Taliban

The Taliban

Introduction

Taliban is the plural of the word talib, meaning “religious student.” It must be noted when comparing the Taliban to previous Afghan Regimes and tribal movements that the Taliban were the first in the recent history of Afghanistan who got control over the country on the name of Islam. When the Taliban got in power, their program to solve the pressing sociopolitical needs of the shattered Afghan society was to enforce moral behavior. This required the strict and literal application of sharia law. Their version of law, however, excluded a premise central to Islamic jurisprudence, which is the idea of law as a complex process of interpretation, or ijtihad, and enunciation of evolving principles that capture the spirit of Islam applicable to prevailing sociopolitical and economic circumstances. For the Taliban, sharia as encapsulated in Mullah Omar's various decrees were God's laws, which all true Muslims were obligated to obey without question. Those who disobeyed were therefore non-Muslims and it was obligatory that they be punished. The Taliban thus dismissed the accumulated corpus of Qur'anic scholarship and interpretation of the law and discredited the legitimacy of other religious authorities and the Islamic credentials of their opponents.

This paper compare the Taliban to previous aghan regimes and tribal movements. This paper also discusses in what ways were they similar to past tribal movements and what is the legacy of their rule on the Afghan state.

Discussion

Not like current or previous Afghan regimes, the Taliban considered sharia as a divinely ordained and fixed set of rules and punishments to be rigorously and dutifully implemented without question. Likewise violators had to be subjected to criminal punishments stipulated in sharia law called hudud, which includes stoning to death for adultery and amputation of hands and feet for theft, and qisas, or law of retaliation in ...