I Never Thought the Leopards Would Eat MY Face
Taliban Edition
WaPo (“As Taliban starts restricting men too, some regret not speaking up sooner“):
As the Taliban starts enforcing draconian new rules on women in Afghanistan, it has also begun to target a group that didn’t see tight restrictions on them coming: Afghan men.
Women have faced an onslaught of increasingly severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago. But men in urban areas could, for the most part, carry on freely.
The past four weeks, however, have brought significant changes for them, too. New laws promulgated in late August mandate that men wear a fist-long beard, bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior, widely interpreted as a prohibition against jeans, and ban haircuts that are against Islamic law, which essentially means short or Western styles. Men are now also prohibited from looking at women other than their wives or relatives.
As a result, more are growing beards, carrying prayer rugs and leaving their jeans at home.
These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.
The Taliban’s new rules governing men pale in comparison with restrictions the government has placed on girls and women, who remain banned from going to school above sixth grade, barred from universities and were recently prohibited from raising their voices in public, among many other rules.
But newly empowered religious morality officers, known for their white robes, have been knocking over the past four weeks on the doors of men in some parts of Kabul who haven’t recently attended mosque, according to residents. Government employees said they fear they’ll be let go for having failed to grow their beards, and some barbers now refuse to trim them. Increasingly, male taxi drivers are being stopped for violating gender segregation rules, by having unaccompanied female riders in their cars, or for playing music.
The new laws give the morality police authority to detain suspects for up to three days. In severe cases, such as repeated failure to pray in the mosque, suspects can be handed over to courts for trial and sentencing based on their interpretation of Islamic sharia law. Violations of the new rules are expected to be punished by fines or prison terms. But people found guilty of some infractions, for example adultery, could be sentenced to flogging or death by stoning.
Amir, a resident who lives in eastern Afghanistan, said he supported the Taliban up until the latest restrictions. But he now feels bullied into submission by their morality police.
“We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. He added, “Even people who have supported the Taliban are now trying to leave the country.”
In fairness, how could anyone have predicted that a group of religious zealots would impose their beliefs on men, not just women? I mean, other than their history of persecution of non-Pashtuns, destruction of centuries-old Afghan artifacts, and imposition of pre-Islamic tribal customs on the populace the last time they were in power.
I’m torn. On the one hand, the draconian abuse against Afghans dismays me. On the other hand, my first reaction to the cabbie’s lament is…
Bwa haha hahahaha hahahahahaha.
Reaping the whirlwind is never pleasant.
We handled that war badly, but I have regrets for the killing of Taliban. A monstrous regime.
@Michael Reynolds:
Don’t you mean “NO regrets”?
@Michael Reynolds:
Obviously the word ‘no’ is missing. Proving once again that I can write high, I can write tipsy, but I cannot write before coffee.
@CSK:
Oooh, simultaneous editing! I feel a little dirty. Hope my wife doesn’t hear about it.
@Michael Reynolds:
Bullets and bombs have historically proven ineffective against religious zealotry.
@Scott F.:
I’m not sure that’s true. Have you seen any Albigensians around lately?
Think of how many religions have been wiped out by violence. Religion X is spread through violence, and destroys religion Y. See: all the religions of pre-Columbian North and South America. Many of the religions of the Middle East and Africa. Indeed Arab Muslims are massacring Black animists and Christians even as we speak. There are hundreds of gods we can no longer even name because another religion erased them from history.
Christianity and Islam were spread by wars of conquest, suppressing gods who I imagine were worshipped as fervently as Jesus or Muhammed. Huitzilopochtli is not a name one hears often.
“Wait, you mean they actually meant all that shit? I figured it was just a schtick to allow them to beat up women.”
Expect the same response here if JD Vance ever manages to get hold of real power.
I think the big lesson of Afghanistan and Ukraine is that it’s impossible for an outside party to fight in the place of a people who don’t want to fight for themselves. While there were certainly many exceptions, the real story of Afghanistan is a people who were happy to just sit back and let whoever ended up winning win. Ukraine appears ready to fight for their country and thus does far more with far less than Afghanistan had.
@Stormy Dragon:
Afghanistan is a tribal culture, which means each tribe has its own subculture. They’ll never get together on anything, unlike Ukraine.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m not suggesting that war can’t effectively eradicate a religious people. Of course it can.
But, violence doesn’t quash zealotry and “erasure” is key. I’d imagine were there any surviving Albigensians, their zeal (and lust for vengeance in the name of their Gods) would be unabated.
@Stormy Dragon:
I think you’re right. We can help, we can’t replace.
@Scott F.:
I have not really worked the thought all the way through, but I have long been skeptical of the idea that oppression generally results in continuing resistance. It feels romantic to me. And also, very American.
I suspect it’s true in some cases, but in others, circumstances and priorities change. I don’t know whether Viking pagans continued to hate Viking Christians. And there were certainly followers of the Inca who survived Christian colonization, but they soon just did the smart thing and converted.
