well. However, that situation gradually changed during the course of the war, as Jamiat became increasingly associated with Tajiks and Hizb with Pakhtuns.
In certain respects, the division between Hizb and Jamiat can be compared with that between the Marxist Khalq and Parcham parties. In its early years, the PDPA had also included in its inner circle individuals from different ethnic and linguistic groups. Over time, this inclusiveness had broken down, and an atmosphere of distrust had taken hold. Like Hizb, Khalq recruited mostly among Pakhtuns and was the more militant of the two parties. Parcham’s support came mainly from Tajiks, and it had a more experienced and moderate leadership, which was willing to compromise with the government in power to achieve its ends. As with Hizb and Jamiat, distrust within Marxist circles ultimately gave way to outright hostility and organizational schism, which helped obscure the common purpose the parties were striving for and ensured that neither would be able to get a solid hold on power for long.
One factor in the increasing ethnic polarization of the Islamic movement was the role of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the famous Jamiat commander in Panjshir Valley, who was minister of defense after the collapse of the Najibullah regime in 1992. Massoud was an early member of the Muslim Youth Organization, though not one of the inner circle. Like other members of the organization, he emigrated to Pakistan after Daud’s coup and was one of those who went inside Afghanistan in 1975 to lead attacks against the government. His assault on the government offices in Panjshir failed, and a number of his compatriots were captured in the operation. Massoud, it appears, never fully forgave Hekmatyar for his role in these uprisings or trusted him again, and, after that time, Massoud generally stayed inside Afghanistan, rarely setting foot in Pakistan, in part because of his distrust of Hekmatyar. On his side, Hekmatyar showed a marked disdain for Massoud, as I discovered in an interview in 1983, when he derided the man the Western press was lauding as “the Lion of Panjshir.”
The Clerics
The coming of the Khalqis brought with it a massive disgorgement of Afghan religious leaders over the border to Pakistan. Most of these leaders congregated in Peshawar and tried to make contact with the leadership of Hizb-i Islami, which they had heard of prior to their arrival because of the party’s declaration of jihad and the clandestine distribution of publications critical of President Daud. [23] When they discovered that Hizb-i Islami had already split into two factions, newly arrived members of the ulama urged the principals to reunify, but Rabbani and Hekmatyar each refused to accept the other’s party as the umbrella. The compromise that was arrived at this time was the creation of a new alliance that was to be called Harakat-i Inqilabi-yi Islami Afghanistan (the Revolutionary Islamic Movement of Afghanistan). After various candidates were proposed and rejected for the position of amir, the assembled members of the ulama decided in early September 1978 on Maulavi Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi as the leader of the new alliance.
Muhammad Nabi was a respected member of the ulama who had first come to public attention in 1969, when he was elected to the parliament from his home district of Barak-i Barak in Logar Province. As one of only a handful of religious scholars in the parliament, he took it upon himself to be a first line of defense against the Marxist deputies who constituted the most vociferous group in the parliament. Nabi’s most famous experience in the parliament was the altercation with Babrak Karmal that led to Karmal’s being hospitalized. When the parliament was dissolved by President Daud, Nabi returned to teaching in madrasas, first in Logar and then in Helmand, from where he emigrated to Quetta after the revolution. According to Muhammad Nabi, thirty Afghan religious scholars were in Quetta at that time, and they decided to send a delegation to Peshawar to obtain arms so that they could begin jihad in the southern part of the country. When the delegates arrived, they discovered that while neither Hizb nor Jamiat had extra weapons to provide, they were looking for a new leader to unify their parties, and both Hekmatyar and Rabbani accepted Nabi for the job.
Hekmatyar had known Nabi in Afghanistan. Unlike many members of the ulama who had been standoffish toward the Muslim Youth, Nabi had invited Hekmatyar and other leaders of the organization to graduation ceremonies at his madrasa in Logar, and when Hekmatyar was arrested, Nabi had tried to get him released. These prior contacts made Hekmatyar well-disposed toward Nabi, as did the fact that Maulana Maududi, who had been a longstanding supporter of the Muslim Youth Organization, urged Hekmatyar to accept Nabi as the leader of the alliance. These factors undoubtedly encouraged Hekmatyar to throw his support to the older cleric; but he also probably recognized that Nabi’s status as a respected scholar and former parliamentary deputy would make him an acceptable compromise leader not only to the exiled ulama but also to the ordinary people inside Afghanistan whom the alliance needed to mobilize and lead.
In my interview with him in Peshawar in 1983, Nabi indicated that personally he had no interest in taking on this responsibility or even of staying in Peshawar, but he was forced to accept the position by his fellow clerics:
Following Nabi’s election, another informant told me:A maulavi named Muhammad Gul, who was from Mashriqi and was an imam in Kabul, rose up, took hold of my hand, and said, “You look in the face of God and be afraid of God because they are disunited; they have destroyed themselves and destroyed the homeland. Today they form a union through you, and you say that you will think about it and give a positive or negative answer.” He said to the meeting, “There is no negative answer. All of you raise your hands and pray that Maulavi Muhammad Nabi is amir.”
They announced that all the brothers of Hizb and Jamiat should come to the Masjid-i Madina in Sikandarpura [a mosque in one of the quarters of Peshawar] the next day. Then we all went and gathered, and all the members of Hizb and Jamiat declared their allegiance [bayat] to Maulavi Sahib Muhammad Nabi and gave their hands to him. [Dr. Musa] Tawana was the president of the conference and spoke as the representative of Jamiat. Engineer [Hekmatyar], Qazi Amin, and [Muhammad Jan] Ahmadzai also spoke, . . . and Muhammad Nabi gave his speech at the end. That day, there was so much crying and so much emotion from the people that the whole mosque trembled. With great affection and love, Maulavi Sahib Muhammad Nabi was selected as the president [ra’es] of the alliance. Tsaranwal Muhammad Rasul was so moved that he took out his pistol and called out that he would shoot anyone who broke the alliance. [24]
After this meeting, an office was opened, and all the committees of Hizb and Jamiat were officially disbanded or subsumed within Harakat. >From this point on, every newly arrived refugee was referred directly to this office and was given clothing and a new pair of sandals and fifty rupees a month for expenses. Provincial committees were also established to coordinate resistance activities in each of the twenty-six provinces of Afghanistan. A number of experienced former military officers began to develop coordinated plans for the resistance. Symbolic of his new status, Nabi was taken to the Bala Hissar fort in Peshawar by Rabbani and Hekmatyar. There he was introduced to the Pakistani authorities in charge of Afghan refugee affairs as the elected leader of the Afghan resistance, who was henceforth in charge of relations with the Pakistani authorities and responsible for all assistance directed to the mujahidin.
Shortly after the establishment of Harakat, however, efforts began in earnest to undermine the alliance. Rumors began to spread that Nabi was incapable of organizing the party, that he hadn’t done a day’s work since the alliance was announced, and that his family members were draining the party coffers. During this period, a secret plan was also approved for an uprising by military officers in Qandahar, but the timing of the uprising was botched, information was leaked, and the government succeeded in capturing the officers involved in the plan. While the causes of this failure have never been adequately explained, many assume that the mix-up was brought about by either miscommunications within the leadership or outright sabotage by disaffected members of the party who wanted to see the alliance destroyed. Nabi himself was blamed by many of those involved in the Qandahar uprising. They had been told that Harakat had weapons and would support the operation, but support never appeared, and those involved were decimated. Nabi subsequently claimed that he had had no involvement in the order to begin the uprising in Qandahar, and he accused Hekmatyar and Rabbani of working behind his back.
About the same time, Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, from the family of the famous Hazrat of Shor Bazaar, arrived in Peshawar, and Nabi asked him to join Harakat. Mujaddidi refused, however, setting up his own party instead, which Rabbani himself initially joined though he retained his membership in Harakat as well. Hekmatyar protested Rabbani’s dual allegiance, and Rabbani eventually left Harakat to join Mujaddidi’s party. Hekmatyar himself stayed in Harakat for a few more months. However, with Rabbani no longer a party to the alliance, Hekmatyar had no further obligation or reason to stay, and he soon abandoned Harakat to reestablish Hizb-i Islami. [25] In the following months, both Hekmatyar and Rabbani reportedly tried to convince Nabi to join their parties, but, with the encouragement of loyal ulama who refused to break their oaths of allegiance, Nabi decided to keep Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami alive as a separate party to represent the Afghan madrasa-educated ulama. This party received strong backing and financial support from influential Pakistani clerics. Through this support, Harakat was able to rebound, with Nabi continuing as its head and Mansur serving as his deputy (mawen). In the new configuration of Peshawar parties, Harakat became known as the party of the ulama and religious students (taliban), the majority of whom joined its ranks and helped Harakat gain ground on Hizb and Jamiat in the competition to establish bases inside Afghanistan.
At the same time, what was to become a continuing dispute over the rightful leadership of Hizb-i Islami emerged between Qazi Amin and Hekmatyar. For several years, Hekmatyar had accepted Qazi Amin as the putative leader of Hizb in order to bolster the party’s support among the ulama, with whom Qazi Amin continued to have good relations. With the establishment of Harakat as a separate ulama party, however, that pretense was no longer useful to Hekmatyar’s purposes, and he demanded that the party have an election to choose its rightful leader. In a close vote, Hekmatyar won out over Qazi Amin, who then became Hekmatyar’s deputy, a position that more accurately reflected the balance of power in the party. According to Qazi Amin, ulama tried to persuade him to leave Hizb after the election, and Nabi promised him a leadership position in Harakat if he joined. However, he decided to remain with Hekmatyar because, in his words, “I had a background in the Islamic movement and believed that in order to establish an Islamic government after jihad in Afghanistan, ulama alone can’t run the affairs of the government.” [26]
Another division occurred about this time that also affected Hizb-i Islami in its relations with the ulama. This split involved Maulavi Yunis Khales, another older cleric who—despite his age—had been aligned with the Muslim Youth Organization in the early 1970s. Educated in madrasas, he had spent part of his career as a civil servant in Kabul and part teaching in madrasas in his native Ningrahar Province. In addition to his ties to the Muslim Youth, he was also closely associated with Menhajuddin Gahez, who published the only independent Islamic newspaper, Gahez, during the late 1960s, when Khalq, Parcham, and other leftist and nationalist papers were stirring up so much controversy. Khales himself had been involved in political organizing during this period and wrote and translated several books on Islamic political philosophy, but he curtailed his activities and spent some time in Mecca after Gahez was assassinated by unknown assailants in 1970. Khales emigrated to Pakistan after his son, who was a member of the Muslim Youth, was arrested by the Daud government. He lived quietly for some time on the outskirts of Peshawar, serving as the imam of a mosque and running a shop in Land-i Kotal, outside of Peshawar, where he was when the Saur Revolution took place.
Initially, Khales played a minor role in party affairs because his son was still in prison and much of his family remained in Afghanistan. As other leaders were converging on Peshawar, he remained in his shop in an effort to persuade any spies who might be watching that he had given up politics and had become a simple shopkeeper. When the first split between Hekmatyar and Rabbani broke out, Qazi Amin and other clerics in the mediation group asked Khales to join them in their attempts to heal the breach, but Khales declined. Later, when Hizb and Jamiat were disbanded in favor of Harakat, Khales again refused to join, but this time he set aside his pose of detachment and formed a separate party with other madrasa-trained clerics, claiming for his party the name of Hizb-i Islami, which had been formally dropped when Harakat was formed. In an interview, Khales stated that he viewed the Hizb name, with which people were already familiar, as too valuable to abandon. [27] After the breakup of the Harakat alliance and the reestablishment of the original Hizb-i Islami under Hekmatyar and Qazi Amin, two parties continued to operate under this name—one in which younger students dominated and the other in which older clerics under Khales played the leading role.
Khales’s reasons for refusing to join Harakat are obscure, and my own interview with him did not clarify matters. When I discussed the matter with Nabi, he indicated that he went to Khales to ask him to join Harakat, but Khales refused. [28] Khales, in response to the same question, stated, “I and some of my friends didn’t accept him because he couldn’t lead this union. He is a good scholar and can teach, but he can’t do this work.” [29] Khales may have had other reasons for his refusal, but it is also the case that, despite having secured the support of some excellent military commanders, Harakat had gained the reputation as one of the more corrupt and least well-organized parties, in part because of the abuses attributed to Nabi’s son, who was his principal lieutenant. By contrast, Khales’s group maintained a relatively positive reputation, mostly on the strength of its commanders, especially Abdul Haq in Kabul and Jalaluddin Haqqani in Paktia.
The relationship between Khales and Hekmatyar is also ambiguous. In part because of his son’s involvement with the Muslim Youth Organization, Khales was more supportive of the students’ efforts than were most older clerics, so much so in fact that Khales stored arms at his home in Ningrahar for use by Muslim Youth activists in the abortive uprisings in 1975. [30] Once in Peshawar, Khales quietly threw in his lot with Hizb-i Islami, before using the occasion of Nabi’s ascendance to announce the formation of his own Hizb-i Islami. Khales had long been known for his independence and idiosyncrasies, but apparently the principal factor in this decision to establish his own Hizb-i Islami was his resentment at being subordinate to younger and less experienced men. Although he did not want to discuss the reasons for his split with Hizb in my interview with him, he did comment on Hekmatyar’s lack of understanding of religious matters, a subject on which he had previously written a polemical pamphlet:
The Muslim Youth wanted to do demonstrations and talk about the government, but we wanted to work deeply and bring about a theological revolution. Our work was ripe, but the work of the Muslim Youth was unripe, like young people themselves. The Muslim Youth would make up slogans just like the communists. [They would chant,] “Death to Zahir Shah,” but they didn’t know who would come after him if Zahir Shah was kicked out. [31]
To Khales, Hekmatyar and his followers were “unripe” (kham), and he questioned how Hekmatyar could claim to lead an Islamic jihad when he had only a rudimentary understanding of Islamic scripture. The term most commonly applied to Hekmatyar and the other erstwhile student revolutionaries by Khales and other older clerics was maktabian, or “schoolboys,” which reflects the fact that most of them were young and had gone to state schools rather than madrasas. Some clerics were willing to forgive the maktabian their lack of training because their hearts at least were with Islam, but increasingly that sympathy was strained as the political environment in Peshawar became more polarized.
For their part, Hizb-i Islami adherents had a long list of complaints against Khales, Nabi, and other members of the ulama, beginning with their condoning of popular religious practices that had no basis in Islamic scripture. As various informants told me, the people had little understanding of Islam, and the ulama as a group did nothing to counteract that lack of knowledge. Islam in Afghanistan was confined to the mosque. A person would go there for prayers, but when he left the mosque, he would accept all kinds of laws that were against Islam. Likewise, they believed that most people used the Qur’an only for ritual and talismanic purposes. For example, when a person died, the family would invite a qari (someone who had memorized the Qur’an) to their home, and he would recite a few verses of the Qur’an. People also kept copies of the Qur’an in their houses for protection from fairies or jinns or so that a thief wouldn’t steal something. Travelers embarking on a journey customarily passed under a copy of the Qur’an to ensure their safe return, and mothers placed verses of the Qur’an in lockets around their children’s necks to keep them from physical harm and the evil eye. Aside from these ritualistic uses of the Qur’an, however, few people—so the Hizbis argued—knew anything of the sacred book’s contents, and the ulama had to shoulder the blame for this state of affairs. They indulged the people in their superstitions and benefited economically from such abuses.
The Hizbis also condemned the backwardness of the ulama who, in the words of one informant, “just kept us busy with old philosophy.”
By contrast, Muslim Youth leaders were familiar with Western science and society, and, in the pamphlets they wrote and the speeches they delivered, they addressed scientific and social issues from an informed Islamic perspective that neither ignored nor condemned the intellectual and technological advances of the West. They were aware of the way leftists made fun of the “backwardness” of Islamic scholars and were intent on showing the compatibility of religion and science.If our brothers talked with mullas about the scientific issues in the mosque, they would issue a fitwa of infidelity [takfir] against us. . . . They were severely antiscience. Even when they traveled in cars and planes, they would say that these were magic and that they would be destroyed once people hit them with swords. If we told them that America, the Soviet Union, and France had atomic bombs and could destroy the world, they would say that we were mad and told lies. If we told them that there was poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan and urged them to learn about contemporary affairs, they would say that we had turned away from Islam. [32]
Another criticism of the ulama was their support of Zahir Shah when the Muslim Youth Organization was getting started. In the view of the Hizbis, the ulama’s failure to recognize and respond to the infidelity of the monarchy created the need for the Muslim Youth to band together in the first place. Thus, citing one oft-mentioned example, a former member of the Muslim Youth noted how clerics employed by the government used Qur’anic passages to justify Zahir Shah’s reign:
Islam should be broadcast by the Department of Propaganda [tablighat], but the people who worked there used the Qur’an and hadith solely for the benefit of Zahir Shah and his government. For example, the Prophet (peace be upon him) said, “The Sultan is the shadow of God on the land.” The ulama who worked for Zahir Shah would use this hadith to argue that Zahir Shah was “the shadow of God,” but the purpose of this hadith is different. . . . The power and domination of God is the shadow on the land, not a person. The powers of God on the land are the Qur’an and sunnat [religious obligations] established by the Prophet, [peace be upon Him]. Now, if the sultan or king is a follower of the Qur’an and hadith, God will assist him. If [God] is offended by him, then [the king] will be discredited. But, unfortunately, those ulama who worked in the government would say that Zahir Shah was the shadow on the land. [33]
Condemnations of government-employed ulama had a particular saliency in Peshawar since Khales had been an employee in a government ministry and Nabi had been a member of parliament who had accepted the king’s sovereignty. As one former Muslim Youth activist noted, “What difference was there between Zahir Shah and Pharaoh? Pharaoh said, ‘I am your God. I am the one that feeds you. I am the one that no one can question. You are my servants and must obey.’ Zahir Shah also said, ‘I am to be respected and cannot be held responsible. Anything I want, I will do.’” [34] At the same time, while the secularly educated Hizbis were quick to deride the ignorance and political cautiousness of the clerical class, they recognized that they had a problem in challenging their authority because the clerical class had one thing they were sorely lacking—working knowledge of Islamic scripture. Thus, while the younger activists could condemn the clerics for being backward and accepting un-Islamic practices back home, they were in a poor position to debate them on much of anything having to do with religion because of their own rudimentary familiarity with scriptural sources. By the time the Muslim Youth evolved into Hizb-i Islami, its adherents had been well schooled in revolutionary doctrines, but it was the older clerics who could quote line and verse of scripture and apply hadith to the variety of circumstances and disputes that arose on the battlefronts and in the Afghan diaspora. The clerics also bore the titles deriving from an Islamic education and enjoyed the respect of the people, and when it came time to issue a fitwa of jihad against the Khalqis, the bulk of the names on the document belonged to clerics. Theirs were the names people recognized and responded to, and they were the ones who knew the formal protocols of drafting and sending forth such a document.
