There was no Internet in Afghanistan under the Taliban. All computer networks were forbidden. Their objection to it was ideological: as fundamentalists, their goal was to return Islamic life to the early hijra era fourteen centuries ago. Along with television, radio, instrumental music, portraits, drama, football, chess, and house pets—the Taliban shot dogs and cats on sight—the Internet was banned for being jahil: modern. The Prophet did not have an Internet connection; why should His most loyal followers? But in 1996, restricting Internet access in Afghanistan was more of a theoretical point: most Afghans were illiterate and too poor to afford computers. There was no Internet to ban. The Taliban simply made sure it stayed that way.
But when they reconquered Afghanistan this month and reestablished the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban announced it on their Twitter account. Official Taliban journalists held up smartphones to record interviews with smiling, pro-Taliban Kabul residents. Their chief spokesman complained bitterly of having his accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp blocked. Social media outreach and branding seems to be a key part of the group’s strategy to consolidate and legitimate their power.
Taliban Twitter!
Everybody really is online these days. Still, nobody knows whether the Taliban will keep a permanent presence on the jahil Internet or delete their accounts—and everybody else’s accounts—in the future. There are reasons to be worried, though. After all, the Taliban are still burning books.
Of course, the Taliban have always burned books. In their first regime in the 1990s, they burned all the jahil books they could find. All secular schools and universities were shut down or destroyed. Museums and priceless cultural artifacts were pulverized, most famously with the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Taliban were, without doubt, one of the most censorious regimes in modern history, up there with Turkmenistan or North Korea.
Smartphones aside, the new Taliban has so far shown few signs of change. They are burning libraries and schools in newly-conquered territories. Educators and librarians in the cities are thinking of hiding or dispersing their collections to stay safe. And as part of their recent campaign of assassination, the Taliban have murdered writers: not only political authors or opposition journalists, but poets, too. The Taliban, it seems, can write freely on Twitter, but nobody else.
But why? To understand the attitude of the Taliban towards books and information, it’s necessary to understand a few things about who they are and where they come from.
The Taliban are children of war. Whether they came of age during the Soviet invasion or the civil wars or the American occupation, most Taliban members—like most Afghans—have only known life during wartime. Their founding members grew up in refugee camps in the 1980s, far from their homes and fields, sleeping under tarps and dressed in rags, picking at lice, huddled over burning, fuming garbage for warmth.
The only education in the camps came from the wahhabists: Muslim fundamentalist preachers who call for a return to the pure, unadulterated world of 7th century Arabia. They reject everything that is not demonstrably Islamic. In their schools, all science, philosophy, art, fiction, law, history, poetry, and music were either banned outright or whittled down to a tiny, ultraorthodox core derived from the Quran and the Sayings of the Prophet, taught by rote and enforced through strict discipline. Everything else, they learned, was a lie peddled by the Devil and the godless West to make Muslims weak and confused.
It wasn’t much of an education, at least in terms of learning and literacy. Their graduates weren’t likely to know much more about the wider world than when they started. But to poor, starving refugee kids, wahhabism explained their world like nothing else. After all, hadn’t the Prophet led a tiny band of disciplined, faithful refugees to defeat the armies of the idolaters? Weren’t they, the students, more organized, faithful, and dedicated than the greedy warlords and their poppy-sick foot soldiers? Weren’t they stronger than the bloodless city-dwellers who worshiped their money and their televisions? Shouldn’t Afghanistan belong to the students? And so, when the graduates of these schools coalesced into an army, they called themselves the Scholars: Taliban.
Larger, better organized, and more ferocious than the warlords, they quickly conquered the country and built a wahhabist state in line with what they’d learned at school. They burned jahil books and suppressed jahil media for the good of the faith.
This, at least, is the story the Taliban like to tell. The truth is, they’ve never been all that consistent as wahhabists. Trying to reconcile their philosophy with their actions, Alamendu Misra writes: “One does not wish to insist on the central ideology of the Taliban too much.” For all their vaunted schooling, the Taliban had a tendency to confuse their ethnic Pashtun culture with primeval Islam:
“Contrary to its claims, the Taliban’s authority was not rational Islamic communitarianism mediated by a contract. The appeals it made on behalf of Islam were historically grounded tribal behavioural patterns, values, and norms which were either pre-Islamic or had little to do with the code of conduct laid down in the Quran and the Hadith. The interpretation, distortion, and use of Islamic religious texts by the Taliban was therefore arbitrary and designed to incorporate its own narrow vision.” (581)
Their 20-page manifesto focuses almost entirely on international relations and Afghanistan’s new place in the world as a true Muslim community, though it says nothing specific about that community structure beyond vague references to Quranic principles. After five years in power, they were only just starting to draft a charter laying out the function and purpose of their government. In their first weeks back in power, they’ve only given vague, contradictory answers about their plans for Afghanistan, despite planning for this moment for the last twenty years.