But, like I said, I’m open to evidence, and I don’t have much of my own to offer.
@Michael Reynolds: Your history is superficial, popular, and bad.
The Christian heretics the Roman church in Europe suppressed (until it could not from critical mss) were minorities in a sea of orthodoxy – not necessarily true believing orthodoxy but at minimum go along. The later history of larger scale heterodoxy is a European example.
In actual real history both Islamic and Xian spread occured by slow accretion of conversions over centuries – not forced conversion which in fact was never particularly successful from a minority position.
The tax records of the Islamic empires – quite precise in this area given differential tax rates and the great interest of the rulers in optimisation of their own revenues… – show quite clearly that Xians (or their equivalents – but most of the Western scholarship has focused from its own cultural interest on the former Xian territories) in fact remained majorities in every geography until rather late into the middle ages, and even ongoing minorities (e.g. Tunisia) into the 15th century even in places where they disappeared in following centuries.
(contrary to the bad popular history you have absorbed, the Islamic conquests were never about mass conversion at sword point – in fact conversion was not particularly encouraged… as the it cut into the conquerors taxs/Ghazi revenues – so one finds in the real primary documentation (not the later day blustering) the ruling class rather being unencouraging about conversion of the heath so much as ensuring security, control and tax revenue of which one got rather better rate from the unconverted, rather better… – but then better tax rates are quite the long-term motivators for conversion… ironic).
In short, if you know actual proper history as elucidated by good particularly documentary research, your examples fail. Suppression of the not-correct believers really requires a population majority.
Now if you wish to go Full Out Stalin – the example of the Soviet re-conquest of neighbouring Central Asian states does provide you with the model for success. But then you need to go Full Stalin, which means death camps, mass labour camps and deportations and being willing to “liquidate the Kulaks” (that is kill about a third or so of the population).
In the meantime, it would be rather best if Americans keep in mind that the Afghanistan of their journalists is the English speaking urbanites (Kaboulites especially)
@Lounsbury:
1) Is it not absurd to talk about voluntary anything in the presence of armed threat? And having seen their hierarchies wiped out in short order, their priests massacred, their temples torn down, and foreign rule imposed, I think the locals would not have mistaken the threat. It would be like suggesting that conversos, Spanish Jews were voluntary converts.
2) You made the assumption that I was alleging Muslims wiped out Christians. Well, of course they did, and enslaved millions to row their galleys – exempting Muslims, enslaving Christians. And maybe the odd Zoroastrian. But they also imposed their religion, by force, on indigenous religions. Animists generally. Again: once your leader has been killed, your army defeated, your clerics killed, and you’ve been occupied, very little is voluntary.
3) And BTW, an imposition of additional taxes and restrictions on rights is coercion, no? If I rule, and I decide that anyone named Lounsbury will pay triple taxes and be required to wear an off-the-rack suit unless they swear loyalty to Taylor Swift, I’m pretty sure you would not believe you were making a voluntary choice.
4)
Imperial Rome. Numerous bloody pogroms.
Poland: centuries of pogroms aimed at non-Christians.
Russia: Ditto.
5) Catholic v. Protestant Wars. See: about a century of European history.
Now, you can quibble over whether these oppressions and killings and enslavements were intended as efforts to convert, but you can’t say that any who did convert out of a desire to not row a galley, did so voluntarily.
@Lounsbury:
Finally! Something you and I agree on. And thank you for the alternate perspective on this question.
@Scott F.:
On the contrary, European history indicates the considerable efficacy of mass slaughter on discouraging religous zealotry.
Because dead zealots are not much of a problem, and many living possible zealots, look at the dead zealots and consider: “Would I rather live, or be a zealot?”
And then decide zealotry is not their preferred career option.
I can provide a rather long list of such cases, if you wish.
@Lounsbury:
I’m sorry, but forced conversion based on the conversion of a social elite, or its elimination or replacement, worked quite well in multiple instances in European history.
That Ommayad, and Abbasid, and Ottoman approaches were not based on forced conversion, but resulted from long term erosion due to legal advantages, does not prove that the kill/convert option is not viable.
@JohnSF: Ah… We now have the convergence of two competing faiths (in their respective conviction that their story is “the truth”). Laissez les bons temps roullez.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Bon temps have sadly little to do with it.
I’m thinking more of the mass slaughter of pagan Saxons by the Franks.
Or the aftermath of the defeat of the Anabaptists in Munster.
Or the mass killings of Hussites in Bohemia.
Or, on a lesser scale of killing, how the Anglicans in England suppressed the Puritans after 1660.
Or etc etc.
“Truth” often succumbs to power.
@Michael Reynolds:
Again, your history is superficial and bad.
The tax records, rather non-ideological sources, show that the centuries laters Just So Stories of burning conquest – much like the 19th century racialists Just So Stories were and are essentially post-facto puffery.