Another of Khales’s strengths in comparison with Hekmatyar was that he was as much a man of the tribe as he was a party leader. For Hekmatyar, the party was all-important, and as the events in Pech Valley illustrated, he and his subordinates never hesitated to undermine tribal alliances if it was advantageous for the party to do so. One of the marks of Khales’s wing of Hizb-i Islami, conversely, was its ability to work with tribal leaders and to accommodate tribal customs, even if it meant contravening the formal dictates of Islamic law. I experienced this personally in the summer of 1984, when I visited mujahidin bases in Paktia Province that were run by Haqqani, Khales’s chief deputy. Khales’s local commanders worked closely with tribal leaders, sharing jurisdiction with them and allowing them to apply customary tribal law to resolve internal disputes. In areas controlled by Hekmatyar’s Hizb, local commanders generally insisted that all disputes and criminal proceedings be handled according to Islamic law under the supervision of party leaders. Khales’s commanders took a different approach, which helps to explain the considerable military and political success his groups enjoyed in the early 1980s in the areas under their jurisdiction; in comparison, the early victories of Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami were more modest.
The Great Saints
As fractured as the political situation was by the winter of 1979, when Harakat and Khales’s Hizb-i Islami were formed, it was about to get worse. This time, the principals were the scions of Afghanistan’s two most prominent saintly families—Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, the grandnephew of the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar, and Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, a descendant of the venerated twelfth-century Sufi saint ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (d. 1166), known by many Sufi adherents as the pir-i piran—“the saint of the saints.” [35] The involvement of these two men in the Islamic resistance began in the summer of 1978, when Mujaddidi, then living in exile in Copenhagen, traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with Gailani, Rabbani, and a representative of Zahir Shah. Before going to Saudi Arabia, Mujaddidi had telephoned the former king to urge him to join him in Pakistan to rally the tribes against the Khalqi regime. In essence, it was 1930 all over again, when Sibghatullah’s great uncle and Zahir Shah’s father spearheaded the tribal assault on Kabul that deposed Bacha-i Saqao. This time, Sibghatullah would be playing the role of spiritual firebrand, and, like his famous forebear, he intended to be more than a figurehead:
I contacted some leaders of the tribes—secretly. I called them to Peshawar. Some ulama from my own Jamiat-i Ulama Muhammadi [Society of Muhammadan Clerics]. They had come already. Some of them were here. . . . Then I went back. I contacted some friends in Saudi Arabia, Egypt—Afghanistan people. They were here, there, and everywhere—America, Europe. I said, “We have to arrange a meeting in Mecca. We came to Mecca—fifteen to twenty persons. Rabbani was also with us at that time. . . . And then we agreed that we should establish a front in this name—Jabha-yi Nejat-i Milli Afghanistan [Front for the National Salvation of Afghanistan]—and this front would be a platform for all the groups. . . . All the tribes, all the people must come together on one platform, under one umbrella. [36]
The result of the meeting was the formation of a new alliance (hereafter referred to as Jabha) with Mujaddidi as the amir and Rabbani serving as his deputy. Nabi and his deputy, Maulavi Mansur, initially agreed to fold their Harakat party into this new union, with each taking a seat on the council. Though not publicly involved, Zahir Shah was waiting in the wings, and his son-in-law and main advisor, Sardar Abdul Wali, was in close contact with Sibghatullah, pending the king’s own appearance on the scene. Following the meeting in Mecca, Sibghatullah remained in Copenhagen, between trips to Pakistan, awaiting final permission from the Pakistan government to establish his base there. The Pakistanis, however, put him off for some time, probably because they saw the existing parties as more dependent and subservient to their wishes than a coalition involving Mujaddidi and the ex-king, both of whom had overseas backing and the ability to secure arms and resources on their own, without the help of the Pakistanis.
If this was the source of Pakistan’s resistance to Mujaddidi’s return, it was at least well reasoned, for no one was better positioned to break through the divisiveness that had prevented the formation of an Islamic alliance than Mujaddidi, members of whose family had been recognized as kingmakers for most of the modern history of Afghanistan. Descended from Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the seventeenth-century mystic and philosopher, who is one of the central figures in the development of Sufism in the Indian subcontinent, the family claims to have come to Afghanistan originally at the behest of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of the Afghan state, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. [37] Once ensconced, the family established an independent base of support, especially among the Pakhtun tribes of Paktia, Logar, and Ghazni. Members of the tribes in these areas became their disciples in the Naqshbandiya Sufi order.
The high-water mark of family political influence probably occurred in the late 1920s, when Fazl Umar Mujaddidi, known as the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar, helped to rally members of the ulama and several powerful Pakhtun tribes against the government of Amanullah. Given land, royal marriages, and influence in the councils of court following Nadir’s victory, the family maintained its exalted position, but not its political edge. Most members of the extended family pursued secular careers in medicine, engineering, and business. Sibghatullah was an exception however. Born in 1925, he attended a secular high school in Kabul, but then chose to study Islamic law. Although he did not attend a formal madrasa, he was tutored in Islamic subjects at home and, through the intervention of his uncle, the former ambassador to Egypt, was admitted to al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he earned his degree in Islamic jurisprudence in 1953. Like Ghulam Muhammad Niazi, who arrived in Cairo the year after him, Sibghatullah made his first forays into politics while in Cairo, meeting with Hasan al-Bana, Sayyid Qutb, and other leading figures in the Muslim Brotherhood and attending some of their meetings. After returning to Kabul, he taught at several secondary schools and the teacher-training college, and began meeting with like-minded scholars distressed by the government’s policies, the increasing role of the Soviet Union in Afghan affairs, and the diminishing role of Islam in society generally. As a member of the Mujaddidi family and an effective speaker, Sibghatullah was one of the first Islamic leaders to attract the government’s attention when he argued against Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Since Prime Minister Daud was solidly aligned with the Soviets at that time and was busy wooing Soviet development assistance, Sibghatullah’s pronouncements were embarrassing to the government, and in 1959 he was arrested on a charge of conspiring to assassinate Nikita Khrushchev during a state visit to Kabul. Despite his denials and the influence of his family, Sibghatullah, along with a number of family loyalists, was imprisoned for three and a half years, while other members of his family were prohibited from going outside the city to meet their disciples.
Sibghatullah’s release from prison came at the beginning of a period of remarkable change in the Afghan state. In 1963, Prime Minister Daud was forced to resign his office after becoming enmeshed in an intractable dispute with the Pakistan government over the issue of sovereignty for the border tribes, and in 1964 Zahir Shah introduced the period of democratic liberalization. As a result of Zahir Shah’s policy, there was the sudden relaxation of government control over political activity, the consequent emergence of previously covert or inchoate interest groups and political parties, and the establishment of a number of newspapers with widely disparate points of view. In this environment, the Hazrat family was coming increasingly to appear a throwback to an earlier era of political activism. The old Hazrat of Shor Bazaar had died in 1960, and his eldest son, Muhammad Ibrahim, had succeeded him as head of their Sufi order. While Muhammad Ibrahim took an active part in political affairs as the leader of the conservative faction in parliament and a loyal supporter of the monarchy, his influence with the emerging urban-based students, military officers, and government officials was negligible, and events such as the abortive Pul-i Khishti demonstration only reinforced the growing irrelevance of the family’s traditional tribal/clerical coalition. The one member of the family with the credentials and capacity to take a leadership role in activist politics was Sibghatullah; but, despite his association with the Muslim Brotherhood and his stint in prison, he was denied membership in the Muslim Youth Organization when he applied and was thus effectively precluded from gaining access to the student population, which, as a teacherand activist, he considered his natural constituency. A second effort by Sibghatullah to develop a political party within the ranks of the ulama (Jamiat-i Ulama Muhammadi) also proved unsuccessful, although opposition in this case came not from the Muslim Youth but from his cousin Muhammad Ismail. The son of Muhammad Ibrahim, Muhammad Ismail seems to have viewed Sibghatullah’s efforts as an attempt to usurp his role as heir apparent in the family, and he responded by forming a party of his own (Khodam ul-Forqan—Servants of the Qur’an), effectively negating the influence of both parties. [38] When Muhammad Daud overthrew Zahir Shah in 1973, Sibghatullah was attending an Islamic conference in Libya. Since he had long been at odds with President Daud, he chose to remain overseas with his immediate family, settling first in Saudi Arabia and later moving to Denmark, where he became the director of the Islamic center in Copenhagen. The head of the Hazrat family, Muhammad Ibrahim Mujaddidi, stayed on in Afghanistan with his family and appears not to have had any particular problems with the government but also not to have taken an active political role.
The other figure who appeared alongside Sibghatullah in 1979 at the founding of the Front for the National Salvation of Afghanistan in Saudi Arabia was Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, the second son of Naqib Sahib, a pir of the Qaderiya Order who was born in Baghdad. Naqib and his brother, Abdul Salam, both struck out for India early in the century, it being a common practice for the younger sons of renowned Sufi pirs to establish orders in new locations. Since he had had a Pakhtu-speaking tutor as a boy, Naqib was encouraged to move to Afghanistan but was initially prevented from doing so by Amir Abdur Rahman, who had enough problems with homegrown pirs without inviting an even more exalted personage from abroad to stir up additional intrigues. Consequently, Naqib lived in Quetta for a number of years before finally being invited to settle in Afghanistan in 1915, during the reign of Amir Habibullah, who welcomed him and provided an allowance and land in Kabul and eastern Ningrahar Province. [39]
Naqib died in 1943 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Sayyid ‘Ali (known as Sher Agha), who had a reputation for dissolute behavior. Sayyid ‘Ali’s younger brother, Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, attended a private madrasa as a boy and later audited classes in the Faculty of Theology, where one of his classmates was Rabbani. Like most members of the Mujaddidi family of his generation, however, he turned from a career in religion to one in business, founding the Peugeot dealership in Afghanistan and spending much of his time in France and England. When Taraki came to power, he is reported to have tried to gain Sayyid Ahmad’s support. Instead, Sayyid Ahmad arranged to flee with his family over the border to Pakistan, arriving early in 1979.
The first action undertaken by Mujaddidi’s party was a nationwide uprising planned for mid-March 1979. Letters were sent to provincial leaders, front commanders, and sympathetic military officers informing them that they were to rise up simultaneously on the appointed day. Small-scale uprisings occurred in Jalalabad, Kunar, Nuristan, and Kabul, but the most serious incident was in Herat, where some two hundred thousand people are said to have rallied against the regime. For two days, anticommunist protesters stalked the street looking for Khalqis and Soviet advisors. Some were armed with weapons taken from government stockpiles, and it is said that at least fifty Soviets were killed during these attacks. When Afghan pilots refused to go into action against their own people, the Soviets dispatched aircraft from Tajikistan to bomb the rebels. Eventually, the Khalqi rulers managed to bring in loyal troops to suppress the insurrection, and the government is reported to have killed as many as thirty to forty thousand people in the process of restoring its authority over the city. [40] If similar uprisings had been ignited in other locations, the Khalqis might have been routed. But the insurrection in Herat was not associated with any more general mobilization, and the resistance in the city and surrounding areas was decimated.
According to Sibghatullah, he never intended for uprisings to occur in urban areas. His plan was for operations to begin in mountainous areas and later spread to the plains, and the abortive insurrection in Herat happened as a result of sabotage by factions within the alliance:
Whatever the truth of this assertion, Mujaddidi’s party lost much of its credibility as a result of the failed rebellion in Herat, and consequently it was in effect demoted from a unifying national front to one among the multitude of resistance parties. [42]Everyone agreed on this plan, and we chose the time. Two days before [the planned date], letters were delivered to all [front commanders inside Afghanistan], but unfortunately Jamiat—they did something dishonest with me. Because I was busy with all the other things, I signed the letters. All of these went out with my signature, all over Afghanistan. . . . I told them—for Herat, Khost, Qandahar, for these flat areas, don’t deliver now. After our activity is very warm, very hot in the mountainous areas, then we shall start there. But, unfortunately, they sent out all the letters at one time. . . . And Herat people tell me, “When we saw your signature, we thought, ‘Oh, this man is the right man. We shall start.’” They started, and in one day twenty-five thousand people were killed. This was all from Jamiat. This Sayyid Nurullah from Herat [was with] Jamiat. He sent this [letter], and I did not know it. I was surprised that Herat rose up. We did not inform them. After one year, when the Herat people came here, they said, “It was because of your order.” [41]
Gailani’s National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (Mahaz-i Milli Islami Afghanistan) was established several months after Mujaddidi’s party and, like his, gained its principal support from the devoted disciples of the family’s Sufi tariqat. In Gailani’s case, his base of support was strongest among Pakhtun tribesmen in Paktia, Paktika, and Ningrahar provinces. Gailani also had strong ties to Zahir Shah and his retainers. Since Gailani himself was an uncharismatic politician who didn’t seem to harbor great political aspirations for himself, many assumed from the beginning that his party was a stand-in for the former king himself, a suspicion that was strengthened by the presence in Gailani’s entourage of several politicians who had been prominent during Zahir Shah’s reign.
| • | • | • |
If any leader might have appeared to be in the position to exert leadership over the whole Islamic resistance, it was certainly Sibghatullah Mujaddidi. His inability to accomplish what his great uncle had done forty years earlier was another blow to the ideal of creating a unified response to the Marxist takeover and guaranteed that the ensuing conflict would be a piecemeal and protracted affair. The Herat incident stands out as the immediate cause of Mujaddidi’s decline, but the roots of his failure go much deeper, back ten years to his attempt to join the Muslim Youth Organization and perhaps ten years beyond that, to the first organized attempts to initiate a radical Islamist movement in Afghanistan following his and Ghulam Muhammad Niazi’s return from Cairo in the late 1950s. We have incomplete information concerning these first meetings, and highly partisan information at that, but it does appear that Sibghatullah had an overbearing presence and did little to ingratiate himself with his fellow travelers in the Islamist camp. I derive this inference, in part, from statements made by Sibghatullah himself, who commented to me, for example, that while Niazi was “a nice man, a good man, a sincere man,” he was “not a high-degree scholar. When I was speaking, he was silent. He said, ‘Before you, I cannot speak.’”
Sibghatullah appears to have treated the student leaders of the Muslim Youth Organization with even greater condescension, taking credit for much of their work: “This youth [jawanan] activity was indirectly guided by me. [Abdur Rahim] Niazi was just like a student to me. He respected me so much. I told them, ‘Please Jawanan, I have started this activity in the university indirectly from the outside.’ I called these students whom I knew or who knew me. They came to my house. I taught them. I guided them.” [43] For their part, former members of the Muslim Youth downplayed Mujaddidi’s early activism and cited his family’s connections to the royal family as the principal reason he was denied membership in the party. One can also suppose that the students might have resented Sibghatullah’s superior attitude, and it is probably the case that leaders of the Muslim Youth recognized Sibghatullah as a threat to their own positions. Since Sibghatullah was older and far better trained in Islamic studies than members of the group, most of whom were studying non-Islamic subjects, the student leaders presumably realized that they would have had to defer to Sibghatullah not only as their elder but also as their better in Islamic matters.
When Sibghatullah appeared on the scene following the revolution, Hekmatyar and his Hizbis were not about to cede pride of place. Hekmatyar based his opposition on distrust of the Mujaddidi family and their connections with the king, but he also undoubtedly worried that Sibghatullah would make Hizb-i’s gradual efforts at mobilizing cadres of mujahidin in different localities irrelevant. With his name recognition, Sibghatullah could potentially galvanize a nationwide uprising overnight. If that uprising were to succeed in sweeping out the government, a new moderate Islamic regime would likely come to power, and the Hizbis would find themselves again in the wilderness. For his part, Rabbani, who had been associated with Sibghatullah in the Islamic movement since the 1950s, was initially willing to work with him—whatever his personal misgivings. More than the unbending Hekmatyar, Rabbani appears to have recognized the potential value of Sibghatullah’s standing as a member of the Mujaddidi family in rallying popular support, just as he also seems to have been more open to the possibility of working with the former king if it meant gaining an advantage over the Khalqis. Of all the leaders who emerged in this period, Rabbani seemed the most amenable to compromise and the most willing to share in the credit if it helped to accomplish the common objective. This is seen, for example, in his later readiness to cede the limelight to his famous commander Ahmad Shah Massoud through most of the 1980s. Perhaps, as Sibghatullah contended, the Jamiatis betrayed the plan of the uprisings and brought about the debacle in Herat, but just as likely it was the fault of Sibghatullah himself or of his subordinates. Given the disorganization to which his party was prone during the subsequent years of jihad, this supposition seems entirely plausible.
While Sayyid Ahmad was relatively less known to the Hizbis than Sibghatullah, they viewed him in much the same light—as a proxy for Zahir Shah who would push Afghanistan back into the hands of the monarchy as soon as the communists were defeated. Like Sibghatullah, Sayyid Ahmad had marriage and social connections with the royal family, so such speculation was not entirely unfounded, but he was nevertheless quite different from Sibghatullah. While Sibghatullah had been committed from early in life to his role as a religious leader, Sayyid Ahmad, with his trim goatee and tailored clothes, always seemed to be playing a role that had been allotted to him and that he didn’t necessarily enjoy. To his credit, he stayed with that role, even as many of his relatives emigrated to Europe and the United States, but he nevertheless seemed from the start less than suited to the political struggle that claimed him. Unlike Sibghatullah, who engendered resentment among some for being all too comfortable with the deference of others, Sayyid Ahmad strikes one as an easygoing, unassertive leader who does what he can without forcing anyone’s hand. Regardless, in the final reckoning of the roles different leaders and parties played in the jihad, Sayyid Ahmad and his Mahaz party—though limited in influence mostly to the tribal borderlands—proved relatively effective, in part because of their willingness to work with local leaders without imposing a rigid set of doctrinal expectations on them. Likewise, Gailani and the people around him were not accused of the kind or degree of corruption that Mujaddidi’s associates were.
Relative effectiveness aside, the larger question is why no one from the great saintly families emerged to lead the jihad. Part of the answer must be sought in the rivalries that beset Peshawar. Part also lies in specific events, such as the arrest and execution of Sibghatullah’s uncle, Muhammad Ibrahim, and his family and the tragic accident of the Herat Uprising. More important, the failure of the great saintly families to play a role commensurate with their traditional standing in Afghan society speaks to the erosion of their position since the reign of Habibullah. In many respects, the peak of saintly political influence in modern times came in 1929, when the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar helped topple Bacha-i Saqao and placed Nadir Khan on the throne of Kabul. By this time, the members of some saintly families had already squandered their inherited prestige through dissolute behavior, and many others decided on their own to renounce the life of a pir for the secular opportunities that became increasingly available to the Kabul elite from the 1930s on. Sibghatullah cannot be associated with this development. Nor can he be cited as one who indulged in worldly pleasures. Still, he undoubtedly suffered as a result of this general development since few people beyond the traditional circle of his family’s devotees were willing to suspend what they knew or suspected about the decline of saintly families in order to grant him the sort of allegiance that the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar would have expected as a matter of course. Those days were gone, and consequently Sibghatullah’s destiny was to serve not as kingmaker but merely as another in a list of failed politicians who tried to mold the anticommunist resistance to his liking.
