Rafia Zakaria: Taliban: a response to modernity
Rafia has deconstructed the twisted rationale of the 'talibans' in this essay. She writes:
The purpose of this essay is thus to explain the ideological positioning of the Taliban as a global ideological phenomenon produced and sustained as much by philosophical currents and attitudes toward modernity and rationality as by structural factors within Pakistan. I hoped to reveal how a symbiosis of western ideas of what an authentic Pakistani should be in relation to the West, post-colonial confusions about identity, and the malleability of religious doctrine have all colluded to create the phenomenon we see today. The imagined Islam of the Taliban markets itself as a virulent reaction to modernity, disregarding the doctrinal and historical realities to the contrary.
In this regard, it is necessary first to appreciate the imagined Islam of the Taliban as an act of construction rather than reversion. Doing away with hundreds of years of jurisprudence of Classical Islamic law, of administrative procedures and methods of reasoning, of sources of law and juristic analysis, the Taliban has redefined Sharia as a performative tableau rather than a jurisprudential exercise. An entire judicial system thus is reduced to the application of hadd punishments, floggings, beatings and amputations. Thus the Qazi, arguably the most integral of those involved in justice provision, is nearly always invisible, while the crowd, the victim and those meting out a punishment play a central role. Justice is redefined as a means to subjugate and punish, with the entire collective crowd partaking in its pornographic enactment. There is no mention of the basis of the Islamic law applied, the deliberations which led to the application of the punishment, or any form of legitimacy that would associate the punishment with being Islamic. It is instead the anti-modernity of the whole spectacle, the absence of institutional safeguards, that makes the scene Islamic. The calculation is simple and persuasive: the more visibly different from the epithets of modernity that the Taliban can be, the more automatically Islamic it becomes.
***
To her otherwise excellent essay, I should add this refrain. The Talibans are a uniquely localised phenonomenon.
Islam is universal. Talibans are not!
[Terrorism, otoh, is a universal scrouge. And, even thoughmost terrorists in the news recently are Muslims, thge sage tell us all MUslims are not terrorists.]
And, they flourish and operate in a vacuum. One can argue if this vacuum existed or was allowed to exist with or without intent. We can also transpolate this argument to ex-Pakistan aread where the talibans thrived too.
Guess, we come back to the old perception that power abhors vacuum.
The purpose of this essay is thus to explain the ideological positioning of the Taliban as a global ideological phenomenon produced and sustained as much by philosophical currents and attitudes toward modernity and rationality as by structural factors within Pakistan. I hoped to reveal how a symbiosis of western ideas of what an authentic Pakistani should be in relation to the West, post-colonial confusions about identity, and the malleability of religious doctrine have all colluded to create the phenomenon we see today. The imagined Islam of the Taliban markets itself as a virulent reaction to modernity, disregarding the doctrinal and historical realities to the contrary.
In this regard, it is necessary first to appreciate the imagined Islam of the Taliban as an act of construction rather than reversion. Doing away with hundreds of years of jurisprudence of Classical Islamic law, of administrative procedures and methods of reasoning, of sources of law and juristic analysis, the Taliban has redefined Sharia as a performative tableau rather than a jurisprudential exercise. An entire judicial system thus is reduced to the application of hadd punishments, floggings, beatings and amputations. Thus the Qazi, arguably the most integral of those involved in justice provision, is nearly always invisible, while the crowd, the victim and those meting out a punishment play a central role. Justice is redefined as a means to subjugate and punish, with the entire collective crowd partaking in its pornographic enactment. There is no mention of the basis of the Islamic law applied, the deliberations which led to the application of the punishment, or any form of legitimacy that would associate the punishment with being Islamic. It is instead the anti-modernity of the whole spectacle, the absence of institutional safeguards, that makes the scene Islamic. The calculation is simple and persuasive: the more visibly different from the epithets of modernity that the Taliban can be, the more automatically Islamic it becomes.
***
To her otherwise excellent essay, I should add this refrain. The Talibans are a uniquely localised phenonomenon.
Islam is universal. Talibans are not!
[Terrorism, otoh, is a universal scrouge. And, even thoughmost terrorists in the news recently are Muslims, thge sage tell us all MUslims are not terrorists.]
And, they flourish and operate in a vacuum. One can argue if this vacuum existed or was allowed to exist with or without intent. We can also transpolate this argument to ex-Pakistan aread where the talibans thrived too.
Guess, we come back to the old perception that power abhors vacuum.
posted by temporal at 4/11/2009
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