A. Priests etc were not massacred. Populations and churches continued e.g. in Islamic empires to majority Xian for centuries. Not years. Centuries. Similar pattern are seen (although less studied in non-ideological lens) ex-Xian (India, Central Asia). The best records are the tax records in these areas, free of ideological preening, full of sharp financial interest. Not that discriminatory taxation is all joy and love, rather it is sharp interest.
B. Pressure for conversion actually accelerates at a tipping point where the majority of the population passes to the new religion. There is sans doubt some nice literature about the social dynamics of this including a pattern of escalation of violence –
The case of the Muslims and the Jews in Spain is instructive.
1. Minority populations where already the majority was such that there was not a power question relative to resistance (i.e. cost)
2. The forced conversions came late in history and rather heavily ideological circa 1490s – in contrast with the centuries prior – where under both Xian and Muslim rulers, tax records (the most non-ideological of sources) do not show either side being heavily motivated prior to the 1400s to engage in mass conversion. Discriminatory taxation is rather more profitable.
Conversion happened over centuries, and as one sees in the Middle East proper right up to the 19th century (when emmigration rather than conversion accelerated) very significant non-Muslim minorities remained. The discrimination and taxation being tolerable (tolerable being a pragmatic judgment from the fact of after 1 thousand years+ of rule 20-40% minority populations remained) enough on the “we leave you alone to govern your internal affaires so long as you cough up your taxes at higher rate”.
The Talebans ideology is ironically not a Medieval one, it is a modern one – its Deobandist roots are very modern, mid-late 19th century to be precise (and ironically, Indian… from the British Raj… one can draw the liaison to a bad mix of European ideas and conservative reation, stewed into something rather nastier than the Medievals ever thought up0.
I said nothing about discriminatory taxation being joy and love and Kumbaya. That is your gallop to move a goal post from the comic book Mass Conversion by the Sword story.
The fact conversion dribbled on for centuries rather indicates a long-process – certainly not Kumbaya nor Lefty Millenials Everyone Gets A Gold Star and No One is Ever Mean to Me, but not conversion at sword point either.
Which returns to the fundamental.
The assertion of that historical model for Afghanistan is ‘not even wrong’
Of course one has the modern Stalinist example – but then you have to have the appetite
This list … well it is a red herring or simply you don’t understand “failure to mass convert by the sword” does not in any way mean “all Kumbaya”
Rome did not do pogroms, anachronist silliness, episodic reaction by Emperors fundamentally inconstant as they lacked the idealogy so really just pure anachronism – but Roman history rather shows again the failure of action by the sword where a population reaches a tipping point in percentages.
Yes, the Pograms against the Jews rather failed to convert them, but in any case violence against minorities in a sea of majority is a totally different subject and dynamic than the Afghan case, so in the realm of irrelevancies to the subject of Afghanistan and the Talebans.
Failures again from the PoV of elimination and conversion by the sword of a minority – although not really relevant to the subject of Afghanistan and action against a majority X population (not that elimination of a minority within a sea of a majority is impossible, as one can see where there is sufficient bloodiness, but it is a different subject entirely).
You think this makes your point?
It makes the one I was making in fact rather cited.
Mass conversion of a resistant majority (or near majority) did not work. Once tipping points were reached.
France was unable to eradicate by the sword it’s own Protestants in the areas where they had reach majority of the population – emmigration later solved this but the Wars of religion were quite spectacularly failures of conversion where the populations percentages had fundamentally changed underneth them.
@JohnSF: This is simply misframing – elite conversion and mass conversion are two entirely different subjects. It is quite evident in European history that the Roman church rather loved to exaggerate it’s conversions – and insofar as the records are less able to rely in the nice record keeping of the Islamic empires, with their built in bureaucracy that had quite the strong and concrete motivation – fiscal / taxation documentation to be precise, whatever the puffery and exageration written by the religious scholars who in the end on these subjects are most untrustworthy.
The rather better although not well documented later conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Xianity shows what reality rather than Roman church agitprop had, of accretion and transition until tipping points (after yes elite Kingly conversions but also it would seem popular accretion as the biais of the historical written record likely exaggerates materially royal roles.
The Kill option I have already pointed to is there – it is going Full Stalin – as the Soviets did in the late 20s through early 40s with Central Asia – but one can see in modern situation what is needed. Death camps and both the ability and williness to kill off 30% odd or so of the population. Not simply oppress, liquidate, not threaten to liquidate, actually do so. Even then the Sovs did not manage to eliminate foreign religious belief, only drive it into sullen hiddeness (in a certain misspent youth I was rather interested in this history, rather ugly reading one could even c. 90)
This all tells you that simplistic bad popular history evocations of Conversion by the Sword as some kind of referential for dealing with Afghanistan are just Bad Popular Mythology and thus a bad guide to any kind of reflection on action.