The Absent King
In the winter of 1980, following the Soviet invasion, an ambitious attempt was made to establish a unified resistance under the leadership of a national jirga that would operate outside the framework of the political parties. This effort was spearheaded by Umar Babrakzai from the Zadran tribe in Paktia Province, who had served as a judge before the war and was also well versed in tribal law. Babrakzai came from a renowned family in Paktia. His grandfather, Babrak Khan, had served Afghan kings, beginning with Abdur Rahman until his death defending Amanullah during the rebellion of Mulla-i Lang in 1924. [44]
The impetus for the creation of a national jirga began in 1979 in Miran Shah, where representatives from a number of Paktia tribes gathered to discuss the conduct of the jihad in their territory. Resistance against the government had begun in Paktia within days of the Khalqi coup. The mountainous terrain had allowed opponents of the regime to take control of most of the roads and villages and had forced government troops to hole up in the fortified town of Khost and a few outlying forts that had to be supplied by helicopter. Relative to other areas of the country, Paktia had tribes with well-developed legal codes and traditions of collective action in defense of its laws and customary practices. When the conflict with the government began, the tribes instituted their own procedures for ensuring order in their territories and succeeded in working cooperatively with the Islamic political parties that had established fronts in the province. Thus, in contrast to the situation in Pech, where tribal and party leaders were working to undermine each other, many tribal and party leaders in Paktia had come to accept a division of authority. Party leaders did not insist on adjudicating internal tribal disputes and often accepted the authority of the tribal police force—the arbaki—to enforce tribal law and apprehend lawbreakers. In response, the tribes allowed the parties (principally Gailani’s Mahaz and Khales’s Hizb under Haqqani) to establish bases, recruit local tribesmen, and conduct military operations.
The Paktia jirga that began meeting in Miran Shah in December 1979 was initially concerned with coordinating resistance activities in Paktia itself, but the relative harmony that had been forged in the province led Babrakzai and other Paktia leaders to believe that their experience might provide an example for the resistance movement generally. The Paktia jirga dispatched eighty or so delegates to Peshawar to speak with party leaders and to lay the groundwork for a national jirga. According to Babrakzai, the leaders unanimously agreed to the convening of a national jirga based on traditional tribal principles, and the Paktia leaders set up their own office in Peshawar. [45] During January and February 1980, they met in council with representatives from other areas—mostly elders from various refugee camps—to prepare the ground for the national momasela (provisional) jirga. [46] Nine hundred sixteen representatives convened in Peshawar on May 9. From these participants, two people were selected from each province, along with four representatives of the nomadic tribes, to serve on the “revolutionary council” (shura-yi enqelab), which would continue to meet regularly after the adjournment of the full jirga until an elected government could be established. The seven principal parties were also to have a representative on the revolutionary council, but, despite their initial support of the jirga, all the parties except Gailani’s Mahaz decided to boycott the meeting. According to Babrakzai, the parties recognized that their influence would be considerably diluted in this public forum:
In a jirga where only seven representatives of the parties were present, and sixty-eight representatives from the people of Afghanistan were present, the majority would naturally have been in favor of the tribe [qaum], and the decisions which would have been taken would have been outside the limits of the party [hizbi] system. . . . These parties saw that this would create new problems for them. A party system would have been changed to a comprehensive national system. When the parties studied the matter in-depth, they figured out that this would be against their beliefs. [47]
Having the support of only one party proved more detrimental than having the backing of none at all, for the jirga came to be viewed by many as a tool of Gailani’s party. This perception was amplified when Sayyid Ahmad Gailani’s nephew, Sayyid Hassan, was allowed to chair a session of the jirga, which led more party members to boycott the proceedings. [48] Ultimately, Gailani’s role was not the issue for most of the party leaders. It was rather the conviction that Gailani was a stand-in for Zahir Shah and that the jirga itself was intended as a vehicle for bringing the former king back as the savior of a secularized resistance movement. A related factor in the ultimate failure of the jirga was the attitude of the Pakistani government, which withheld its support for the jirga because of its own uncertainty as to the consequences of the coalescence of the Afghan resistance. In particular, the Pakistanis appear to have been loath to witness the creation of a PLO-like supra-organization on Pakistani soil. [49] Such an organization could become independent of Pakistani control and—given its potential support among the border tribes—could create common cause with independent-minded Pakistani Pakhtuns along the frontier. In addition, President Zia ul-Haq, who was pushing a program of Islamization within his own country, had already thrown his support to the Islamic parties, especially Hizb-i Islami.
Without significant support from either the parties or the Pakistan government, the momasela jirga faded in importance even before it had adjourned. Despite this failure, however, the institution of the jirga had sufficiently hardy roots that a second attempt to convene an assembly was initiated fifteen months later in Baluchistan. This plan again received an enthusiastic response, and the jirga attracted more than three thousand Afghans. The main result of this jirga, which was again opposed by the Islamic parties and the Pakistan government, was to spotlight the intentions of Zahir Shah, who was proposed by the jirga as its national leader (milli qa´id). [50] Unlike his father, however, who came in person to the frontier to right the toppled throne, Zahir Shah dithered, sending forth proclamations supporting armed jihad conducted by a united front but never making any concerted attempt personally to enter the fray. [51] As a result of his inaction and the efforts of party leaders and Pakistani government officials, the second jirga, like the first, ended in failure.
| • | • | • |
The parties balked at accepting the jirgas for understandable reasons. Their leaders reasoned, probably accurately, that if the people of Afghanistan were able to choose the form in which they would conduct their war against the communist government, political parties would lose out—in all likelihood to some moderate coalition led by Zahir Shah and a collection of ex-ministers, courtiers, and mainstream religious figures like Gailani and Mujaddidi. The failure of the two jirgas, however, ensured that there would be no independent and united national front. It also brought an end to the one institution that Afghans had always been able to count on in times of national emergency to bring consensus and reconciliation among warring factions.
National jirgas had been convened periodically throughout modern Afghan history both to draft new constitutions and to provide leadership at times of crisis, such as before and after the country’s several military confrontations with Great Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the most famous instance of a national jirga is the one that selected Ahmad Shah to lead the Durrani confederacy in 1747. This is the ur-event of Afghan nationalism and is described in the following passage from an article that appeared in a 1963 volume of Afghanistan, a now-defunct government-sponsored journal of culture and history:
After the assassination of Nadir Shah [Afshar] in 1747, his vast empire began to splinter. The Afghan contingent, headed by Mir Afghan Noor Mohammed Ghilzai and Ahmad Khan Abdali, returned home. On reaching Kandahar, a tribal Jirga was held at the shrine of Sher-i-Surkh (Red Lion) to consider the future of the country. The chief question was who should be elected king. Among the aspirants there were many elderly chieftains of great power and influence. The Jirga met eight times without making any choice. On the ninth day so heated did the discussions and arguments become that recourse to arms seemed inevitable. Seeing this, Sabir Shah, a respectable divine, whom all tribes revered, proposed the name of young Ahmad Khan, who was hardly twenty-five and who had kept quiet during the whole of the session. . . . Seeing this all the contending chiefs came forward to pay homage to him. Young Ahmad Shah, the future king of Afghanistan, raised by his own people to the highest honour and dignity, was seen to prove himself the most worthy of this trust. [52]
This account illustrates not only the crucial role that the institution of the jirga played in Afghan history but also the traditional role assigned to religious figures in political affairs. The “dervish” Sabir Shah is depicted not as a participant in the proceedings but as a mediator, someone who intervenes only as a last resort when “recourse to arms seemed inevitable.” Likewise, the story shows Ahmad Khan, later Ahmad Shah, as a quiet figure and not the strongest of the assembled chiefs. Ahmad Khan, in this account, does not force himself on the assembly but is chosen, as much by divine providence (in the figure of Sabir Shah) as by the assembly itself. The absence of pomp and show also emphasizes that the king has been “raised by his own people” to his position of honor and is not above them. The new king is to be first among equals, and it is via the jirga that this exemplary state of affairs is arrived at and the perils of both divisiveness and tyranny are avoided. This particular rendition of Ahmad Shah’s election comes from a government journal and has a decidedly hagiographic slant, but the story nevertheless demonstrates the role of the jirga in mediating among and binding together the three foci of Afghan political culture—Islam, tribalism, and state rule. Without this assembly, with its established rules and protocols, tribal chiefs posture and bully without bending to the needs of the many; kings emerge from decimating battles—the strongest of the strong, but not necessarily the wisest of the wise; spiritual leaders keep to themselves, cultivating followings and sometimes rising up to cause their own disruptions but never being seen as potential rulers themselves. With the jirga, however, compromise becomes possible. Divergent interests are placated, and the best course is found for the community as a whole, even if it is not the course desired by the mightiest among those assembled.
Thus the origin myth of the jirga, but how different the outcome when the same route was tried in Peshawar and Quetta and how different the balance of power. This time, the tribal leaders were in the subordinate position. The fact that the movement for a jirga was led by Babrakzai, a lawyer educated in Europe, rather than a warrior chief, is one indication of change. More important, though, the Islamic leaders were now the “chiefs” contending for power, while the tribal leaders were in the dependent position, seeking compromise and reconciliation from their party patrons, who this time controlled the arms and were in a position to posture and bully. Consider as well the role of Sayyid Hasan Gailani, who, taking the chair during part of the first jirga, directly reversed the fabled role of Sabir Shah. Unlike Sabir Shah, who intervened at the last minute to prevent conflict and save the proceedings, Sayyid Hasan, with his unwise intervention, effectively undermined what was admittedly an already endangered process. Whether Sayyid Hasan’s involvement in the jirga was an attempted “coup d’état” of the assembly, as some party stalwarts claimed, or merely a clumsy attempt to gain some fame for himself or something altogether more innocent still is a matter of debate. Either way, however, the overreaching entanglement of the Gailanis in the jirga provided a pretext for the other parties to pull out, and in so doing ensured not only that the jirga system would lose its effectiveness as a mechanism of dispute resolution but also that religious leaders, who had long played an important role in keeping the peace in Afghanistan, would henceforth be excluded from that role. Saints, mullas, and other religious figures had provided the service of reconciling enemies and bringing feuds to an end. However, with religious leaders of all kinds implicated as antagonists in the political fighting in Peshawar, they lost the neutrality and noncombatant status that allowed them to play that role—a role that no other group has filled or is likely to fill in the near future.
Another factor to consider is the role of Zahir Shah in these proceedings. Opponents of both the Peshawar and the Baluchistan jirgas believed that they were little more than maneuvers designed to bring Zahir Shah into the fray. This may or may not have been the case, but the vast majority of Afghans would undoubtedly have embraced the decision of a national jirga that elected Zahir Shah as its leader. Afghans, like most people, are oriented toward the idea of a single national leader, and with the death of Muhammad Daud in the 1978 revolution, Zahir Shah was the only figure who still enjoyed a national reputation. One effect of his family’s prolonged dynastic control was that Zahir Shah was thought of as a representative of the royal family rather than a particular tribe, region, or ethnic group. The Pakhtun tribal roots of the dynasty were less salient to most people than the fact of their extended rule, their residence in Kabul, and their assimilation to the Persian-speaking culture of the capital city. The various leaders contending for power in Peshawar had limited constituencies. Mujaddidi and Gailani had the advantage of being outside the ethnic and tribal matrix, and both had some name recognition throughout the country, but their traditional constituencies were still largely Pakhtun. Likewise, while the mullas and maulavis in Nabi’s party were able to build a base of support outside their own native regions, neither he nor Khales was well known nationally. In the eyes of many, they were still “just” mullas, and they retained their strongest support in Pakhtun areas south of the Hindu Kush. This was also the case with Hekmatyar, but he was even more hampered in attracting a national following by his humble roots and lack of prior accomplishment. He was after all “just” a student who had never completed his schooling and who was referred to as “engineer” without having actually earned the credential. For his part, Rabbani was older and a professor as well as a religious scholar; but he was a Tajik, a group that had produced only one major national leader—the ill-fated Bacha-i Saqao—and he hailed from the province of Badakhshan, which was far removed from Kabul and relatively insignificant politically.
The location of all the major Sunni parties in Peshawar also limited their ability to extend their power beyond the eastern provinces of the country as a whole. Peshawar is unmistakably a Pakhtun city. The fact that the parties all had their base of operations there reinforced the sense of non-Pakhtun Afghans (who constitute roughly half the population) that the victory of any of these parties, except Jamiat, would inevitably bring with it the advent of the sort of Pakhtun dominance that the monarchy had managed to keep at bay. Ultimately, none of these parties won out, but, nevertheless, the jirga system was probably Afghanistan’s last best hope for creating a nationwide framework of political rule. For all his evident weaknesses, Zahir Shah was the only leader capable of enlisting the loyalties of all the various ethnic and tribal groups in the country and of forestalling the kind of deep ethnic divide that has since evolved under the Taliban regime.
The Arab Connection
The last major participant to join the Afghan exile political scene was Abdur Rasul Sayyaf, who arrived in Peshawar in 1980 after being released from prison in Kabul under a general amnesty declared by Babrak Karmal soon after he was brought to power by the Soviet invasion. Sayyaf was well known to many of the leaders in Peshawar as he too had been a professor in the Faculty of Islamic Law at Kabul University. Like his former colleagues, Professors Niazi and Rabbani, Sayyaf had spent time at al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he had also associated with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the Jamiat version of history, Sayyaf was elected as Rabbani’s deputy (mawen) in 1972, the year in which Jamiatis say their party’s constitution was drafted. [53] Sayyaf was then arrested after Daud’s coup d’état and was still in prison when the Khalqis took power. It is believed that he escaped execution because he was a Kharoti Ghilzai and cousin of Hafizullah Amin; these connections kept him alive long enough to benefit from Babrak’s gesture of clemency. [54]
At yet another meeting to form an alliance—this one inaugurated in response to the Soviet invasion and pressure from potential international donors who wanted the mujahidin to have a single front to facilitate the allocation of assistance—Sayyaf was put forward as a candidate for leadership over Sibghatullah Mujaddidi, who was also pushing hard for the job. [55] As a relative moderate and nationally known leader, Mujaddidi thought he could count on receiving the votes of the delegates from Gailani’s Mahaz party, Nabi’s Harakat, and his own Jabha, but his votes fell short, and Sayyaf was elected. Sayyaf’s success was the result of his having been recently released from prison and his not having been implicated in the divisions and fiascoes of the preceding several years. Under Sayyaf’s leadership, the Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan (Ettehad-i Islami bara-yi Azadi-yi Afghanistan) came into existence, and one of the new leader’s first responsibilities was representing the Afghan mujahidin at an Islamic conference in Tayef, Saudi Arabia. One of Sayyaf’s strengths was his fluent command of Arabic, and, in Qazi Amin’s words, he greatly impressed his Arab audience, “dressed in his simple Afghan clothes and speaking eloquently in their own language.”
From the outset, Sayyaf overshadowed the other Afghan leaders in the eyes of wealthy Arabs who were eager to bankroll the Afghan jihad. At a time when the mujahidin were still largely dependent on Pakistan for financial support, Sayyaf’s performance at Tayef promised to open the spigot of Arab oil money; but the new alliance quickly became mired in controversy, brought about by the new wealth that Sayyaf had tapped and the jealousies it inspired. Quoting Qazi Amin:
Bitterness over Sayyaf’s handling of Arab funds, as well as accusations that he was secretly conspiring with Hekmatyar to undercut the moderate parties, soon led to the breakup of this newest alliance, with Sayyaf’s party becoming the seventh independent political party—one that had virtually no fighting fronts but a great deal of money. [57]After this conference, some [Arab benefactors] took a personal interest in Sayyaf and gave him aid directly. As a result, the other leaders were frightened that Sayyaf was becoming more popular day by day. At the same time, Hekmatyar was also increasing his popularity, while leaders like Khales, Rabbani, Sibghatullah, and Effendi [Gailani] were not considered important. Sayyaf also was thinking, “These [other leaders] are just bothering me because the aid is coming directly to me.” No one asked them, so all the aid was in his control. [56]
Shortly after the collapse of Sayyaf’s alliance, Sheikh Abdullah, the Commissioner of Afghan Refugees for the Government of Pakistan, who had general oversight over Afghan political activities in Peshawar, stepped in and announced that only the seven Islamic parties (the two Hizbs, Jamiat, Harakat, Jabha, Mahaz, and Sayyaf’s new party) would be allowed to remain in operation. At that time, there were more than a hundred small parties with offices in Peshawar. [58] Some of these parties were nationalist in orientation; some centered around individual personalities; some were regional, tribal, and ethnic coalitions. The government’s restricted recognition meant that only the designated Islamic parties would be authorized to receive assistance from Pakistan and other international donors, and all refugees would have to receive a membership card from one of these parties in order to live in registered camps and receive tents, rations, and other assistance. In response to this move, tribal leaders living in refugee camps near Peshawar formed jirgas in which they publicly announced that the Pakistan government could also outlaw the seven Islamic parties—that all the parties were operating out of self-interest and betraying the Afghan cause. The first of these jirgas, which about two hundred elders attended, was held in the Nasirbagh camp; the second, with more than three thousand participants, was at the Kachagarhi camp. After these jirgas, smaller groups continued to meet in different mosques and public parks in Peshawar, where they pressed their demands for an end to party bickering and threatened to turn in their party identification cards as a sign that they no longer recognized the parties’ authority.
Simultaneously, a group of respected clerics calling themselves ulama dayun began meeting in the Mahabat Khan mosque in Peshawar and declared that they would not leave the sacred precinct until a real and abiding alliance was established. Reminding party leaders of the Prophet’s injunction that if two Muslims met sword in hand with the intention of killing one another both would be condemned to eternal damnation, the clerics succeeded in getting the party leaders to agree to work together through a council of clerics representing each of the parties. Only Gailani in the beginning kept his party out of the new union, which was given the name Islamic Union of Afghanistan Mujahidin (Ettehad-i Islami Mujahidin Afghanistan). The founding accords of this newest alliance were signed on August 14, 1981, and it was soon agreed that each of the seven parties would receive fifteen seats on the alliance council. According to various informants, however, Sayyaf and Hekmatyar recognized that, as the most radical members of the alliance, they would be outnumbered in this forum, and they convinced Mansur, Nabi’s deputy, to separate from Harakat and to set up his own party in order to increase their votes in the executive shura. At the same time, Mujaddidi and Nabi refused to accept Sayyaf as the leader of a party entitled to full representation on the council since he had few fronts and little evidence of popular support inside Afghanistan or within the refugee community. The result of this maneuvering was that by September, Gailani, Mujaddidi, and Nabi had all dropped out and formed a separate alliance also with the name Islamic Union of Afghanistan Mujahidin. This split led to the relatively long-lived division of the Islamic resistance into two wings. The more radical alliance, generally known as the “Seven Party Unity” (Ettehad-i Haft Gana), comprised both Hizb parties; Jamiat; two splinter factions from Harakat, one led by Mansur, the other by Maulavi Moazen; a minor splinter group from Mujaddidi’s Jabha led by his former deputy, Maulavi Muhammad Mir; and Sayyaf’s financially well-endowed but otherwise minor party. The moderate “Three Party Unity” (Ettehad-i Seh Gana) included Nabi’s Harakat, Gailani’s Mahaz, and Mujaddidi’s Jabha.
These two alliances managed to stay intact until 1985, when they disbanded under pressure from the Saudi and Pakistani governments and recombined under the familiar name Islamic Union of Afghanistan Mujahidin. This new union was little more than a shell. Committees that had been unified within the alliances were dissolved, and each of the seven principal parties (the two Hizb-i Islamis, Jamiat, Harakat, Jabha, Mahaz, and Sayyaf’s Ettehad) again took up its separate work. The ostensible reason for taking this step was that the international patrons of the mujahidin wanted the resistance to appear united at international conferences and meetings with statesmen. To this end, a rotating presidency was established, with Rabbani as the first to occupy this position. But the new arrangement only exacerbated tensions and jealousies among the leaders for all the cooperation and unanimity they tried to present to outsiders.
