Tears for the Taliban
This is hardly surprising given the thinly disguised 'Islamophobia' of a number of well-known political and intellectual figures and the racist hate messages that one gets to sample in the cyber world. It seems not a few people in the West, would like to think that this is a religious war too.
The carnage and horrific deaths of civilians uninvolved in the conflict in the world's poorest country from the technological might of the US fire-power in the pursuit of one man, must have further strengthened that feeling among Muslims.
For Muslims, the suffering of their brother Muslims are also theirs and for many of us, the Taliban and the Afghan civilians are one and the same.
I happened to arrive in France just a day before the Sept 11 attacks. Some two weeks later, having dropped off our rented car at Terminal 2 of Charles De Gaulle Airport, we hopped on to a shuttle bus to a nearby hotel for a night's sleep before catching the flight home the next day.
The driver was a young devout Muslim from Egypt, which was rather unusual as most Arabs I meet in France come from the Maghreb. When all the other passengers have disembarked, we had a small chat as I am wont to do whenever I meet other Muslims in Western cities.
The conversation naturally gravitated towards Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama and the impending American retaliation. He told me that the moment the US starts bombing Afghanistan, he would drop everything and go to there to fight along the Talibans.
Having been driving the whole day, I was not in the mood to go into a lengthy discussion, knowing that it might ruin the new-found friendship that we had just struck.
Exploited sentiment
The fraternal spirit is not uniquely an Islamic characteristic, but of the great spiritual traditions this is perhaps most visible among its believers.
No doubt, this is because of the strong emphasis in its teaching of the equality of all men, regardless of race or social status as witnessed yearly at Haj (pilgrimage), and exemplified in history by the prophet's eminent companions such as Bilal, a liberated Ethiopian slave and Salman the Persian
Also, more than any other people, Muslims seem to have more than their fair of political misfortunes in the world's trouble spots. This kindred sentiment, without fail evokes feelings of sympathy towards fellow Muslims suffering elsewhere. But this powerful sentiment has also been exploited to rally Muslims to support a particular cause, without taking into consideration its justness.
A decade ago, as the US and her allies were preparing to bomb Baghdad during the Gulf war, Saddam Hussein exploited this sentiment and managed to gather leaders of Islamic movements to a hastily organised conference in Baghdad to win their support.
To prove his Islamic credentials, he lobbed a few scud missiles into Israel to the cheer of the Muslim world. Saddam was proclaimed the latter day Saladin, and his past evils were conveniently forgotten.
To many Muslims, it seemed impossible not to condemn the allied bombings of Baghdad without at the same time taking the side of Saddam Hussein. For such an attitude, Iraqi civilians continue to suffer a decade after the war, both from sanctions and continued bombings, and from Saddam's swiftly resumed repression.
When the seemingly invincible Taliban unexpectedly crumbled after six weeks of American bombing and we are presented with pictures of their captured combatants arbitrarily executed in the streets and heard of revenge killings and slaughter of their foreign volunteers in Mazar-e-Sharif, I couldn't help but to feel wistfully sad for their fate, despite what I feel about their oppressive policies.
This is because when they burst into the scene five years ago they were seen as devout, disinterested, strict Muslims whose arrival was welcomed by ordinary Afghans.
They have had enough of the lawlessness and internecine wars among belligerent Mujaheedin leaders and tribal warlords in the post-communist era.
It is their naivete and simplicity that had led them to be exploited by Saudis, Americans, Pakistanis and the Al-Qaeda. It is their entanglement with the Al-Qaeda that finally caused their grip to unravel and suffer humiliating defeat. At least that is the impression I had of them from whatever I have read in the past.
Diminishing support
As curious as the sudden collapse of the Taliban power, the fervour of support for them now seems to have markedly diminished. We do not see anymore the angry crowds in Pakistan or Indonesia calling for jihad (holy war).
Could it mean a fatigue of that fraternal spirit and Muslims elsewhere simply want to get on with their lives, or that they no longer see the issue in simplistic terms as a clash between Islam as represented by the Taliban, and the West?
The disillusionment of volunteers who had returned into Pakistan on the trail of the Taliban's retreat and the jubilation of Afghans in the liberated cities despite the return of ill-disciplined Northern Alliance troops may have made Muslims somewhat circumspect of the Taliban as well, that they too have something to answer for the tragedy that is Afghanistan.
In a seemingly last ditch effort to shore up Muslim support and exhort them to join the jihad along side the Taliban, there is an Internet posting widely circulated among Muslim professionals by one Azzam Publications.
It is meant to be a strongly worded farewell message whose gist is the equivalent of President Bush's, " If you're not with us, you're against us".
