With the capture of Kabul a week ago, the strongest political and military force in Afghanistan took power again after almost twenty years: the Taliban.

The Islamist movement profited above all from the weakness of its opponents, who were divided and discredited among many people.

Now it remains to be seen whether they are in a better position to govern Afghanistan - and whether they have learned anything from their first nationwide rule from 1996 to 2001. Many fear the worst, especially for women, when the Taliban speak of it that they want to reintroduce an “Islamic system” and the Sharia.

Christian Meier

Editor in politics.

  • Follow I follow

What they mean by this in detail is of course open;

just as the Taliban as a whole are difficult to pin down.

Are you, as some experts believe, representatives of 20th century Islamism?

Or do they rather stand for the recurring onslaught of rural groups, which are held together by strong tribal solidarity, on the urban centers, as described by the scholar Ibn Khaldun around 1400?

Closer to reality than such theses is that the Taliban represent a very unique and peculiar mixture, which could probably only bring about the special situation in Afghanistan.

A mixture of traditional and reformist Islam, Sufism and tribal thinking, emerged in a time of unequal modernization and shaped by years of war and flight.

Pseudo-Islamic guardians of virtue

The Taliban as we know it today were founded in the south of the country in the middle of 1994 in the vicinity of Koran schools to take action against the ubiquitous lawlessness of the civil war - as manifested itself above all in the checkpoints set up by armed gangs. As researchers such as Anand Gopal and Alex Strick van Linschoten point out, this first generation was socially and culturally anchored in the “world of the southern Pashtun village before 1979” - the year of the Soviet invasion. The traditional culture there was mainly characterized by tribal values, mixed with Islamic elements and Sufi mysticism. The position and visibility of women in society were under strong control by men and were associated with ideas of virtue and honor. Music was at least disreputable from a religious point of view,if not prohibited.

The ethnologist Conrad Schetter describes this peculiar mixture when he says that he has never seen a photo of a Talib with a Koran. “It's always guns and motorcycles that can be seen in the pictures. That is typical of a masculine culture in which the prevailing thought is that you have to protect your wife and family. ”In the past few days, says Schetter, this point of view has been shown again in the Taliban's statements that you have to be on the safe side Roads worry.

It was these norms and traditions that the Taliban implemented with extreme brutality when they first came to power in the 1990s. Their aim was not to change society (as modern Islamism aimed at), but to preserve it. This came about from the experiences of the collapse of the social order that they had made in the 1980s and early 1990s, during the uprising against the Soviet occupiers and afterwards when Afghanistan sank into civil war. Due to the chaos and hardship, the struggle of the Koran students for peace, security and Islam was initially welcomed by many people.