For his part, Qazi Amin claims to have been so upset by the dissolution of the old alliance format that he resigned from Hizb-i Islami and broke off relations with all the parties, calling this “the third darkest day after the communist coup and Russian invasion.” This statement was made many years after the fact (in 1996 to be exact), after the Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of the coalition government in Kabul that arose out of the Peshawar party alliances. In Qazi Amin’s view, “There wouldn’t have been such a disaster in later years, if the original alliance had been kept.” Whatever the accuracy of this view and whatever other factors may have been involved in his decision, Qazi Amin did choose this moment to resign his position in Hizb-i Islami and to promote a small party of his own, which he named Daiya Ettehad-i Islami Mujahidin Afghanistan (Inviting Islamic Mujahidin of Afghanistan for Unity). Qazi Amin’s party was never a factor in the fighting. Its principal objective was to militate for cooperation within the resistance, an objective that was to prove elusive until the Taliban militia came into existence with the explicit aim of putting an end to party abuses and bickering.
| • | • | • |
Of all the major leaders to emerge in Peshawar, Sayyaf had the fewest fronts, but his contribution to the direction of the jihad was significant because, more than anyone else, he was responsible for internationalizing the jihad, making it not just an affair among Afghans but a focal point of concern for Muslims around the world. [59] More than anyone else, he was responsible for bringing in not only Arab money but also Arab mujahidin who saw the conflict in Afghanistan as their jihad just as much as the Afghan people’s. Although the impact of Arabs in the jihad was not felt in substantial ways for several years after the Soviet invasion, this tack in the jihad was signaled as early as 1981, when Sayyaf, speaking at a conference hosted by Jama’at-i Islami Pakistan, stated that “Afghanistan provided a school of Islamic jihad” that “would determine the future of the Muslim world.” [60] Sayyaf was not alone in seeking to internationalize the jihad. Others, notably Maulavi Hussain from Pech Valley, also welcomed the Arab mujahidin and included them in their operations. However, Sayyaf was associated more than anyone else with these efforts, benefited more from them, and accepted the ideological transformations that Arabs insisted on as the price of their support.
With regard to the ideological effect of the Arab connection, a turning point occurred when Sayyaf announced that he would no longer be known as Abdur Rasul (“servant of the Prophet”) Sayyaf but Abd al-Rab (“servant of God”) Rasul Sayyaf. The change was much noted at the time within the Afghan community, as was the related phenomenon of Sayyaf’s allowing his beard to grow to a rather extraordinary length. Both moves, people believed, reflected his coming under the sway of Arab Wahhabi supporters, who told him that to call oneself “the servant of the Prophet” was not in the spirit of monotheism (tauhid) since one should be only the servant of God, not of a human being, even one so exalted as the Prophet. Similarly, some scholars argued that, according to scripture, beards should be allowed to grow and not be trimmed close to the face, as was the custom for many Afghan men. Though personal in nature, these gestures had a general symbolic importance that was much commented on at the time. Sayyaf, it was said, was now so thoroughly aligned with the Arab Wahhabis that he was even willing to change his name and his appearance. Whether these alterations were from sincere conviction or mercenary interest was never certain, but people did notice that Arab money was making it possible for Sayyaf to build a large administrative, scholastic, and residential complex in Pabu, an hour east of Peshawar. Arab backing also enabled him to offer front commanders willing to join his party sophisticated weapons and abundant financial assistance, beyond what most other commanders were able to offer to their forces; these offers increased the suspicion of many Afghans that Sayyaf and a few others like Maulavi Hussain were intent on shaping Afghan culture and religion along Arab lines. [61]
Between 1984, when I left Peshawar after completing my dissertation research, and 1986, when I returned to conduct another six months of fieldwork, the biggest change I noted was the conspicuous presence of Arabs in Peshawar. During my earlier stay, there had been many foreigners, the vast majority of them Europeans and Americans who worked in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) providing assistance to the Afghan refugees. The Arabs, even those working in NGOs of their own, were fewer in number and didn’t mix much with the other foreigners. Nor did it appear that they had much to do with Afghans, except those leaders aligned with them and dependent on their financial backing. Despite their intense devotion to Islam, Afghans, by and large, had no great fondness for Arabs, and their experience of the volunteer mujahidin did not alter that impression. For the most part, Arabs were perceived as overbearing and insensitive to Afghan traditions. Where they were present, it was felt that the war efforts were altered and diminished. Arabs brought dissension with them, along with a ruthlessness that hadn’t been there before. While noted for their martial skill and keenness for battle, Afghans tempered these characteristics with other concerns. Kinship, honor, respect for elders, compassion for the plight of women and children, recognition of the needs of civilian populations—all might affect the decisions of an Afghan commander considering his options, but Arabs—informants believe—had no such crosscutting loyalties or scruples. They were zealots who had come to Afghanistan to prove a point and build their movement, and they had no particular affection or respect for the people living in the country where they were fighting. The result of this attitude was to make the war both more impersonal and more polarized.
Just as the communists had changed the ideological equation when the status of the Soviets changed from backers to participants so the appearance of Arab mujahidin as full-scale combatants changed the tenor and complexion of the conflict from the other side. One aspect of this change was that many Arab volunteers had militant ideological convictions of their own that were often inimical to Afghan religious beliefs. Since the rise of Hizb-i Islami and Jamiat-i Islami, Afghans had become used to hearing some of their own politicians calling for the creation of an Islamic state along the lines formulated by the first Muslim rulers, but while they maintained a general tolerance, if not a fondness, for homegrown versions of Islamic radicalism, they were much less sympathetic to Arab ideologues, particularly those branded as Wahhabis.
Wahhabism not only rejected the validity of Sufism but also asserted that Muslims should rely solely on the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet as guides to everyday behavior and legal judgments. The majority of Afghans, including most of the ulama, believed in Sufism in principle, even if they condemned many Sufi pirs, and they also relied on and strongly espoused the Hanafi school of interpretation (fiqh) as the basis for its legal code and ritual practice. Because of these beliefs, Sayyaf and other leaders who were dependent on Arab aid asserted their continued commitment to Hanafi doctrine, if not to Sufism, in order not to compromise their position among the people. However, some Afghan leaders were genuinely committed to Wahhabi principles and broke away from the parties rather than compromise their beliefs. One such leader was the previously mentioned Maulavi Hussain, who left Hizb-i Islami in 1980 and established an independent base in Bajaur, where he welcomed many of the Arab volunteers who began arriving in the mid-1980s to participate in the Afghan jihad. Though referred to by others as a Wahhabi or Panj Piri, Hussain himself referred to his movement as Salafi, and under his leadership, the Salafis became a major force in Kunar until Hussain was killed, ironically by one of the Arab volunteers he had welcomed into his front. [62]
Conclusion
One evening in 1983, I was leaving a house in the old part of Peshawar, and passed a blind beggar standing in the street. The beggar must have heard one of my companions address me, for he called out, “Doctor Sahib, come here!” When I walked over, the beggar informed me that he was collecting money for a new party of which he was the amir. He was calling his new party Hizb-i Chur o Chapawul-i Islami—the Party of Islamic Thieves and Robbers—and he asked me if I would be willing to make a contribution. [63]
The configuration of seven parties that emerged by 1980 was effectively the core group responsible for winning the war against the Soviet Union. These parties, along with several Shi’a parties linked to Iran, provided the organizational backing for the mujahidin who first forced the Soviets into the cities and finally convinced them by 1989 to cut their losses and withdraw across the border. These same seven parties also lost the peace that followed the Soviet withdrawal by continuing to bicker among themselves, thereby laying the groundwork for the Taliban takeover. The pattern of squabbling that began in the late 1970s persisted throughout the period of Soviet occupation and intensified after the withdrawal; this inability on the part of the resistance organizations to work together provided the opening for the Taliban to challenge and ultimately vanquish the established parties in most of the country.
Given the mixed legacy of victory over a superpower but final failure to conclude the peace, one is left wondering why. Why were the parties never able to find ground for common cause? Why, when all agreed on the ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state in Afghanistan, could the ideological differences separating them not be overcome? There are, of course, many ways to approach these questions. One could focus on the role of outside governments—Pakistan, the United States, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia—in providing the resources that fueled the rivalries. It is an Afghan obsession to blame “secret hands working behind the curtain” for internal problems whose causes are difficult to assess. While often unjustified, laying blame on foreign interference is justified in this instance, for as much as outside financial, material, and logistical support made the mujahidin victory possible, it also profoundly exacerbated internal divisions in the resistance, particularly since resources were distributed disproportionately, with some parties receiving a great deal and some almost nothing at all. [64]
Another way to approach the rivalries that tore apart the various alliances is to try to assess the motivations and actions of individual actors. Hekmatyar, for example, was the first leader to establish a base in Peshawar, and he was undoubtedly involved in many of the ruptures that beset the resistance. But if Hekmatyar was more inflexible and more ruthless in pursuit of his ambition, the other leaders played their parts with almost equal avidity. Given the failure of the leaders to rise above personal ambitions and rivalries, one is left wondering what might have happened if, say, the two Niazis—Professor Ghulam Muhammad and his student protégé Abdur Rahim—had managed to survive and make their way to Peshawar. These two men were the recognized leaders of the two groups that became Jamiat and Hizb, and their commitment to the cause of creating a just Islamic society in Afghanistan was recognized by all, as was their knowledge of Islamic scripture. There was a bond between them, based on their longstanding relationship as teacher and student, that one supposes might have helped mitigate the generational and ethnic cleavages that made Jamiat and Hizb such bitter enemies. Both Hekmatyar and Rabbani were secondary figures in the early days. Hekmatyar’s main role was as a rabble rouser who pushed the offensive against the leftist students on campus, and one imagines that if some of the other student leaders had survived, he would have ended up as the chief of military or logistical operations, but not as overall head of the party. Perhaps, if the Niazis or some other early party leaders—Maulavi Habib-ur Rahman, Engineer Habib-ur Rahman, Maulana Faizani—had survived, the ruptures that ended up crippling the resistance would have been avoided; but such was not to be.
The role of outside intervention and the personal characteristics of party leaders both are relevant factors for understanding the persistent pattern of discord in the jihad. However, of equal importance is the nature of the parties themselves and what might be called their structural incommensurability. In the first part of this book, I discussed the Marxist PDPA and its attempt at transforming Afghanistan. The PDPA, it was argued, was as much a dysfunctional family as a political party, at least at its upper reaches. Thus, Taraki—the childless older man—gathered around himself a circle of young men who were like children to him. One among them, Hafizullah Amin, assumed the role of favored son and, fueled by his own hubris and ambition, turned the father against his rival—the “bad” son, Babrak Karmal—before finally betraying the father in what amounted to an act of patricide. None of the parties in Peshawar lend themselves to so archetypal an interpretation, but, nevertheless, only one of the parties—Hizb-i Islami—was in the modern sense of the word a political party. The other organizations were hybrids, part party organization and part something else—depending on the backgrounds of the individuals involved. Thus, in addition to variations in ideology and tactics, the parties also differed in how they viewed the role of the leader and how they thought decisions should be made. In a sense, fabricating an alliance between parties in Peshawar would have been structurally equivalent to merging a U.S. political party with a religious sect and a Mafia family. Their ways of conducting business and their respective “corporate cultures” were so varied and so deeply rooted that conflicts among the parties were inevitable. Add to these differences in educational backgrounds, ethnicity, and language, generational divisions, the ambitiousness of the leaders, as well as the interference of outside powers, and it becomes more apparent why alliances in Peshawar were continually breaking up.
Consider in this regard Jabha and Mahaz, the parties of the two saints, Sibghatullah Mujaddidi and Sayyid Ahmad Gailani. Both Mujaddidi and Gailani came to Peshawar as de facto heads of Sufi orders, even though neither man had previously been deeply involved in Sufi activities. [65] One important feature of the Sufi order is personal contact between the pir and his disciples, for it is through the pir that the disciples gain both additional knowledge (through the bestowal of new zikr exercises) and mystical blessing (barakat). Because personal contact with the pir was expected, every petitioner needed to see the pir himself. Translated to the realm of political affairs, there was no way to delegate work or authority effectively, and the result was that the Jabha and Mahaz offices were often empty and the compounds where the pirs lived were nearly always full—with officials seeking the pir’s signature on nearly every piece of paperwork, with commanders seeking weapons, and with common refugees seeking help in resolving financial, medical, and personal problems. Simultaneously, pirs were also expected to be generous patrons, and so, despite having little in the way of work, the pirs’ offices had full complements of officials, mostly disciples and retainers who drew their salaries but did little beyond filling out their time cards and drinking tea. [66] Because of Gailani’s base in Paktia and his close relationship with tribal khans from the areas of his support, his party more than Mujaddidi’s reflected this connection. In Olivier Roy’s words, “There was no party structure; the local khan had freedom of action and people obeyed a local influential leader and not the party. There was no political office, but a small court; weapons were distributed according to the recipient’s personal relationship with Ahmad Gaylani.” [67]
The clerical parties—Nabi’s Harakat and Khales’s Hizb—were less centralized than the Sufi parties. No special status was invested in the heads of these parties, and business did not have to go through them. Consequently, they tended to be somewhat more efficient and less subject to bottlenecks than the Sufi groups, where major and minor decisions always had to await approval from on high. Khales, in particular, had a number of trusted lieutenants and commanders (for example, his deputy, Haji Din Muhammad, and commanders Abdul Haq of Kabul and Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani of Paktia) who were able to act independently and effectively. In essence, the clerical parties were networks of maulavis and mullas, some of whom knew each other already, but all of whom had in common their educational experiences and their commitment to a particular vision of Qur’an-centered existence. If there was an “old boys’ network” in Afghanistan, a network of men who didn’t necessarily know each other individually but who acted on each other’s behalf because they knew “where they were coming from,” it was probably this group.
In addition, and in contrast to the Sufi parties, the clerics also had effective avenues of recruitment. Thus, while neither Gailani nor Mujaddidi had any way to recruit new devotees except through the resources they were prepared to hand out—the Sufi orders associated with their families being largely scattered or inactive—the clerical parties had madrasas, which enjoyed a booming renaissance during the jihad years. By 1984, there were 3.5 million refugees in Pakistan, and, beyond the primary schools available in the camps and a handful of secondary schools in Peshawar, the only educational alternative for refugees was to go to religious schools. Prior to the Marxist revolution, mullas and maulavis had limited prestige in Afghanistan. Mostly poor and lacking in influence, clerics generally did not inspire emulation, and few young people, except the genuinely devout, were attracted to religion as a career. With the resistance in the hands of religious parties, however, madrasas became a surer path to advancement than secular schools, whose graduates found a paucity of jobs available to them. The madrasa thus replaced the school as the place to go to get ahead, and the clerical parties first, and later the Taliban, benefited by having this institution at their disposal.
Sayyaf’s Ettehad and Rabbani’s Jamiat were anomalous in not being strongly grounded in a prior institutional culture. Both Sayyaf and Rabbani were university professors prior to becoming party heads, and their political orientations reflected their exposure to international currents beyond the ken of most Afghans. Sayyaf’s association with Arab backers also meant that his party was the most flush with cash and the least characterizable in terms of structure or constituency. According to Roy, Sayyaf’s party appealed mainly to marginal commanders and groups that had come into conflict with their superiors. Others who switched allegiance to Sayyaf had been “elbowed out by newcomers from the dominant party [in the region], or [were] very small ethnic groups seeking to preserve their identity. Finally, there are other much more dubious groups, who border on banditry, for whom it is essential to have weapons to avoid being brought to heel by the dominant party.” [68]
Rabbani’s party also had an amalgam of followers, although not so many of the opportunistic variety that was attracted to Sayyaf. While perhaps best known before the war as a translator of Sayyid Qutb, Rabbani also studied the traditional theological subjects associated with the clerical class, as well as early Sufi texts, and his party reflected its leader’s catholicism in its willingness to embrace groups with diverse backgrounds and interests. Again quoting Roy, “The Jamiat was well placed at the meeting-point of three of the four networks which went to make up the Afghan resistance movement: the Islamists, the Sufis and the mawlawi. With the fourth network (the tribes) its position was much weaker, which explains why it found it so difficult to establish itself in the south.” [69] Another source of Jamiat’s success in developing fronts inside Afghanistan was the high quality of its commanders and the democratic and multiethnic character of many of its fronts. Among those with excellent reputations were both Zabiullah Khan, the Jamiat commander in Mazar-i Sharif until his death in 1985, and Toran Ismail Khan, the Jamiat commander in Herat. [70] The strength of these commanders and the resilience of their fronts stemmed in large part from their ability to work and coexist with local leaders without forcing people in their areas to adhere to a particular ideology. In this respect, Jamiat contrasts with both Harakat, some of whose commanders incurred resentment for their heavy-handed rule, and Hizb, which tended to divide the world between those who were and those who were not party members.
If Jamiat, reflecting its name, was more of an “association” than a formal political party, Hizb-i Islami was a political party in the modern and specifically Leninist sense. In keeping with this status, it proved the least cooperative group to work with at the party level in Peshawar and in the field, and it was also the most hierarchical, disciplined, and secretive. Unlike Rabbani and the other leaders, Hekmatyar came of age in and through the party, and while the other leaders were more likely to see the organizations they led as means to an end, for Hekmatyar the party was the end itself. One became aware of the difference between Hizb and the other Peshawar fronts the moment one walked into Hizb headquarters. In contrast to the other parties in Peshawar, Hizb appeared to be a highly efficient and streamlined organization. Hizb offices were staffed mostly by young, educated men (as opposed to the older clerics with sinecures who decorated the offices of the moderate parties), and they were usually buzzing with activity. Appointments were kept, schedules adhered to, and assignments completed. Rarely did one see the milling crowds outside the Hizb office or Hekmatyar’s home that were so common outside the offices and homes of Mujaddidi, Gailani, and Nabi. While there was never any doubt who was in charge, Hekmatyar had competent people reporting to him and delegated to them many of the mundane responsibilities that other leaders had to fulfill personally.
