All Horns, No Head

By AM Sunday, August 29, 2021

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Anthony McIntyre ✒ shares a mish mash of thoughts on Taliban rule. 

Since I first read her book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism I have always appreciated the writing of Michelle Goldberg. Like Katherine Stewart, currently a prominent author on the religious right in the US,  Goldberg provides powerful insight into a range of Christian fundamentalist beliefs and practices much wider than the usual whack jobs that TPQ covers in its pieces from Right Wing Watch each Sunday morning.

In a piece for the New York Times titled "The Right-Wingers Who Admire the Taliban", Goldberg flags up “the open admiration for the Taliban that’s developed within parts of the American right.”

Powered by outrage at secularism, combined with a deep animosity towards the Democrats, the pro-Taliban sentiment is transparent. Nor is it something that should be casually dismissed as being on a par with Calvin the Calvinist fulminating on his laptop in Aghadowey, having just been told at Sunday Service that there are sinners out there who hold to the heretical belief that the earth is not 6000 years old. The type of people who espouse admiration for the Taliban are not on the margins where they should be but have influence and access to those in power.

The influential young white supremacist Nick Fuentes — an ally of the Arizona Republican congressman Paul Gosar and the anti-immigrant pundit Michelle Malkin — wrote on the encrypted app Telegram: “The Taliban is a conservative, religious force, the U.S. is godless and liberal. The defeat of the U.S. government in Afghanistan is unequivocally a positive development.”

An account linked to the far right misogynistic Proud Boys expressed similar sentiments. 

Goldberg makes the point about the toxic influence that the Taliban kindred spirit has acquired since 9/11:

the distance between the sort of right-wingers who cheer for the Taliban and conservative power centers has shrunk ... The tragic journey of the last two decades began with the loudest voices on the right braying for war with Islamism and ended with a right-wing vanguard envying it.

For someone like myself with something of a passing interest in US evangelicalism, this is not too wieldy to swallow in one go. Since first reading Kingdom Coming, I have been struck by the points of comparison between the Taliban and the US evangelical right. Take away the Afghan fundamentalists' garb, and the ideas have a lot in common.   

Fortunately for US women the US Taliban cheerleaders are not in power unlike in Afghanistan where the theocrats have set up the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Nevertheless, it is instructive that women are to the fore in offering discerning analysis of the dynamics within the US Christian Right. Religious fundamentalists of all hues display a visceral loathing of women and incessantly endeavour to curb their rights and freedoms. 

Now we have a situation in Afghanistan where “puritan barbarism” is the hegemonic force. An Afghan activist succinctly grasped the essence of the Taliban: they only have horns (guns), they have no head (ideas). If they give up their horns (barbarity), they will dissolve.

Despite all the posturing and defence of liberal values the US administration is hardly blameless for the beast being in heat again. The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 when the US reined in what it had breathed life into through CIA covert involvement in the anti-Soviet War which:

fueled Islamic militancy and inadvertently helped organize and orchestrate a resistance movement mostly composed of ardent religious fighters.

Patrick Cockburn listened to the reminiscences of a friend who remembers an era replete with theocrats, neither literate or enlightened.

She recalled Taliban leaders prior to 2001 who could not read or write and, at first, employed somebody to write their signature on official documents. “Later they had their signatures inscribed on a ring they would press down on an inkpad and then on a document,” she said.

The Taliban has its theological origins in India’s Deobandi Islam which:

adheres to orthodox Islamism insisting that the adherence to Sunni Islamic law, or sharia, is the path of salvation. It insists on the revival of Islamic practices that go back to the seventh century – the time of the Prophet Muhammad. It upholds the notion of global jihad as a sacred duty to protect Muslims across the world, and is opposed to any non-Islamic ideas.

Upon seizing power in 1996 the Taliban:

 

instituted a system of gender apartheid effectively thrusting the women of Afghanistan into a state of virtual house arrest. Under Taliban rule women were stripped of all human rights – their work, visibility, opportunity for education, voice, healthcare, and mobility.

Small wonder that in the wake of the latest rise to power by the Taliban it fell to women to challenge the theocrats and their warped Weltanschauung. A day after Kabul fell, and the US sponsored leader of a kleptocracy fled to safety leaving the hindmost to the devil, five young Afghan women gathered outside his abandoned palace. “Small in size but Himalayan in courage” they put it up to the armed thugs of the Taliban. 

Despite their courage the future looks likely to be blacked out by a niqāb. Much depends on whether the regions can force the Taliban to devolve power. But their Sunni "visceral hatred of the Shia as heretics" might well prove an immovable force.

Life no doubt was bad under the US occupation. Taliban suicide missions further compounded the misery bombed onto Afghan villages by the US war jets. The latter claimed more civilian lives. However, under the Taliban it will go from bad to worse. Once consolidated, Taliban will start deploying their horns more ruthlessly. 

 

⏩ Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.