Afghanistan's Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi’s official visit to India has renewed interest in the Taliban, especially its views on Islam and gender. Many Indians were outraged when women journalists were not permitted to Muttaqi’s media conference held at the Afghan embassy in Delhi on 10 October.
The incident brought back memories of the uproar following the Taliban’s first press conference in September 1996 in Kabul after they captured the Afghan capital. They asked a Western journalist, who was a woman, to leave. This is documented in the US State Department Archive.
If memory serves correctly, however, it was not one but two women journalists that were asked to leave. One of them was Anita Pratap, then the CNN bureau chief in Delhi, who was covering the Taliban takeover of Kabul.
The incident began an examination of the group’s human rights practices. This embarrassed the then US President Bill Clinton’s administration which was projecting the Taliban as an “authentic Afghan group,” involved with other entities in the civil war.
American women's rights groups took a tough stand against the Taliban. With Clinton contesting the presidential election for a second term in November that year, his administration was compelled to criticise Taliban’s social policies, but it did not abandon or go after the group.
That came only after 9/11.
A New Attitude or Deeper Tectonic Shifts?
In the 1990s the Taliban, under Mullah Omar, could not care less about what the world thought of them.
However, on this current occasion, Muttaqi agreed to hold another media conference on 12 October, wherein women journalists were freely allowed to participate. He could not have done so without clearance from Kabul.
The question is, did the Afghan Prime Minister Mullah Hassan Akhund allow him to do so, or if the matter went up to Taliban supremo Mullah Haibatullah? The latter is known to believe that ‘Allah’s commands’ are applicable in this century as they were in the seventh.
Clearly, though, he to is willing to be pragmatic on the group’s actions outside Afghanistan at a time when the country is at odds with a hostile Pakistan. This does not mean that he is not committed to the group’s Deobandi doctrines. And that is, perhaps, what makes Muttaqi’s visit to the Deoband seminary in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, significant.
Islam’s evolution in Afghanistan requires a measure of clarification. People of all ethnicities are Muslim and take their religion seriously. The majority are Sunni and follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.
Understanding the Deobandi Sect of Islam
Perhaps it was this traditional Islam that Ahmed Shah Masood, a pious Muslim himself, referred to when I asked him about the Islam of the Taliban. My question was in the context of the then Mullah Omar's order to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas. He told me that he did not understand "their kind of Islam".
The Deoband seminary, founded in 1866, sought to reform Islam of practices which evolved over centuries and gave comfort to Muslims in their daily lives but were not present in its early years.
These involved, for instance, visits to Mazaars of Pirs. For Deobandis this was un-Islamic. There were other practices, such as celebrating the birthday of Prophet Mohammed, that were common in 19th-century India among Muslims, which Deobandis shunned.
Deobandis also did not believe in political divisions of the ummah. Hence, they were against the Partition of India.
From the beginning Deoband attracted a few students from the Pashtun areas of British India and Afghanistan. Some of them established seminaries based on the Deoband ‘tarika’. Till the Partition in 1947, these institutions in what became Pakistan, maintained their links with Deoband. However, naturally, these links could not continue after the creation of Pakistan. At the same time, students from Afghanistan continued to come to Deoband.
The 1960s witnessed the growth of Islamic movements and Communism in Afghanistan. The centre of these widely different activities was the Kabul university. The Islamic movements which developed in the university were by scholars who went for Islamic scholarship to Al Azhar university in Cairo. They included some who became famous in the Afghan Jihad against the Soviets like Ustad Abdul Rasool Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani. They were influenced by trends that were current in the Arab world, including by the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike Sayyaf and Rabbani some Jihadi leaders had studied in Pakistani seminaries based on the Deobandi ‘tarika’.
In his analysis of a book by Taliban Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani on the Taliban Theory of State, scholar John Butt writes:
“As Deobandi thought moved to Pakistan and as Pakistan itself underwent profound political changes, we see the political thinking of scholars, still ostensibly sticking to the Deobandi school of thought, eventually becoming hardly distinguishable from that of Islamists—those who interpret Islam primarily as a political ideology…Taliban politics would also seem to have gravitated towards Islamism, especially during the insurgency. However, Deobandi thought to which at least some Taleban leaders still aspire, is in no way Islamist."John Butt, Author of 'Taliban Theory of State'
The erosion of contact between Deoband and Pakistani ‘Deobandi’ seminaries, which had moved towards Islamism, led some leading Indian Muslim ullema to believe that Deoband could not influence any of them. A well regarded Indian Muslim scholar was categorical with this writer on this point in 1999.
Muttaqi’s visit shows that the Taliban leadership still has regard for the Deobandi ideology.
It would, however, be premature to consider Muttaqi’s visit as an indication of the group’s desire to weaken its links with the Pakistani seminaries that follow the Deobandi ‘tarika’, which is now influenced by Wahai Islam and Muslim Brotherhood Islamism too.
Certainly, it would be worthwhile for the Indian government to let relations develop between the Taliban and Deoband in the natural course.
Deobandism, Gandhism & Bagram
One school of thought within Deoband stood with the national movement and favoured Gandhian methods. It was against colonialism and wanted the country’s independence. This thinking is in alignment with the Afghans intense instinct for preserving their freedom. They do not want any foreign presence on their land. This is the thought that Muttaqi articulated in his media interactions in India. When asked about the Bagram airbase he rejected the idea that it could be handed over to a foreign power.
The Bagram airbase has been in the news ever since US President Donald Trump expressed an interest in the US regaining control over it. He regretted that the Biden administration had given it up without getting anything in return. What Trump overlooked was that the US-Taliban agreement of February 2020, which led to the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, did not mention that the base would be retained by the US. It is impossible to conceive that the Taliban would agree to hand it over to the US.
At the Moscow format meeting on Afghanistan on 7 October, India joined Russia, China, Afghanistan and other countries in rejecting the presence of foreign ‘military infrastructure’ in Afghanistan. It would be best if on this issue India states that it is for the Afghans to decide their foreign and security policies.
Muttaqi’s visit to India needs to be built upon imaginatively by India to promote its interests in the country’s western neighbourhood.
(The writer is a former Secretary [West], Ministry of External Affairs. He can be reached @VivekKatju. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)