The underside of Hizb efficiency was the self-righteous discipline of the members. The so-called schoolboys (maktabian) who worked in the Hizb offices were readily identifiable by the nearly identical clothes and caps they wore, their trim beards, and their haughty expressions. For members of most of the other parties, loyalty to their family and kin group was of greater personal importance than allegiance to the party. That was not the case with Hizbis, however, or at least it was not supposed to be. They were expected to hold the party above everything else; as a result, people not associated with the party didn’t trust them and were unwilling to speak freely around them. In Peshawar in the mid-1980s, there were ubiquitous rumors about Hizb prisons and torture centers around the city and about how Hizb had “disappeared” this or that person. It was even said that the Pakistani authorities had once dredged a part of the Indus looking for the body of a drowning victim only to find a score of other bodies—all presumed to have been Afghans killed by Hizb. While those rumors were never verified to my knowledge, the very fact that suspicions always centered on Hekmatyar and his people is an indication of the distrust with which other Afghans viewed the party. So too is the fact that party battlefield collaborations rarely involved Hizb and that Hizb mujahidin groups got into internecine conflicts more consistently than the mujahidin associated with any other party. In the view of Hizbis, theirs was the only legitimate party, and alignments with other parties only compromised them and empowered their unworthy rivals. [71]
Underlying the self-righteousness and intolerance exhibited by Hizb was a profound insecurity, for, alone among the parties, Hizb lacked a firm grounding in Afghan society that could ensure its survival. Thus, unlike Gailani and Mujaddidi, Hekmatyar didn’t have a base of disciples, and he also didn’t have a network of clerics to build on, as Nabi and Khales did, or the sort of established position and role they had as interpreters to the people of Islamic scripture. He also lacked the kind of natural constituency Rabbani had with non-Pakhtuns and the outside financial resources that Sayyaf had at his disposal to attract people to his cause. Basically, Hekmatyar had the party itself and the loyalty of young maktabis who, like their leader, had been alienated from the society they sought to transform. However, instead of trying to build alliances that might expand the base of his party, Hekmatyar worked to undermine his rivals, and his principal preoccupation for much of the war was not defeating the regime in Kabul or forcing the Soviets to withdraw but rather positioning himself to win the end game that would eventually be played among the parties after the victory of the mujahidin.
Notes
1. The ten parties I refer to were all associated with the Sunni sect of Islam. There were also a number of Shi’a parties that represented the 10 percent of the population that professed and practiced Shi’a principles. These Shi’a parties were headquartered in the central Hazarajat region of Afghanistan and received most of their assistance from Iran. See Canfield 1973, Edwards 1986b, Roy 1986, and Mousavi 1998.
2. Although the Peshawar refugee settlements contained representatives of all the major Islamic traditions, they contained relatively few Shi’a and Ismaili leaders. Shi’a leaders in particular tended to gravitate to Iran, while Peshawar remained the center of the Sunni majority, and it is the Sunni leadership with which I am primarily concerned here.
3. My information on Maulana Faizani has a hagiographic quality to it because it comes primarily from two of his disciples (Mirajan Saheqi and Rohullah), whom I interviewed in Peshawar in 1983–1984.
4. Faizani’s disciples recounted a number of Faizani’s miracles and told of the strange occurrences and premonitions that accompanied his birth. Rohullah also noted that Faizani received his instruction in tasawuf directly from the saints (awaliya) and four companions of the Prophet (char yar kubar) and that the Prophet himself “tied his waist” and “selected him for an important task.” Interview, September 4, 1983.
5. From a photocopy of the introduction to Faizani’s “Why Do We Read the Books of the Koranic School,” by Mirajan Saheqi (Shah 1983, 10).
6. The three parties that joined together were Madrasa-i Qur´an, under Faizani; Paiman-i Islami, under Mir ‘Ali Gauhar; and Qiyyam-i Islami, under General Mir Ahmad Shah Rizwani. Hizb-i Tauhid, the united party, was also known as Madrasa-i Tauhid.
7. Although Faizani himself was a Sunni from Herat in western Afghanistan, he was close to Sayyid Ismail Balkhi, a prominent Shi’a spiritual figure and political activist who had been involved in an attempted coup d’état against Prime Minister Shah Mahmud Khan in 1949. Balkhi was arrested for his role in this plot and remained in prison until the advent of democracy in 1964, but many of his followers continued their political activities, a number under the leadership of Faizani. On the evolution of Shi’a political protest through the mid-1980s, see Edwards 1986b and Mousavi 1998.
8. In explaining Faizani’s popularity with military officers, one informant indicated that because they often lived in isolated, out-of-the-way bases and had to spend long hours in the middle of the night on watch, officers had plenty of time to practice zikr. Another informant argued that most officers were politically neutral (bi-taraf) and found Faizani’s tendency to prioritize spirituality over politics to be a more sympathetic approach than the more militant orientations of other groups.
9. Interview with Sur Gul Spin, May 25, 1986.
10. Interview with Rohullah, September 4, 1983.
11. Interview with Mirajan Saheqi, October 3, 1983. See also Edwards 1986b.
12. Most of the miracle stories told of the contemporary period involved signs of special grace associated not with leaders but with devout mujahidin killed in battle. A common theme was the perfumed smell arising from the corpse of a martyr, and sometimes it was said that angels had been seen hovering around the grave of a martyr.
13. Olivier Roy has noted that a number of Sufi commanders were prominent in the jihad inside Afghanistan, particularly in the western and northern regions of the country less closely associated with the situation in Peshawar; Roy 1986, 112–116.
14. Among those captured were Saifuddin Nasratyar in Herat, Khawja Mahfuz in Panjshir, and Dr. Umar in Badakhshan.
15. Though he is referred to as “Engineer,” Hekmatyar never completed his studies because of his involvement in political activities.
16. As is discussed in a later section, the other Afghan with a claim to being the first to import the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood was Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujaddidi.
17. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.
18. Another, more important point of dispute between Hekmatyar and Rabbani involved Hekmatyar’s arrest and execution of Jan Muhammad, an ally and friend of Rabbani’s. Few people would discuss this matter with me, in part because it was so controversial and also because few people knew much about it. However, the version of events that appears most reliable to me is as follows. Following the failed attacks of 1975, several factions developed in Peshawar, one of which was led by Hekmatyar and the other by Jan Muhammad. Jan Muhammad was from Kunar and part of a group known as the Council of Kunar, which included Maulavi Hussain from Pech Valley and Kashmir Khan from Shigal. Hussain, the story goes, wanted to send an antigovernment night letter (shabnama) inside Afghanistan, a move that Jan Muhammad and other members of the council opposed. However, Hussain went ahead with the plan, and two of his relatives were captured with the night letter in their possession. Hussain accused Jan Muhammad of having informed the government of the plan. Jan Muhammad was taken into custody by Hekmatyar’s group, confessed under torture, and was later executed.
19. Interview with Qazi Amin, April 23, 1984.
20. Other members of the executive council included Maulavi Nasrullah Mansur, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, Maulavi Hussain (Jamil-ur-Rahman), and Haji Din Muhammad (brother of Commander Abdul Haq and later the deputy to Maulavi Yunus Khales).
21. Qazi Amin told me that Hizb-i Islami planned “three or four coup d’états” against Daud prior to the Saur Revolution (interview, April 23, 1984).
22. Hekmatyar claimed in an interview with me in 1983 that Khyber’s assassination was the doing of Hizbi guerrillas. This claim has not been confirmed, and others claim that Daud himself ordered the killing.
23. For an example of one of these publications, see Edwards 1993b.
24. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.
25. According to one informant, after the establishment of Harakat, Nabi insisted that the leaders of Jamiat and Hizb turn over to him all party documents, information about fronts, and other materials. Both Hekmatyar and Rabbani refused, however, and approximately two months after the initiation of Harakat, Hekmatyar’s faction staged a coup d’état, occupying the Harakat offices and confiscating safes containing the financial resources of the alliance. Some say that Nabi was also briefly held prisoner until the Pakistan government intervened and ordered his release. Thereafter, Nabi remained at home, deciding on his course of action, while the separate offices of Hizb-i Islami and Jamiat-i Islami were reorganized, both sharing in the spoils taken from Harakat. Interview with Wasil Nur, October 8, 1983.
26. Interview with Qazi Amin, April 23, 1984.
27. Interview with Yunus Khales, April 22, 1984.
28. Interview with Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, April 25, 1984.
29. Interview with Yunus Khales, 1983.
30. Khales’s contact with the Muslim Youth was initiated through Engineer Habib-ur Rahman as well as through his own son, Muhammad Nasim, a madrasa teacher and organization member who was arrested about the same time as Habib-ur Rahman and, like him, is presumed to have been executed.
31. Interview with Yunus Khales, April 22, 1984.
32. Interview with Zemarak Abed, Muslim Youth member from Wardak Province, May 5, 1984.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. See Trimingham 1971.
36. Interview, September 12, 1983.
37. See Edwards 1993a, 171. The name “Mujaddidi” derives from Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi’s honorific title, mujaddid-i alf-i thani (renewer of the second millennium).
38. Most family members and loyalists would not discuss the apparent rivalry between the two Mujaddidi cousins. However, reasons did exist for bitterness between the two wings of the family, especially considering that the leadership of the family had been assumed by the descendants of Fazl Umar (Ibrahim’s father), even though Sibghatullah’s grandfather (Fazl Muhammad, the elder brother of Fazl Umar) was the senior member of the family. Although he did not confirm my suspicion that there was bitterness over this usurpation, Sibghatullah did tell me in an interview on September 12, 1983, that his cousin was jealous of him and had founded his party simply to prevent Sibghatullah from encroaching on his position with the ulama. He also expressed the belief that his cousin’s murder and his own survival were not accidental: “Because I was pure, my heart was pure and I was sincere in my purpose, God protect[ed] me, save[d] me with all my children, family, I came here from abroad, and they were all captured. Some may be killed, some may be in jails up to now. This was really a great fault of family policy. I advised them; I requested them when I started my activities here in Peshawar; I told them, ‘Please, I am secretly coming here.’ Nobody knew I was here. I sent a man [to tell them], ‘You must emigrate to Pakistan because I must start. I can’t stop for you.’ They said, ‘No one will tell us anything. We are happy.’”
39. According to the family history, Naqib refused these gifts because they were public property (bait ul-mal) and insisted on paying for them from his own resources. Whether true or not, the account echoes a similar story told of the Mulla of Hadda when he was offered land by Habibullah a few years earlier. It also tells us that Naqib had both independent resources to draw on and the wisdom to realize that dependence on the government would likely compromise his position.
40. Girardet 1985, 115.
41. Interview, September 12, 1983.
42. The parties worked their separate wiles after this until the summer of 1979, when the garrison at Asmar was looted by Hizb-i Islami. This incident created a stir among the other parties, which joined together under the name Paiman-i Islami, but this alliance was also short-lived, breaking up within three months.
43. Interview, September 12, 1983.
44. In a strange reversal for Babrak Khan, who gave his own life to preserve the state, one of his two sons was held responsible (the circumstances and reasons remain murky) for the assassination of Pakistani Prime Minister Liaqat ‘Ali Khan. His involvement in this episode has never been adequately explained.
45. Interview, June 12, 1984.
46. One of the decisions of this initial council was to call the proposed jirga a momasela (provisional) rather than a loya (“great,” or national) jirga since it would be convened outside the country and circumstances prevented the holding of formal elections to decide who should sit on the council.
47. Interview, January 1983.
48. Kakar 1995, 100.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 101.
51. Ibid., 103. In fairness, Zahir Shah was also not welcomed by the Pakistani authorities, and some of the Islamic parties in all likelihood would have done anything in their power to prevent him from setting up a base of operations in Pakistan. Both the Pakistanis and the Afghan resistance parties recognized Zahir Shah’s popularity within the refugee population and inside the country.
52. Ali 1963, 16.
53. Roy 1986, 73.
54. It is also said that after Amin’s own death members of his family emigrated to Peshawar and took up residence with Sayyaf, proving perhaps that even among the more zealous ideologues blood and honor retained some meaning.
55. This alliance included all the parties except Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami.
56. Qazi Amin, interview, April 23, 1984.
57. Roy 1986, 123.
58. Khan 1981.
59. While Sayyaf had relatively few fronts, he did attract some first-rate commanders, including Abdul Salam Roketi from Zabul, Amir from Khanabad, and Saznur from Ningrahar.
60. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 9, January 1982, 10. Sayyaf took the notion that Afghanistan should provide “a school of Islamic jihad” quite literally; he established for Afghan refugees an Islamic university in exile that also included Arabs in its student body.
61. Hussain, like Sayyaf, changed his name during this time. Known widely in Kunar as Maulavi Hussain or as Panj Pir Maulavi, for his advocacy of Panj Piri doctrines, he came to be known as Maulavi Jamil-ur-Rahman because the name Hussain was associated with Shi’a Islam and was not popular in Arab circles.
62. Most people assume that Hizb was behind Hussain’s assassination. However, some well-placed informants expressed the view that Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, which coordinated most aspects of Pakistan’s involvement with the Afghan resistance, was behind the killing because Hussain had announced the formation of an Islamic state in Kunar and had clashed with Pakistani militia groups along the border.
63. Personal communication, Dr. Zahir Ghazi Alam, 1986.
64. Yousaf and Adkin 1992, 105.
65. Ibrahim Mujaddidi had been the pir-i tariqat of the Mujaddidi family, while Nur Agha Gailani had been most actively involved in his family.
66. The advantage that accrued to both Mujaddidi and Gailani was that each began with a loyal following, mostly in the tribal areas, but both had difficulty moving beyond this initial base of support, especially since they were given a smaller percentage of total funds than the other parties were. Mujaddidi’s problems were also compounded by the fact that many of his family’s disciples were Ghilzai Pakhtun from Logar, Ghazni, Zabul, and Qandahar; this area had a high concentration of mullas and maulavis, many of whom joined Harakat, particularly when it became clear that Mujaddidi’s party had relatively little in the way of resources. By contrast, Gailani’s strongest support was in Paktia, where clerics as a rule had less influence.
67. Roy 1986, 135.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 131. The Afghan Information Center Bulletin noted in 1983 that while Rabbani was “one of the prominent figures of the young revolutionary Islamic movement,” he had established his reputation as a leader “in a traditional way,” and his doing so had encouraged some local Sufi leaders and brotherhoods in the northern provinces to join his movement; Afghan Information Center Bulletin, nos. 32–33, November–December 1983, 18.
70. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 21, December 1982, 14.
71. The Afghan Information Center Bulletin cites a number of examples of Hizb conflicts or noninvolvement (or both) with other fronts in Tagab (no. 26, May 1983, 7), Wardak (no. 26, May 1983, 7), Panjshir (no. 27, June 1983, 7), Maidan (no. 34, January 1984, 14), Kunduz (no. 34, January 1984, 15), and Kabul (no. 35, February 1984, 10).
Coda
The Death of Majrooh
In April 1987, the Afghan Information Center (AIC) in Peshawar—the only independent Afghan source of news about the fighting inside Afghanistan—broke its general rule of avoiding news and commentaries on the political situation in Pakistan to note the groundswell of support for Zahir Shah among refugees and mujahidin. This news accompanied indications that the Soviets might at last be ready to leave the country. According to the AIC, support for the king—while most evident among Afghans from the southern provinces—was widespread throughout the refugee and mujahidin communities and came even from some Hizb-i Islami commanders whose endorsement directly contravened their party’s official position:
This report went on to describe a meeting outside Quetta of some six thousand refugees and mujahidin from the four western provinces (Qandahar, Helmand, Zabul, and Uruzgan) at which the speakers “deplored the persisting disunity among the political leaders and criticised their inability to unite, and at the end all shouted: ‘We want King Zahir Shah!’” [2]A large number of refugees from the camps as well as resistance commanders and fighters from all political organisations met in Miranshah, North Waziristan on April 11. People were shouting pro-Zahir Shah slogans. All the speakers at the meeting without exception made strong declarations in his favour. Even Amanullah Mahssur and Shahzada Massud[,] commanders of Hezb-e-Islami (Hekmatyar), commander Khan Gul Khan of Jamiat (Prof. Rabbani), Gulam Jan[,] a Jamiat commander in Samangan[,] and Sufi Abdurrouf[, Gailani] commander in Herat[,] delivered speeches and declared their support to the former king. [1]
To this point in the conflict, the director of the AIC, Professor Sayyid Bahauddin Majrooh, had maintained a determined neutrality on political questions (Fig. 15). Since founding the AIC and taking on the responsibility of editing its bulletin, Majrooh had avoided taking sides with respect to the Peshawar political parties. In the seventy-plus monthly bulletins published up to that time, the activities of the Peshawar leadership were referred to on only a half dozen occasions and then only to report without commentary a new alliance or similar event. The bulletin’s focus through early 1987 had been almost exclusively on providing an accurate portrayal of the infighting and intrigues of the Kabul regime and the progress of the war itself, and Majrooh had endeavored to be as comprehensive as possible, including accounts of activities in the most distant provinces and from every party. He also featured interviews with well-regarded commanders, regardless of their party affiliation. In the course of these interviews and in some accounts of the military and strategic situation in different areas, fighting between parties was noted, usually without commentary, and it was also noted when different parties were cooperating with one another in the field. Since Hizb-i Islami was involved in most of the internecine battles within the mujahidin and was rarely involved in battlefield alliances, it received worse coverage in the bulletin than other parties, but the only direct criticism of the party was that expressed by commanders themselves in their interviews.[3]
15. Professor Bauhauddin Majrooj (right) with Samiullah Safi, Peshawar,Pakistan, October 1980 (courtesy of Samiullah Safi).
If Majrooh’s assumption of neutrality on the political questions of the war was in part a response to the polarization that existed in Peshawar, it had deeper roots as well. Majrooh’s grandfather, Pacha Sahib-i Tigari was one of the principal deputies of the Mulla of Hadda, who set up residence in Upper Kunar, in the interstices between the Safi and Mohmand tribes. Neutrality was one of the services offered by Sufi pirs. In the combative world of tribal honor, they offered sanctuary and mediation when disputes and feuds became excessively burdensome. Majrooh’s office in Peshawar was a contemporary variation on a Sufi khanaqa in the sense that all were welcome there. Commanders from different parties could come and tell their stories, and Majrooh earned their respect by keeping himself aloof from the party factionalism that dominated almost every other corner of the city.
Majrooh began to set aside his studied neutrality in the spring of 1987, when talk of an imminent Soviet withdrawal was causing Afghans in Pakistan and abroad to turn their attention to possible endgame scenarios. The article on popular support for Zahir Shah was one of the first indications of Majrooh’s shift, and it was followed two issues later by a signed commentary titled “The Future Government of Afghanistan,” in which he argued for the formation of a “united political leadership for the resistance.” [4]Among the points Majrooh made in this article was that one of the casualties of the war was the traditional respect the Afghan people held for the central government. Prior to 1978, popular insurgencies had rarely been directed against the central government but rather at local officials who had made themselves unpopular with the people. There were exceptions, such as the uprising against Amanullah, but even in such cases the sovereignty of the state had ultimately been reclaimed without significant opposition, and a legitimate ruler had been reinstalled on the throne.