Even their religious commitments are inconsistent. Taliban leaders have never been shy about their enthusiasm for dream interpretation: a common Pashtun cultural practice, but strictly forbidden by wahhabism. How can any Muslim practice divination or divine revelation when Muhammad is the final, perfect prophet? They’ve also never lost much sleep on whether their assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades are jahil. As with their Twitter accounts, they never condemn anything they like to use, or that gives them an advantage.
Most damningly, the Taliban show little loyalty to their correligionists. Wahhabism has always presented itself as a global movement. The Taliban, then, are supposed to go wherever they are needed for the international struggle against secular modernism, whether it’s the northern Caucasus, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, or Syria. Islamist fighters1 come to these warzones from all over the world. Afghanistan itself had been one of these flashpoints--that’s how Osama bin Laden came there in the first place, far from his Arabian homeland. “Yet,” writes Misra, even at the height of their power, “the number of war-loving Afghan mujahidin making it to these far-flung places was a trickle.”
But if religion wasn’t the motivation behind the Taliban’s censorship, what was? Misra has a guess: hatred of Afghan urbanites.
When outsiders discuss Afghanistan, they usually have the mountainous, harsh, rural Pashtun heartland in mind: poor, isolated, deeply conservative. This is where the Taliban come from. But the cities—Kabul, Mazar-i Sharif, Jalalabad, and others—are ancient, cosmopolitan places with long histories of cultural development, religious diversity, and far-flung trade networks. These are cities where Greeks, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Manichaeans lived together--extraordinary centers of trade and learning between Europe, India, and China.
Even with the decline of the Silk Road the colonial era, cities remained more powerful and affluent than the countryside. They are the natural home of Afghanistan’s cultural and economic elites. They don’t have much in common with their rural neighbors: they speak Dari among themselves, not Pashto; they have professions and wages, not farms and livestock; they have laws and police, not honor and feuds. Their daughters dress freely. They take books seriously.
The Taliban, growing up in warzones and refugee camps, were far away from these books, TV sets, cars, and trendy fashions. They had, Misra argues, “a deep-seated contempt for a normal lifestyle associated with a peaceful urban existence amid modernity and prosperity.” Kabul, with its mix of languages and cultures, its magazines and radios, universities and embassies, was alien to these illiterate Pashtun mountain farmers. The diversity of Afghanistan in the cities and outer provinces—Pashtuns, the largest group, are only two-fifths of the population—was baffling to them. Because they confused Pashtun with Muslim, they reacted violently to differences of language, dress, or custom. “By and large,” Misra writes, “all non-Pashtun Muslims in Afghanistan felt that the Taliban was using jihad as a cover to exterminate them.”
When the Taliban burn schools and libraries, then, or dynamite the Bamiyan Buddhas, they aren’t just religious inquisitors suppressing heresies laid down by a strict code. They are bloodthirsty yokels, getting their revenge against urban elites, successful ethnic minorities, and all the symbols of their power: industrial technology, secular government, and book learning.
Both of these theories can be true. I’m not an expert here, and I don’t pretend to know what the Taliban are thinking or what’s happening in the country right now. I’ve tried to stay close to my sources and focus on a specific question: when the Taliban burn books, what do they think they’re doing? I can’t say what they’ll do next, or what it means for the future of Afghanistan.
But I’ll bet that the next time the Taliban sets a stack of books on fire, you’ll see it on jahil Twitter.
Sources & Further Reading:
Most of my sources here are linked as I use them. Much of my information on the inner workings of the Taliban and its ties to wahhabism are from Amalendu Misra’s “The Taliban, radical Islam, and Afghanistan,” printed in Third World Quarterly, Vol 23, No 3.
Whether various Islamist groups qualify as “wahhabist” vs. salafist, qutbist, etc. is beyond my ken. The Taliban, for their part, call themselves wahhabists and were educated by self-proclaimed wahhabists, so I use that term here.