All of this changed, however, when the Khalqis took power. For the first time, “the age-old magical charm” that had kept the population in thrall to the Kabul government was broken, and “rebellion against the central authority . . . was justified, disobedience became lawful[,] fighting the communists a religious and national duty.” [5] While it had sustained more damage than at any other time in modern history, the magical charm, Majrooh argued, still had enough vitality to ensure that the leaders in Peshawar would be unable to secure power for themselves once the Soviets had withdrawn and the puppet regime had been overthrown:
Paradoxically, the same factor . . . which has prevented the Kabul Marxist regime from establishing its authority over the country, is also working against the resistance political leaders. The latter are well respected as persons, and also for their role in the jihad; they are also expected to have a role in the future political solution, but none of them is considered as a legitimate national leader able to re-establish the respect for a central authority. Anyone of them coming to power will be challenged and other mujahideen groups will find enough justification to fight against the central government. [6]
In Majrooh’s view, the only solution to the leadership problem was for the country to accept as its ruler a man “having the aura of the central authority’s magical charm around his person—someone like former King Zahir Shah—not attempting to restore the old family rule, but working with an entirely new team.” [7] Majrooh may not have been entirely objective in his desire to see Zahir Shah’s return to the political arena. His father, Shamsuddin Majrooh, had served as minister of justice under Zahir Shah and had been a member of the committee that drafted the 1964 constitution, which introduced democracy to Afghanistan. Majrooh himself had served as governor of Kapisa Province under Zahir Shah before returning to Kabul University, where he was a dean and professor of philosophy and literature. Despite his associations with the former king, Majrooh viewed the monarch’s return as an interim step, a way of rallying the popular support needed to forestall a political free-for-all in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. Zahir Shah was the only person everyone in the country knew who was not also tainted by association with one or another of the existent political parties. His passivity during the years of the war was in a sense his greatest strength because he didn’t have anything in his record to explain—the abuses of his own regime being not only long ago but also trivial compared with what had happened since.
To gauge the level of support for the former king, Majrooh devoted the bulk of the following issue of the bulletin to a survey of Afghan refugees, which asked the question “Who would you like to be the national leader of Afghanistan?” The data-collection team put together by Majrooh contacted more than two thousand respondents in 106 of 249 camps, representing twenty-three of the twenty-eight provinces, the eight major ethnic groups, and all seven political parties. The result was that 72 percent of respondents wanted Zahir Shah as the national leader of Afghanistan. Only nine of the two thousand people surveyed, or 0.45 percent, wanted one of the leaders of the resistance parties in Peshawar, and a mere 12.5 percent indicated that they would like to see the establishment of “a pure Islamic state.” [8]
Despite the limits and biases of a survey of this type, the overwhelming support expressed for Zahir Shah, combined with the direct rebuke of the resistance leaders, indicated that the majority of Afghans remained unmoved by the Islamic political rhetoric with which they had been relentlessly assailed for the better part of a decade. Zahir Shah’s support may have been largely nostalgic in nature and reflective of his stated view that government should play a limited and nonintrusive role in people’s lives. Or it may simply have stemmed from the fact that he was not part of the morass in Peshawar. Whatever the reasons, Majrooh demonstrated with a degree of empirical precision heretofore lacking what everyone had long assumed—namely, that the Afghan people, if given the option, would choose Zahir Shah as their ruler.
In response to calls for his return, Zahir Shah broke his usual silence on exile political affairs in a radio interview with the BBC World Service in which he stated his willingness to serve the Afghan people if called on to do so; he stressed that, if asked to return, he would under no circumstance seek the restoration of the monarchy. These assurances aside, Hizb-i Islami and other radical Islamic parties reiterated their absolute opposition to any negotiated settlement that would bring Zahir Shah back to Afghanistan, even if he were selected through a democratic election. Hekmatyar’s position, as well as that of other radical leaders, was that Afghanistan should be an Islamic state and that the head of state should be selected by a council of qualified Islamic scholars and leaders from among those who had played an active part in the jihad. Since he had remained in Europe throughout the war and had made no sacrifices for the jihad, Zahir Shah was disqualified a priori from consideration. Majrooh’s commentaries and refugee survey challenged that view and gave ammunition to those who sought a more moderate solution to the political crisis facing Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal.
While disunited among themselves, the Peshawar parties had nevertheless succeeded in dominating the political debate and excluding other interest groups and the people at large from participation in discussions about Afghanistan’s future. Majrooh tried to break that monopoly and would pay dearly for doing so. Around 5 P.M. on February 11, 1988, gunmen rang the buzzer at his compound gate, and when Majrooh opened the door, they opened fire. The killer or killers apparently had been watching the movements in and out of the compound, for they waited until Majrooh’s cook had gone to buy bread at a nearby bakery before ringing the bell. Majrooh had been expecting a visit from the chargé d’affaires of the French embassy in Islamabad, so one imagines that he must have been caught unawares when he opened the gate and saw through the evening dusk the Kalashnikov pointed at his chest. He probably had never seen his killer before, but, in any case, those responsible have never been identified. No person or group has ever stepped forward to claim responsibility, and no solid clues have ever been discovered to indicate why Majrooh was singled out, though few who were familiar with Peshawar were surprised. If anything, many who knew Majrooh were surprised that he had lasted in the city as long as he did.
Majrooh was representative of a type that had largely vanished from the Afghan community in Peshawar. Since he had received his Ph.D. in France, he undoubtedly could have emigrated there or to the United States or Great Britain or Germany. He spoke the languages of all of these places and had friends and admirers abroad who would have helped him secure the necessary papers. But aside from short trips overseas, Majrooh maintained his base in Peshawar and never seriously contemplated leaving. Like his Sufi grandfather perhaps, he seemed happiest and most complete in the thick of warring protagonists, for each of whom he offered equal access and service. His staying might also have had something to do with the profound sense of detachment and solitude one sensed in Majrooh’s company. For nearly two years in the mid-1980s, he had been my neighbor, and I frequently dropped in on him at his office. Invariably anywhere from six to twelve men would be sitting around the living room smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, but Majrooh rarely joined them. He was almost always in the adjoining room, listening to the conversation as he typed up one of his stories.
Majrooh was senior in age and status to most of the men who congregated at the AIC office, but his separateness derived from deeper springs of isolation. His name itself was indicative; majruh was an appellation, or takhalus, meaning “wounded.” The family had adopted the word as its surname years earlier at a time when educated elites in Kabul were fashioning new, more cosmopolitan names for themselves, distinct from the tribal and regional terms by which most people were known when they left their home areas. The term majruh has Sufi connotations, evoking the suffering of the believer separated from God, the Beloved, but the name was especially apt for Sayyid Bahauddin. A Parisian intellectual by temperament and training, as well as a Sufi poet, Majrooh was nowhere at home in the world, except perhaps when absorbed in his work. He had children, but no real family or home, having been estranged from two wives. Even his physical condition reflected his chosen name, for years earlier he had been involved in an automobile accident that left him with a permanent limp.
While he hated all that Peshawar had come to represent, Majrooh knew he would never be happier elsewhere, and he seemed even to take a certain perverse satisfaction in defying the moralists who dictated behavior to others. If he chose to smoke French cigarettes and enjoy an occasional glass of Scotch whiskey, that was his business, and he had no need to apologize for it. Majrooh knew his own mind and conducted himself as he pleased. As long as he provided the much-needed service of reporting the war and assisting Western journalists who wanted to see the war for themselves, important commanders and the more open-minded of the leaders were glad for his presence, even after he published an extended poetic allegory titled “The Ego Monster” (azhdeha-yi khudi), which told of a traveler journeying in a benighted land not unlike Afghanistan and Pakistan ruled over by tyrants not unlike the leaders in Kabul and Peshawar.
Apparently, Majrooh’s decision to openly support the return of Zahir Shah changed the thinking of at least some party leaders as to Majrooh’s continued usefulness to their version of the jihad. His proclamations that a wide array of commanders, including some from Hizb-i Islami, supported Zahir Shah’s involvement in the peace negotiations undoubtedly made him seem not just expendable but also dangerous to the more radical leaders, particularly when it became known that Majrooh had also been meeting with Felix Ermacora, the United Nations Investigator for the Human Rights Commission, and appeared ready to play a prominent, personal role in U.N. efforts to mediate an end to the fighting. Majrooh possessed the pedigree to assume this role and might have been accepted as a mediator, despite his background as a Westernized intellectual, since most of those with established religious credentials had compromised their neutrality through their involvement with the various parties. Majrooh, the journalist, had not, and he had thus put himself in a position to play an important part in the upcoming negotiations, as his grandfather Pacha Sahib had done on many occasions in his native Kunar Valley and as religious figures have done throughout Afghanistan’s history.
Majrooh certainly knew the risks he was incurring by his actions and recognized that he would face the wrath of party leaders; they had turned a blind eye to his presence in the past because they saw him as a benign presence but would be unlikely to do so now. That he was mindful of his jeopardy, however, makes his death no less tragic. The Soviets’ announcement of their intention to withdraw from Afghanistan created a brief opportunity for commanders and party leaders and ordinary people to find common cause. Majrooh recognized that the chance was at hand and would soon be lost. This is why, I believe, he decided to break his customary silence on political issues to seek a solution based not on any residual loyalty to the old monarchy but rather on his understanding of Afghan culture and history. In past crises, Afghans had been able to use the institution of the jirga to meet together and choose one among them to rule. The point this time was not for Zahir Shah to reclaim his throne but for the old monarch who had stayed out of the fray for the previous decade to provide a symbol of national unity around which people could rally until a coalition government could be formed. Majrooh was enough of a realist to know that Zahir Shah had neither the charisma nor the vigor nor the strength of character to weld the nation back together as his father had after Amanullah’s overthrow. However, he also knew that, if left unchecked, the parties would soon turn the country into carrion, and no other leader had sufficient stature to bring the people to him and, thereby, the parties to heel. It was a perilous wager, but one he chose to make. Lesser men have been called heroes.
Notes
1. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 73, April 1987, 4–5.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. If there was any bias in the bulletin, it was not toward the moderate parties but rather toward Jamiat, in part because Majrooh, who had studied in France, had close ties with a number of French journalists and researchers, who were the most active and courageous group covering the war. These individuals, including Oliver Roy, Jean-Jose Puig, and others, often traveled inside Afghanistan with Jamiat units and usually provided reports for the bulletin on their return. Through these reports, Jamiat received more attention than other parties, and a number of Jamiat commanders, including Ismail Khan in Herat, Zabiullah Khan in Mazar-i Sharif, and especially Ahmad Shah Massoud in Panjshir, were lionized, while commanders from other parties labored in relative obscurity. For his part, however, Majrooh appears to have tried to correct for the French bias toward Jamiat commanders by sending his own reporters out to provide coverage of other groups and by conducting interviews himself with commanders from other parties, including Qari Taj Muhammad (Harakat) from Ghazni, Amin Wardak (Mahaz) from Wardak, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani (Khales) from Paktia, and Maulavi Shafiullah (Harakat) and Abdul Haq (Khales) from Kabul.
4. Sayyid Bahauddin Majrooh, “The Future Government of Afghanistan,” Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 75, June 1987, 2.
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Afghan Information Center Bulletin, no. 76, July 1987, 2–8.
8. Epilogue
Topakan and Taliban
QUETTA, Pakistan, November 7 [1994] (Reuters)—Islamic students have captured Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, and freed a Pakistani trade caravan held by guerrillas, Pakistani official sources said Saturday.
They said the 30-truck convoy, held up by two guerrilla commanders Tuesday while on its way to Central Asia, reached Kandahar in southwest Afghanistan Friday when the Taleban student group took control of the city.
The Taleban fighters have also captured Kandahar airport and governor’s house, the sources added.
More than 50 people have been killed in four days of clashes between the Taleban and guerrillas, the sources said, quoting reports they said they had received from the area.
The caravan, the first of several Pakistan plans to send to blaze the trail for regular commerce with former Soviet republics, left Baluchistan’s provincial capital of Quetta Oct. 29 with gifts for Afghanistan and the two Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
The trucks were carrying rice, wheat, clothes, medicines, surgical instruments, and X-ray machines.
The party polarization and infighting that I had witnessed in the mid-1980s became even more severe following the Soviet withdrawal in February 1989, as leaders and groups jockeyed to dominate what was expected to be the short endgame to the war. To the surprise of almost everyone, however, the government of President Najibullah refused to fall even after the departure of Soviet troops; his survival was undoubtedly assisted by the failure of the resistance parties to work in a coordinated fashion. Nominally, the seven principal parties established a power-sharing interim government. This new government entity was supposed to establish a capital for itself in Jalalabad, the assumption being that under the combined force of the seven parties the city would quickly capitulate; but the attack failed to dislodge Najibullah’s forces, and this failure exacerbated frictions within the resistance coalition, as local fronts—increasingly disconnected from central control—intensified their attacks against one another. Banditry also increased as the withdrawal of the Soviet forces led to a decline in financial assistance to the Peshawar parties and a concomitant reduction of support to local fronts; as a result, many individual commanders had to look to the people around them to provide the resources they needed. In local parlance, this period after the withdrawal of Soviet forces came to be known as topakeyano daurai, the time of the gunmen, the nomenclature reflecting the fact that, in people’s eyes, the once venerated mujahidin, the warriors of God, had become simply men with guns, intent on their own selfish goals.
President Najibullah, who was still receiving financial help from Moscow, was also stepping up assistance to local militia and front commanders in an effort to undermine the parties’ attempt to coordinate their activities. These efforts enabled Najibullah to hang on for several years, but his government finally fell in April 1992, amid a flurry of deal making involving party and former government and militia leaders. Thus, an arrangement among Ahmad Shah Massoud (Rabbani’s deputy and the strongman in Panjshir Valley), Parchami leaders in Kabul, and Rashid Dostam (a powerful Uzbek militia leader and former general from northern Afghanistan) enabled Massoud to effect a bloodless takeover of Kabul and to assume the role of defense minister and strongman of the new government. Sibghatullah Mujaddidi assumed the presidency of the new Islamic government, with party leaders agreeing that the presidency and ministerial posts would rotate among them on a regular basis. This arrangement, not surprisingly, proved impractical, and the peace was predictably short-lived as leaders refused to relinquish their formal posts at the end of their allotted turns, and each tried to improve his military position at the expense of the others.
As before, Hekmatyar was among the most ruthless in his pursuit of power, and his Hizb party soon initiated street fighting in an effort to improve its position in the capital. In the bloody skirmishes that followed, old battle lines, most notably the longstanding antagonism between Massoud and Hekmatyar, were renewed, while new ones, such as that between the Shi’a Hizb-i Wahdat and Sayyaf’s Saudi-supported Ittihad, were initiated. The primary victims were the residents of Kabul, thousands of whom fled the capital to escape the fighting and incessant rocket attacks. Further conflict in the winter of 1993 led to the negotiation of a new power-sharing agreement between Rabbani and Hekmatyar that allowed Rabbani to stay on as president past his allotted term and made Hekmatyar prime minister. A sign of the precariousness of this arrangement, however, was that Hekmatyar, fearing for his safety, refused to go to the prime ministry in Kabul from his base in the suburb of Charasiab, while Rabbani was prevented on one occasion from meeting with Hekmatyar at his base by attacks against his convoy.
While the parties were at the center of the fighting in Kabul, one of the most pronounced developments of this period was the radical polarization of ethnic alignments, with Tajiks (including many who had been associated with the Parcham faction in Kabul) rallying to Rabbani and Massoud’s cause, Hazaras to the Hizb-i Wahdat party, and Uzbeks to the militia force of Rashid Dostam. All these groups were fearful that, regardless of the talk of establishing a “true” Islamic government, Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, Khales, and the other principal party leaders, all Pakhtuns, would renew the time-honored practice of suppressing and exploiting the non-Pakhtun groups within Afghanistan’s borders once they had power in their hands. At the same time, however, while ethnic alignments hardened, the party leaders themselves were as willing as ever to make opportunistic deals across ethnic boundaries to advance their personal positions and to exploit the vulnerabilities of their rivals. Thus, in February 1993, Massoud joined Sayyaf to attack the Shi’a Hazaras, who controlled the western suburbs of Kabul, while in January 1994 Hekmatyar joined forces with Dostam to try to unseat Rabbani and Massoud. This attack, which continued on and off throughout 1994, led to the flight of tens of thousands of residents from Kabul and was halted only when Hekmatyar himself was forced by the emergent Taliban militia to flee Charasiab and set up a new base at Sarobi, on the road between Kabul and Jalalabad.
The appearance of the Taliban in Qandahar and their rapid success in reaching the outskirts of Kabul caused Rabbani, Massoud, and Hekmatyar to come up with a new power-sharing agreement, which briefly kept the militia at bay, but by the fall of 1996 the Taliban had succeeded in dislodging the established Islamic political parties from Kabul and had forced all the party leaders to flee for their lives. Massoud was the only one of the old leaders to mount an effective resistance, but his base in the Panjshir mountains became increasingly isolated and his struggle seemingly ever more quixotic. The rest of the leaders had to content themselves with fulminating to the press, and when the press stopped listening, they mounted websites to continue their efforts to prove that they alone should rule Afghanistan.
Explaining the Taliban Takeover
KABUL, Sept 27 [1996] (Reuters)—Afghanistan’s Taleban Islamic militia appeared in full control of Kabul on Friday after entering the capital in tanks and on foot, witnesses said.
They said the streets were bustling with pedestrians, cyclists and cars, and shops and markets were open despite an Islamic holiday. Tanks had pulled back to the side streets although fighters were still visible at key points.
All key government installations appeared to be in Taleban hands including the Presidential Palace and the Ministries of Defence, Security and Foreign Affairs.
No government forces were visible on the city’s streets.
Unusual activity was most obvious outside the presidential palace, where crowds had gathered to see the bodies of former President Najibullah and his brother Shahpur Ahmadzai hanging from a concrete traffic-control post.
“We killed him because [he] was the murderer of our people,” Noor Hakmal, a Taleban commander who entered the city from Charasyab, south of Kabul, overnight, told Reuters.
Najibullah was ousted in 1992 when Islamic Mujahideen guerrilla forces closed in on Kabul after 14 years of civil war against a Soviet-backed communist government.
The Taleban met little resistance from government forces which had abandoned the city hours before.
Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai, Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister, said at the United Nations in New York on Thursday that government forces had retreated to prevent civilian casualties.
The Islamic movement announced just hours after the takeover that an interim six-man ruling council would run the country.
A Taleban commander, who gave his name only as Musa, told Reuters the militia was using loudspeakers to tell civilians to go about their daily life as usual.
Musa said he hoped the new regime in Kabul would mean more plentiful food in the capital. But he added hundreds of thousands of civilians would remain vulnerable, particularly in the coming winter.
He said the International Committee of the Red Cross was asking Taleban to protect civilians and not to retaliate or carry out executions.
He said Taleban were not out for revenge.
“Taleban will not take revenge. We have no personal rancour. If the people find someone responsible for crimes in the past we will judge him according to Islamic law,” he said.
Musa said Taleban fighters had occupied Afghan army headquarters in the northern suburb of Khairkhana, which was headquarters of government commander General Baba Jan.
He said Taleban forces were heading north from the Bagram airbase they captured last night. “We know the senior government leaders escaped from Kabul to the north,” he said.
Musa said the Jala-us-Seraj base further north was still held by the government’s top commander Ahmad Shah Massood but Taleban fighters were heading in that direction.
The emergence of the Taliban caught observers of the Afghan scene off-guard. Few people had heard much of this group before it suddenly started moving up from the south, and its immediate and rapid success in consolidating power in and around Qandahar and then in expanding its advance to the suburbs of Kabul was something that no other military force had been able to accomplish in the preceding eighteen years of war. The most common explanation one heard after the Taliban’s first appearance was that they were the creation of the same Pakistani security forces—the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI)—that had built up Hekmatyar and Hizb. One opinion has been that the failure of Hekmatyar to consolidate power led the leaders of ISI to fabricate a new entity to do their bidding, and the Taliban militia was the result. While Pakistan probably played a substantial role in organizing, arming, training, and financing the Taliban, the manpower and the motivation behind the movement cannot be explained away entirely as a Pakistani fabrication, and the ultimate meaning of the Taliban likewise defies so simple or so conspiratorial an explanation. While a comprehensive discussion of the origin of the Taliban is beyond the scope of the present work, I do want to consider the meaning of the Taliban in the context of the discussions in the preceding chapters, particularly the connection between the Taliban and the Islamic political parties that won the jihad yet lost the war and the more general implications of the Taliban in relation to Afghan political culture.
In analyzing the success of the Taliban, it is important to recognize that despite the apparent novelty of the movement, this was not the first time religious students (taliban) played an important role in political events. To the contrary, madrasa students were the principal sources for various political movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they were viewed as especially dangerous by the British colonial authorities because they were so difficult to identify or hold accountable. For all the problems the tribes occasionally brought down on the Raj, they were nevertheless locatable on a map; they had villages that could be razed if need be; they had leaders with whom to negotiate and from whom to extract promises; and they had practical and material interests that provided a basis for getting along once the enthusiasms of any given moment had passed. Madrasa students, however, were from everywhere and nowhere; they were often destitute and generally had much more to gain by keeping people in an agitated state than by allowing a conflict to die down. [1]
The contemporary situation is different, but one point of commonality is that religious education once again became an important avenue of social mobility, especially for young male Afghan refugees. On the frontier, at the turn of the last century, becoming a taleb was one of the few ways an individual could improve his life fortunes, gain social respect, and escape the—for some—claustrophobic world of the tribe and the village. In Afghanistan prior to the war, the government sponsored tribal boarding schools, and many of the brightest and most ambitious young men from the border areas attended these schools with the hope of landing a government job after graduation. However, this possibility ended for most Afghans when the war began. Between three and four million people fled to Pakistan, and the vast majority ended up in refugee camps scattered up and down the frontier. Most of the camps had primary schools, and a few secondary schools were set up especially for Afghan refugees. But these schools had more to do with social control than with education, and few who attended them had their life chances expanded as a result. The same was not the case, however, for those who attended madrasas. As in the nineteenth century, a religious education once again became the surest avenue to social advancement. In the years before the war, madrasa graduates generally ended up in menial positions teaching children and taking care of village mosques, but in Pakistan, with the resistance parties in the hands of religious leaders, madrasa graduates had more numerous and lucrative options than ever before. Madrasas were also more vibrant and lively than secular schools and more connected to the world outside because the war, which defined people’s lives, was seen as a religious struggle and those who graduated from madrasas were considered more likely to play significant roles in that struggle.
For all the power of the parties, religious schools were by no means simple indoctrination centers. Though party-supported madrasas tended to toe the party line, many other schools remained outside the orbit of politics, found their own financial sponsors, and maintained their independence from the parties. Consequently, through the 1980s and early 1990s, as the reputations of the Islamic political parties and their leaders steadily declined, madrasas kept alive the notion that Afghanistan could still become an ideal Islamic polity. This message held a special potency for veterans of the fighting, who had become disillusioned with the way the jihad was being conducted by the parties, as well as for young refugees who had grown up in camps and who witnessed firsthand the corrupt administration and moral malaise of refugee society. [2]
Those who refer to the Taliban as a creation of the Pakistan government often overlook the fact that the Taliban themselves were in a fundamental way Pakistani, or at least a hybrid of Afghans and Pakistanis. Unlike earlier generations, who were tied to village and tribe, the Taliban generation grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan with people from a variety of backgrounds, and many of them were orphans who had lost one or both parents in the war. In such a context, loyalty to place, to descent group, to tribal ancestor, even to family lost much of its former saliency. Religious schools built on this foundation, bringing together in one place young men from a variety of backgrounds, many of whom had never set foot in Afghanistan and therefore had only vague conceptions of what Afghanistan was like before the war. Like their teachers, most of the madrasa students were disillusioned with the infighting and corruption of the parties but still idealistic in outlook. Having spent months and years in quasi-monastic communities, the potential recruits were also naive in their understanding of the world and relatively untainted by the tribal, regional, ethnic, and party loyalties that conditioned and compromised the values of so many in the refuge universe. They were also, undoubtedly, eager to put into practice what they had been discussing in theory, and the emergence of the Taliban movement offered that opportunity.
One of the most remarkable features of the Taliban’s drive to power was how little resistance they encountered up until the siege of Kabul itself. For nearly twenty years, efforts to establish a unified movement had failed, and the question that arises is why the Taliban were successful. In answering this question, one must take into consideration the fact that the early, easy Taliban successes were all in Pakhtun areas; the Taliban did not make significant inroads in non-Pakhtun regions without effort and bloodshed, as evidenced by their prolonged struggle with Massoud for control of the Tajik areas north of Kabul. Even with this caveat, however, the Taliban accomplishment is still considerable, for while Pakhtuns probably made up somewhat less than half of the prewar population of Afghanistan and have long been the most powerful ethnic group in the country, they are also famously fractious, and no party or movement had previously managed to bring so much of this large and disparate population under one political umbrella.
The Taliban’s success in moving from madrasa to military movement stems in the first instance from the corruption that preceded them. Part of the Taliban mythology is that Mulla Umar committed himself to forming the Taliban one day when he came across a carload of people by the side of the road who’d been robbed, raped, and killed by former mujahidin who had taken to preying on the people in their area. Whether apocryphal or not, the story is believable within the experience of average Afghans, who came to see the Taliban as a deliverance from the anarchy that had befallen Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. [3] Even before people knew who the Taliban were or what they represented, they were willing to give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt, and even if they were suspicious, they weren’t willing to risk their own lives to defend those in charge against the Taliban assault.
Another factor in explaining the Taliban’s success is that they consistently downplayed tribal or regional identities in favor of what might be called “village identity.” As a Taliban spokesman stated to Western reporters in an interview, “Our culture has been greatly changed over the past 40 or 50 years, particularly in Kabul. In the villages the culture has not changed much. . . . The Taliban are trying to purify our culture. We are trying to re-establish a purist Islamic culture and tradition.” [4] In identifying purist culture and tradition with the Islam of the village, the Taliban were indirectly condemning the Islam of the parties since most of the party leaders were products of Kabul University or had worked for state-sponsored institutions. They were also putting themselves on a par with the people whose support they had to enlist if their movement was going to be successful. The truth was that the Taliban themselves, having spent most of their lives in refugee camps, armed mujahidin groups, and religious madrasas, had little experience of villages, but this was still an effective position to take, given the nostalgia people felt for the world they remembered or at least imagined before the war.
An additional point in the Taliban’s favor was the relative invisibility of their leadership. Although the Taliban was nominally headed by the rarely seen and seldom heard Mulla Umar, most decisions emanated from a council of Islamic clerics headquartered in Qandahar. No one knows much about these men, and they appear to have made it a point of policy to keep a low profile. One can only speculate on the motivation behind this strategy, but it seems reasonable to conclude that it might be related to the people’s disillusionment with the all-too-visible leaders of the established religious parties, who did so much to divide the country. In this sense, the Taliban in their first period seemed to represent something like an anticharismatic movement; the emphasis was not on leaders and their promises but on the movement itself and its supposed rootedness in an idealized sort of ordinary village existence that had been absent for twenty years and that was longed for all the more for that reason. The fact that most of those who were recruited into the Taliban movement had little experience of the village life they idealized mattered less than the fact that the movement’s leaders promised a return to this life and were distinctly different in their approach to politics than were the parties that had come before.
Perhaps the most significant reason for the Taliban’s success though was simple exhaustion. As the Taliban movement began to pick up steam in 1995, their reputation for keeping security preceded them into each new area. Thus, for example, when they launched their attack on eastern Ningrahar Province, where roadblocks had become a fixture of everyday life and renegade mujahidin operated with impunity, the local population failed to support local commanders, even when they were from the same tribe or ethnic group; the people were simply tired of the status quo and willing to accept the new leadership, despite its promises of certain austerities and purist doctrines that deviated from established custom. While the Taliban did not gain mastery over the entire country, the roads in areas they did control were relatively safe. People were able to ride buses without fear of being searched at roadblocks, something they had been unable to do for years, and trucks carried goods without having to pay exorbitant road taxes. That may not sound like much of an accomplishment, and it is generally ignored in Western accounts, but after a decade of Soviet rule and more years of predation by former mujahidin commanders, basic security was a longed-for luxury and sufficient reason for many to offer their support to the new regime.
The Changing Place of Islam
KABUL, March 17 [1997] (Reuters)—Afghanistan’s purist Taleban rulers pledged their support for a revival of Moslem and Afghan culture at a seminar in Kabul which concluded on Monday.
“I would like to give my assurances that I will do my best for the support of those involved in cultural spheres, the education of future generations, and for the preservation of our genuine culture,” said a message from Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, read out at a two-day seminar on “Endeavours Directed at the Revitalisation of Islamic Culture.” Omar’s message also asked Afghans to reject foreign cultures.
“Everyone should reject foreign cultural influences and abide by their own cultural values,” said the message.
On the podium behind the speakers hung a banner reinforcing the message: “The struggle against colonialist culture is the duty of every Moslem,” it said.
Since first appearing in Afghanistan more than two years ago, the Taleban have forced women in territory under their control to wear the burqa, the traditional Afghan head-to-toe veil that has a small patch of gauze over the eyes. They have declared that Saudi-style veils, which do not cover the eyes, are not allowed.
There seems to be some confusion in the Taleban ranks on the overlapping of Islamic laws and traditional culture of southern Afghanistan, home to most of the Taleban.
Although the edict concerning burqas was publicly justified by saying that Sharia, or Islamic law, demanded it, the head of the Taleban’s highest court told Reuters that Sharia allows women to bare their faces.
“Sharia allows women to have their faces unveiled as long as there is no sign of agitation or lust on their faces. However we are now in an emergency situation, so it is right that women should have their faces covered,” Mullah Abdul Ghaffour Sanani said.
Some Afghans have expressed concern that the Taleban were using Sharia as an excuse to impose southern Afghan culture on this ethnically and culturally diverse nation.
The tradition that women should not work and should stay at home, which has been made law by the Taleban in areas they control, has never been part of the northern Afghan way of life, although it is common in the southern provinces.
Although in Monday’s message Omar pledged Taleban support for the education of future generations, that support does not yet include education for women.
Women were excluded from Kabul University when it was officially re-opened last week.
The Minister for Higher Education told journalists that the segregated education of women would begin when resources became available, but that women would only be allowed to study certain subjects.
“The main problem is a lack of resources. We need separate facilities for girls and we do not have enough women teachers, but if we get the resources, women’s faculties in certain subjects will be allowed to open,” said Higher Education Minister Maulawi Hamdullah Noumani.
“Although they may not be allowed to study engineering for example, they will be allowed to study medicine, home economics and teaching,” he said.
There were 4,000 female students at the university before the Taleban took over Kabul last September and closed the university.
While the reasons for their initial success may be debated, there is little doubt that the Taliban have redefined the role of religion in Afghan political culture, particularly the relationship between religion, state, and tribe. In an earlier age, Islam had played an interstitial role between the tribes and the state. Having no coercive power of their own to wield, Muslim leaders had to rely on their charisma and powers of persuasion to fuse tribal coalitions or, contrarily, to ingratiate themselves with and becomes allies or even functionaries of the ruler. Muslim leaders existed on the in-between margins; on the one hand they pulled the tribes out of their insularity through a rhetoric of common submission and promises of eternal reward, and, on the other hand, they served as mediators and guarantors of state authority at the peripheries of government control. On those occasions when the ruler overstepped his authority, Muslim leaders were in a position to exaggerate and channel tribal energies outward rather than in the usual internecine directions. Likewise, when tribes became fractious, the ruler could recruit Muslim leaders with established followings in the tribes to help calm the storm of discontent or to redirect it against an enemy common to the tribes and the state; this enemy could be either another tribe or ethnic group (Hazaras and Uzbeks were the most frequent targets) or that other ruler over yonder (most often the British, but later also the Pakistanis). In all cases, Muslim leaders stood betwixt and between, possessing a forceful ideology but little power of their own.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the relationship of Islam, tribe, and state became more complex, but this basic structure remained the same. Religious leaders like the Hazrat of Shor Bazaar and Naqib Sahib continued to court tribal support, making periodic visits to the homelands of their supporters and welcoming delegations of visitors to their khanaqas; but they also accepted visits from the king and his ministers, along with occasional marriages with the royal family, and in some cases they held official positions within the court and government bureaucracy. The political tenor of these relationships became increasingly muted, particularly following the overthrow of Amanullah. Established religious families and lesser figures were pulled into the orbit of the state; madrasas and shrines were put on the dole; and new graduates of religious schools were given government sinecures. However, the possibilities for antagonism were never entirely eliminated, if only because no individual figure or family could represent Islam or hold a monopoly of power. Charismatic leaders could always appear unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere, as was the case with Maulana Faizani. In addition the advent of modern communication and transportation meant that Afghanistan, more than ever, was connected to broader currents of political activism that the government could not control, particularly with the expansion of secondary schools and universities, sympathetic places for radical political ideas from abroad to incubate and develop.
In the overheated environment of Peshawar, the multiple strands of Afghan religious political culture intertwined and cross-fertilized. Old-style clerics began imitating the young radicals by forming political parties of their own, while younger radicals educated in secular schools memorized the Qur’an and hadith to prove their own Islamic bona fides; but this cross-fertilization did not lead to a fusion of purpose and conduct, despite the obvious commonality of interest of the different factions and their declarations of common devotion to Islam. Rather, Peshawar became its own insulated world, cut off from the rest of Afghan society, a world that finally referred more to itself than to the struggle going on inside Afghanistan. The parties headquartered in Peshawar lost touch with the basic truth of Afghan history: that religious leaders don’t have power of their own—they borrow it from others. In the past, religious leaders had gained authority through association with the tribes or the government in Kabul. This time, the parties gained leverage from the patronage of Pakistan, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and China, and they were successful as long as they had massive infusions of financial and military assistance from these sources. But with the departure of the Soviet Union, much of that assistance dried up, the parties had less to offer, and whatever credibility they still had with the people had largely withered because of their ruthless pursuit of their own political agendas.
The Taliban prospered at first because they seemed to renounce the ways of the parties. Their approach was different, and they seemed to care about and identify with the people. Unlike the parties, which could never surmount their individual political interests when given the opportunity to rule, the Taliban managed to form a government with a unified purpose and direction, and they have sustained much of this unity, or at least the appearance of unity, despite the severe economic and military challenges they have faced. In evaluating this accomplishment it is easy to ignore how novel the situation is in the longue durée of Afghan history. Although it has happened before in smaller contexts, the reign of the Taliban represents the first time, at least since the advent of the Afghan state under Ahmad Shah Abdali, that religion does not function as support for the ruler but is identical with state rule. Given the rough-and-ready rural background of the Taliban, from their top leaders to their rawest recruits, and the regime’s self-conscious identification with an idealized “village” culture, one might even go so far as to argue that the Taliban victory has fused all three traditional legs of Afghan political culture—Islam, state, and tribe—and that being the case, one might have expected the Taliban to be more successful than it has proven to be in uniting the country in the wake of their relatively easy early triumphs.
The Failure to Unify Afghanistan
MIRAN SHAH (North Waziristan), January 26 [1999] (NNI): An Afghan tribe in the western province of Khost has demanded of Taliban authorities to hand over the militia officials involved in the killing of several people last week. At least 6 persons, including a woman, were killed and 2 women injured in fighting between a local tribe and Taliban officials in Khost on Wednesday.
The fighting broke out when youth of Gurbuz tribe refused to obey Taliban’s orders to stop playing a traditional “egg fighting” game, they said. Taliban officials stopped the children from the game, which they considered as un-Islamic.
Taliban had sent a jirga (team) of Pakistani religious scholars and Afghan elders to the Gurbuz tribe for resolution of the dispute but failed to reconcile the angry tribesmen. Taliban have rejected the demand to hand over their officials to the tribe.
The Gurbuz tribe, which had backed Taliban when they tried to capture the Khost province, has announced withdrawal of its support to the student militia’s administration.
Ulema returned here from Afghanistan say tension has gripped the area following the incident and Taliban are facing problem to deal with the situation. Taliban, who control some 90 per cent of Afghanistan, enforced strict Islamic laws in the areas controlled by them.
Before the Soviet invasion, there had always been an adaptive side to Afghanistan’s political incoherence, particularly given its location at the interstices of powerful empires in Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia. As the British discovered to their dismay, securing the capital tended to enflame rather than behead the resistance. Captured kings were replaceable, and the presence in Kabul of a foreign host provided a context for desperate and mutually antagonistic tribes and ethnic groups to rally together, most often under the inspirational leadership of a Sufi saint or revered clerical leader. Then, once the foreign presence had been expelled, the steady state of balanced opposition between the central government, the tribes, and Islam could reassert itself, with a new king taking control of the capital, the tribes retiring to their homelands enriched with booty, and the saints and clerics returning to their schools and shrine centers shrouded in reverence.
The advantages of incoherence in relation to the external world are apparent, but perhaps incoherence has also been internally adaptive—perhaps the existence of separate realms of discourse and moral expectation has provided a degree of internal flexibility that has dampened more extreme turbulence within this multiethnic, linguistically heterogeneous, historically composite, and never entirely logical nation-state. In their zeal to overcome the abuses of the previous twenty years and to create a new foundation for the country, the Taliban have instituted an uncompromising moral severity and inflexibility that, abuses aside, does not mesh well with Afghan sensibilities, especially the valorization of individual autonomy that is shared across the ethnic and regional spectrum. Afghans rejected the Marxist regime principally because they came to believe that Taraki, Amin, and later Karmal were intent on imposing a foreign moral code on the country, and now many feel that the Taliban are trying to do the same thing—this time instituting under the cover of “village morality” religious mores that are more parochial and conservative than those of the vast majority of Afghans, including most Afghans from rural areas. Ironically, the Qandahari villages that Mulla Umar and other top Taliban officials come from are famous throughout Afghanistan for their enjoyment of music, dancing, and games of various sorts. One comes to the conclusion that the Taliban call for a return to “village morality” has as little connection to real villages as the Khalqi valorization of “downtrodden peasants” did to the struggles of actual people. One also suspects that just as the isolation of Kabul-based Marxist leaders from the lives of the rural poor led them to formulate unrealistic social programs, so the cloistered society of the all-male madrasa has led the Taliban to create an idealized vision of Afghan villages unmoderated by the domestic influences of women, families, elders, and the everyday realities of tilling fields, tending flocks, and raising children.
The Taliban failure to consolidate their early victories is most pronounced in non-Pakhtun areas, where the people see the emergence of the Taliban as one more instance of Pakhtun hegemony. During the course of the war, the non-Pakhtuns of the country, who control more than half the land mass and constitute close to half the population, became disengaged from their dependence on the central government and ever more distrustful of the parties in Peshawar. Back in the 1980s, when I spoke with Uzbek, Tajik, or Hazara mujahidin who had journeyed to Peshawar to negotiate with the parties for weapons, they always expressed wariness and suspicion of what was going on around them. They walked the streets of Peshawar in groups, not interacting much with Pakhtun Afghans and keeping to themselves. It seemed that they felt almost as alien in Peshawar as they would have among the enemy in Kabul, where at least they would have encountered more people who looked like themselves and who spoke the same languages and dialects. While they still had need of the financial support offered by the parties, the non-Pakhtun populations of Afghanistan became more independent and self-assured over the course of the war. The parties provided for certain of their needs, but they otherwise went about their business, developing local organizations and institutions of their own and in some cases developing alternative avenues for the supply for weapons and ammunition.
Since the Taliban have come to power, non-Pakhtun groups have shown little willingness to relinquish their hard-earned autonomy, and the determination of the Taliban to impose their morality throughout the country has further alienated groups with different and often considerably more liberal traditions (for example, with regard to female veiling and the right of individuals to worship as often and with whom they please) than those of the conservative and conformist Taliban. With much of the population exhausted and impoverished from decades of war, distrustful of political leaders and of other ethnic groups, and, in many areas, suffering from prolonged drought and famine, it is not surprising that, with the exception of Massoud’s continuing holdout in the Panjshir Valley, a widespread and sustained military challenge to the Taliban has not yet arisen. However, evidence of popular discontent is considerable. Stories regularly filter out of local disputes, such as the one in Gurbuz in 1999, involving villagers who fight back when local Taliban authorities try to tell them, for example, how to celebrate a marriage or a circumcision. Other cases are more serious, such as the 1997 uprising in Mazar-i Sharif, which left thousands dead and many more homeless. Similar incidents have occurred in Herat and the Hazarajat, as well as in Pakhtun areas like Kunar, where the people resent the Qandahari ascendance almost as much as Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Shi’a Hazaras do.
While the Taliban have generated hostility in Pakhtun areas, there is little doubt that antagonism to the regime is most concentrated in non-Pakhtun areas and that the regime has greatly exacerbated ethnic divisions within the country that were already made worse during the Soviet occupation. Thus, even before the Taliban came to power, one notable result of the war was the loss of an Afghan lingua franca. Before the war, young people throughout the country learned both Dari Persian and Pakhtu, but the collapse of the educational system and the exodus of mostly Pakhtun refugees to Pakistan and Iran mean that most of the younger generation of Afghans is more likely to speak only their native tongue or to have Urdu as a second language than to be conversant in the two Afghan national languages. When they first came to power, the Taliban claimed to represent all Afghans, and some Afghans I have spoken with believe that their public execution of former president Najibullah was a demonstration of their intention not to offer more favorable treatment to Pakhtuns. [5] Whatever the original ambitions, however, few doubt that divisions are stronger than ever—particularly between Persian and Pakhtu speakers. Some Afghans I have spoken with even contend that, were it not for the large numbers of Pakhtuns who were forcibly resettled in the north by the government since the time of Amir Abdur Rahman, Afghanistan would now be a divided country, with Pakhtuns ruling south of the Hindu Kush, Tajiks and Uzbeks contending for control of the north, and Hazaras holding out against both sides in the center.
One lesson from the Taliban experience is that a degree of political indeterminacy of the sort that had previously existed in Afghanistan may be necessary for effective rule, with respect to both forces outside the borders and the heterogeneous population within. Perhaps the triangulated political culture of the past, which had seemed incoherent and destructive of civil society, was actually its guarantor. More simply, perhaps people like their rulers to be separate from themselves and are not so eager to abandon the moral logic of opposition—of tribe/ethnic group and state, of “rough” village ways and “smooth” urban custom. The failure of the Taliban to consolidate their rule forces the question of whether their subjects want uniformity across social planes and to have their cities treated as though they were big villages. Afghan culture has long been defined by dynamic oppositions, not by transparency and sameness, and people generally might be more eager to explore the future than to accompany their rulers on their excursion into the past.
Conclusion
KABUL, January 25 [2001] (AP)—The Taliban religious police have jailed 22 hairdressers accused of propagating a western-style haircut referred to among young men in Kabul as “the Titanic,” residents said Thursday. The hairstyle mimics that of actor Leonardo DiCaprio and the cut is named for the movie in which he starred.
Religious police deployed by the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue—responsible for imposing the religious militia’s brand of Islamic rule—say the hairstyle is offensive, according to Mohammed Arif, a barber in Kabul.
The hairstyle allows hair on the forehead, which the Taliban say could interfere with a person’s ability to say his prayers. Muslim prayers are said while bowing toward Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holiest site.
The arrests began last Saturday. Some 22 men have been arrested, Arif said.
It’s not clear whether they will be punished or what the punishment might be. So far none of those arrested have been freed.
In the 95 percent of Afghanistan that they control, the Taliban have imposed a harsh brand of Islamic law that espouses public punishment for most offenses. The Taliban also ban most forms of light entertainment and demand men grow beards and pray in the mosque.
Arif said men secretly trim their beards, an offense according to the Taliban.
“They come very early in the morning or very late at night,” he said. “It is done very secretly and only for friends,” he said.
I began this book with a description of Lowell Thomas’s trip in 1922, when the American showman set out to meet the Afghan king in “forbidden Afghanistan” and found instead a Hollywood stage set. Thomas encountered not an exotic Oriental despot but a progressive leader intent on dressing up his nation to prepare it for a different future than his people had ever imagined they might have. When I first lived in Afghanistan, I discovered that Amanullah’s dream had not died with the overthrow of his regime five years after Thomas’s visit. The students I met each day in class had absorbed something like his dream and wanted something like the future Amanullah had sought, and they too dressed for the occasion in cast-off Western clothing that seemed no less dignified for being second-hand.
Recently, I had the chance to view the film Naim and Jabar, discussed in the Introduction, which captures so well the sense of possibility that students felt before the revolution. It was the first time I had watched the film in a number of years, and I saw again the earnest longing of fourteen-year-old Naim, who wants so desperately to join his friend Jabar at the high school in Mazar-i Sharif. New details appeared to me with this viewing—such as Naim’s response to the filmmaker’s question of what he would do if he were admitted to the school (“I’d conquer Aq Kupruk,” his home village) and what he’d do if he were rejected (“My heart will break, by God”). This time I noticed as well the blind and absolute faith that the two boys’ fathers—both landless farmers and itinerant laborers—place in education as a path for their sons (“If I am down to my last crust, my children go to school”). And I saw more clearly than ever the look of desperation in Naim’s face as it becomes clear to him that his desires will not be realized, that he will be getting on the truck to go back home to the village rather than starting school in the city. Still, the most poignant moment in the film was the one I discussed in the first chapter when Naim, wearing his new coat, casually removes his head covering after Jabar has whispered in his ear that his friends will think he is “a villager” if they see him wearing a turban. More than a quarter century later, that scene is sadder and more poignant than ever. If a butterfly beating its wings off the coast of Africa can, in theory, set off the chain of meteorological events that culminates in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, could not a gesture like this be linked to the political maelstrom that followed?
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson wrote of the pilgrimage to the city of village boys, all speaking different languages and wearing their regional costumes, all transiting through primary and secondary schools, where their separate dialects and costumes were melded into one and where they were transformed into functionaries of the state. [6] Afghanistan’s progress in the last half century begins with the expansion of the state into ordinary lives, much as Anderson describes in Southeast Asia, and the early life histories of Nur Muhammad Taraki, Samiullah Safi, and Qazi Amin in their different ways all provide examples of the sort of nationalized youth about whom Anderson writes so eloquently. However, these men became not government functionaries but revolutionaries intent on disrupting and overturning the institutions of the state. Taraki, Safi, and Qazi Amin couldn’t be more different in most respects. Their goals were contradictory, and they each detested what the others represented, yet their similarities are also profound—most important, their shared commitment to social progress as they each defined that ideal.
However impoverished he may have been as a child and however mistreated his family by feudal landlords, Taraki’s vision of social justice seems to have owed less to personal experience than to his own flights of imagination and his reading of socialist theories that he spun together in his novels and speeches. When he suddenly and unexpectedly had the opportunity to resolve in real life the sorts of social dilemmas he lamented in his writings, Taraki proceeded with ill-considered haste. The decision to implement social reform on a host of fronts may have been due to Hafizullah Amin’s influence, but Taraki’s poor connection to social realities outside Kabul and perhaps his vanity kept him from objecting.
Samiullah Safi’s notion of social justice seems separated from reality for different reasons. He was from the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum and learned his way in the world watching a father who, in his own valley, commanded fear rather than pity. In Safi’s world, there was much talk of the equality of honor and the importance of personal autonomy, but equality of means was never a possibility. Men affected equality through their adherence to the tribal code, which Safi could exalt; however, his testimony reveals a man who remained troubled by the contradictions poverty posed to the values of his people. Safi also saw the great man, his father, wrenched from his valley and forced to suffer humiliations at the hands of a government that viewed his power and wealth with suspicion. This experience engendered indignation at government abuses and its failure to care for the people, but indignation only briefly found its channel, perhaps because Safi could never feel entirely at home in the presence of the strangers he called kinsmen.
In my meetings with Qazi Amin, social principles rarely came up—perhaps because I focused my questions on the events happening around me, as I tried to make sense of Peshawar politics. But I don’t think this is the whole answer, for none of the leaders in Peshawar—or anyone else for that matter—spent much time worrying about principles. It always appeared that when leaders brought up abstract matters like what an Islamic state should stand for, how it should organize economic life and treat its people, they were doing so to gain an advantage over their rivals. These leaders were animated not by abstract matters but by the politically relevant questions of precedence (Who started the jihad and was therefore entitled to lead it?) and qualification (Did a madrasa education count more than a university one? Were maulavis or maktabis better suited to run the government?).
In this way, the impassioned debates of the 1960s over ideals and first principles were superseded by a more brutal concern for power, in pursuit of which the primary actors found themselves trusting those most like themselves regardless of their political beliefs. Thus, one of the saddest ironies of the Afghan conflict is that the contest of ideas between Marxist and Islamist ideologues ultimately mutated into an ethnic struggle between Pakhtun and non-Pakhtun. At the center of this development was the rivalry between Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar for preeminence in the resistance. As each sought advantage over the other, belief gave way to self-interest, and self-interest to compromise, with both leaders seeking alliances with former ideological enemies who would give them additional leverage and who could be trusted because they were something close to kin. Perhaps because his was the more precarious position, Massoud appears to have been the first to make this move; the alliances he forged with Tajik Parchamis in Kabul in turn led to the separate peace with the Soviet invaders that he began to negotiate in the late 1980s. When Hekmatyar saw Massoud first attracting Western aid and adulation and then making deals with the government in Kabul, he did everything in his power to undermine his rival and proved equally willing to broker his own deals with Pakhtun Khalqis who could help him move closer to his ultimate ambition of ruling Afghanistan.
The most gruesome irony of the partisan strife and bloodletting that bedeviled Afghanistan during the last three decades of the twentieth century is that the idealistic visions of progress that animated Afghan politics in the democratic period ended with the Taliban. Arresting men for growing their hair is an example chosen for its resonance with earlier examples where appearance also mattered, but it is only one of many reported instances in which the Taliban Bureau for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (amr bi al-ma‘ruf wa nahi ‘an al-monkar) imposed its moral vision of a future defined entirely by the past. Sadly, virtually the only reports that make it into Western media regarding Afghanistan have to do with public punishments for various offenses. One time the story is of women caught in public without their burqa veils; another time it is of men flogged for clipping their beards too short; the next is of thieves having their hands and feet surgically removed or of homosexuals having mud walls toppled on their backs for the crime of sodomy.
While Western media tend to forget the years of war, invasion, and predation that hardened the Taliban in their severity and also to ignore other, less sensational stories like the multiyear drought that has made vast stretches of the country uninhabitable or the success of the Taliban in lowering poppy production, the Taliban campaign for public morality is a significant story and deserves attention for what it tells us of the regime and its vision of society. And what we learn from these stories is not so much that the Taliban rule through fear but that they rule out of fear. The fear that grips the regime more than any other is the fear of having any intercourse with the larger world; and intercourse, with its sexual connotations, is the appropriate word to use in this context, for in the Taliban vision of the world all relations with outsiders, particularly non-Muslims, carry the taint of the licentious and forbidden.
If, as I have implied, Naim’s disposable turban can be taken as an appropriate symbol for the fearlessness that fueled the revolutionary movements that collectively tore Afghanistan apart, then the indispensable burqa that is being reimposed on the women of Kabul is certainly the best symbol for the fearful spirit that animates the Taliban rulers today. The burqa tries to preserve a rigid divide between male and female, public and private. It seeks to manage threats to women’s virtue by eliminating situations of insecurity and ambiguity. More intimately, it speaks to male anxieties over being shamed before peers and to men’s need to maintain control over uncertain circumstances whatever the costs to themselves and their dependents; and in this respect, the hypermorality of the Taliban bears as much resemblance to the honor-based insecurities of Sultan Muhammad Khan as it does to the quotidian practices of village Islam, which the regime claims to represent. Taken as a more general symbol of Afghanistan under the Taliban, the burqa can be seen to embody a spirit opposite to the one the young people I met in 1975 possessed in such abundance. Those young people so wanted the world to open up for them, to offer them new experiences. Now the youthful faces of the Taliban, faces that have known mostly war, refugee camps, and the cloistered confines of all-male madrasas, stare back with unblinking negation. Nothing outside their own world is good, nothing outside their own experience and their scriptural lessons is worth emulating or caring about. The world for them is closed.
Stories like the one about “Titanic” haircuts offer some hope at least. In another context, a story of boys imitating a popular film star’s hairstyle would hardly be news, but in present-day Afghanistan, where men are forced to wear black turbans to work and to keep their beards long and where every other form of nonconformity is a punishable offense, it is significant that boys the same age as many in the Taliban risk punishment to keep some exposure to the outside world alive. It is also sadly ironic that the film of the great ship that hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic should be so popular in this landlocked desert nation that is itself like a great ship rocked by natural forces (repeated earthquakes, devastating droughts followed by bitter-cold winters, plagues of locusts) and buffeted by wave after wave of political turmoil.
The paramount question now is whether the Taliban vision is one that Afghans generally will embrace or at least accept. While the people’s devotion to Islam is deep and abiding, it cannot be said that they are clamoring for a more orthodox approach to their faith, that they want to rid religious practices of customary overlays like shrine visitation, that they feel the government needs to intervene to make sure people attend the mosque on Fridays, or that they are as worried as their rulers about women’s dress and men’s turbans. The Taliban has premised its rule on precisely these matters, and from the moment the movement captured Kabul and, in its first public act, hung the castrated bodies of former President Najibullah and his brother from a traffic light in the city center, it has gone about its business in a public and often spectacular style. If this manner of exercising power resembles anything, it might—ironically—be the reign of Abdur Rahman, who likewise ruled with his whip hand and incurred the wrath of his subjects for his brutality. But as ruthless as he could be with those who challenged his power, Abdur Rahman also recognized the need to meet people’s basic needs and to accept progress and technology where it could augment his authority and bring prosperity to his kingdom. To date, the Taliban have shown little of Abdur Rahman’s larger vision for the nation’s future to go along with their exercise of power, and so one suspects that their own tenure may be short-lived.
Speculation about the future aside, another question of special significance to my project concerns whether the Taliban victory represents a decisive break with the political culture of the past. The monarchy, at least in its recognized form, is gone, but the tribes may not be. They and other more remotely located ethnic groups (Hazaras in the center of the country, Turkmen and Uzbeks in the northwest, Tajiks in the northeast, Nuristanis on the eastern frontier) are pursuing their own goals and taking advantage of their opportunities while the Taliban continue to expend most of their energies subduing the immediate threat of Massoud. Borders these days are also porous. Commercial traffic of various sorts, much of it involving illegal drugs, weapons, and smuggled goods, flows in and out, and it is increasingly unclear whether it makes sense to speak of a coherent political structure of any sort. The future of Pakistan as a nation-state is also tenuous; the collapse of that country’s governing structure would make Afghanistan’s existence even more precarious and would perhaps lead to the complete disappearance of the boundaries separating the two countries, as well as those to the north and perhaps also to the west. Afghanistan would then effectively come to an end, and the rules of nation-state engagement that have held firm in the region for the last hundred years would cease to matter.
In key respects, conditions would be similar to those that Abdur Rahman confronted before he forged the Afghan state at the end of the nineteenth century; at that time power was not institutionally fixed in administrative structures and demarcated at external borders, but rather it radiated out from various charismatic centers. The cycle would thus begin again, but it would be fair to say that this age is not conducive to heroic action, as that time arguably was. While the political conditions might recapitulate those of an earlier era, things have changed. Weapons of personal destruction are more powerful and menacing, the means of communication and transportation are quicker and more efficient, competing forms of purist Islam and ethnic nationalism have coalesced and hardened against one another. All that can be said with certainty is that ordinary people now, as before and ever since, will more often be the victims of political change than the beneficiaries. That, sadly, is one facet of the situation that is unlikely to change whoever rules Afghanistan in the future.
Notes
1. The authors of a 1901 British report on the tribes of Dir, Swat, and Bajaur discussed the role of madrasa students in inciting popular discontent in the following terms (McMahon and Ramsay 1981 [1901], 22–23):
Worse even than the bigger men are the Talib-ul-ilm (seekers of knowledge). These are men, chiefly young men, who contemplate following the religious profession. They flock to the shrines of the country and attach themselves to some religious leader, ostensibly for religious education. Their number far exceeds those required to fill up vacancies in village mullahships and other ecclesiastic appointments, and they are reduced to seek other means of livelihood. They are at the bottom of all the mischief in the country, the instigators and often the perpetrators of the bulk of the crime. They use their religious status to live free on the people, who are too superstitious to turn them out, even when they destroy the peace of the family circle.
2. For a contemporary depiction of talebs as vituperative as that of McMahon and Ramsay, see Goldberg 2000.
3. During a trip through eastern Afghanistan in 1995, a year prior to the Taliban takeover in the region, I witnessed the conditions that the Taliban complained about and cited as justification for its existence. On that occasion, I was accompanied by a number of armed men and so was relatively safe, but wherever we traveled we had to pass through improvised roadblocks where vehicles were stopped and forced to pay tolls. Local commanders drove around in expensive four-wheel-drive cars and trucks and were clearly enriching themselves as the mass of people scraped by. While I never encountered or heard of an incident as brutal as the one Mulla Umar is said to have come across, it was clear from what I saw that the country was in a state of nearly complete anarchy—a state that had little to do with the Islamic principles on which the war against the Soviets had been premised.
4. Interview with Maulawi Rafiullah Muazin, C-reuters@clarinet.net, March 29, 1997.
5. Whether it was officially sanctioned or not is unclear, but the act of removing President Najibullah and his brother from the United Nations compound where they had been given refuge and stringing their mutilated bodies from a traffic light in downtown Kabul was seen as a dramatic repudiation of the previous Islamic regime, which had allowed Najibullah to stay put. Afghans understood that the Taliban were not just executing a Marxist; Najibullah was also a prominent member of the Ahmadzai Pakhtun tribe, and people saw the incident as an example of the Pakhtun Taliban being willing to risk the enmity of a powerful tribe in order to fulfill their vow to rid the country of the immoral, whoever and wherever they might be. Thus, while the act was gruesome, it had symbolic value as a unifying gesture. Whatever utility it might have had at the time has since been squandered, however, as non-Pakhtuns have come to see the Taliban as another variation on the theme of Pakhtun political domination.
6. B. Anderson 1983, ch. 4.