Just to quote a line, "The Taliban government have proved their Islamic legitimacy to the whole Muslim ummah whoever is not on the side of the Taliban is a hypocrite". The long message is couched in standard terms that appeal to the fraternal sentiment of Islam.
While this natural bond of brotherhood among believers is a positive thing that arouses sympathy for fellow muslims on whom a misfortune has befallen, this has also been extended to situations where muslims are at war with non-muslims, others must unconditionally take their side.
Under the sway of raw emotions, we often forget that we need to weigh the justness of the issue.
I chose to dwell on the Taliban phenomenon not because they are the first and the last of Afghanistan's problems. Afghanistan has been neglected by the international community especially by the US and Britain for whom the mujaheedin had been their proxy in the war with the Soviets after the Red army was driven out.
The four-year vacuum after the communists fell in 1992 was filled with lawlessness and internecine wars that killed 50,000 Afghan civilians and the periodic bombardment of Kabul that eventually saw the ascendancy of the Taliban
And with the present war, we hear less and less of America speaking about freedom and democracy, but only their dogged intention of killing Osama bin Laden and destroying the Taliban. The task of rebuilding Afghanistan seem only to concern her other allies.
But I chose to focus on the Taliban because in the name of Islamic brotherhood, we often prefer to close one eye and rationalise the errors of those who carry the banner of Islam.
The Taliban has been hailed in the Sunni world as the model Islamic government. We have to admit that muslims have not been particularly good at internal criticism. It must be said that to their credit, the Taliban succeeded in restoring order in Afghanistan as the territories that came under the control spread and ordinary Afghans thought they could now rebuild their lives.
Nobody expected the Taliban to introduce parliamentary democracy in Afghanistan, but at least they could have practiced some kind of benign, if not benevolent paternalism. They could have concentrated on alleviating poverty, rebuilding the educational and health infrastructure and institutions and regenerating the economy.
But instead they rapidly sclerosed into a rigid, obscurantist totalitarianism with an obsession on enforcing puritanical, strict moral codes, turning the wearing of turbans and beards for men and burqas (veil) for women into enforceable law.
Social life for women became very restricted when they were barred from education and employment. And there was a religious police to enforce the banning of television and music.
In the absence of civil institutions, poorly educated population, and militarised opposition, that quickly degenerated into a religious dictatorship.
Dysfunctional society
The rejoicing of Afghans in the streets with the retreat of the Taliban goes to show that ordinary people quite like freedom.
The rioting that took place on a Ramadhan day when a cinema in Kabul opened for the first time after the fall of the Taliban must have been a great embarrassment for muslims.
While common decency in any society is a necessity, turning asceticism and extreme moral precepts into enforceable law can only create a dysfunctional society.
The account by the Iranian film maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf who had travelled extensively in Afghanistan and witnessed the reality of life there in the course of making his two feature films, clearly pointed the direction the country was heading - poverty, corruption, oppressiveness and near famine as the economy ground to a halt.
But what brought the doom of the Taliban must be its entanglement with Al-Qaeda, although they are, in all likelihood, innocent of the Sept 11 attacks.
If Afghanistan had been abandoned by the US and Britain after the Soviet's defeat, the muslims are equally guilty of the same, by withholding good counsel and criticisms, if not substantial direct assistance.
How could we criticise them, they are our model in implementing the Quran and Sunnah, we just have to close our eyes to poverty, famine, oppressiveness and corruption. Today when the Taliban suffer humiliating defeat, their foreign volunteers abandoned and slaughtered, we don't hear anymore of those boisterous voices that called on muslims to join them in jihad.
Severe though it may be the blow that the muslim world has received in the aftermath of Sept 11, this is also an opportune time for earnest rethinking on the role of religion in politics, state and society.
The radicalisation of Islam can have but one outcome, such as what we are seeing now - the violence, intolerance, ignorance, poverty and hatred of the other that is becoming in dissociable from the religion.
Muslims are in a very weak position in almost every respect that violent provocation of the US is terribly unwise if not suicidal. It only serves to provide the world's only superpower the justification she needs to assert its force, act unilaterally in matters of humanity's common concerns and strengthen its hegemony on the rest of the world.
Thanks to the Sept 11 attacks, the threshold for labelling muslims as terrorists has been drastically lowered. From now on, muslims with legitimate struggle against injustices have to accept that this is what they up against and the world will be less generous to them.
The hostile and all-encompassing anti-West face of political Islam will only serve to polarise the world and lend credence to that obnoxious "clash" theory.
The Afghan lesson, just as Iran under the Ayatollahs, serves to illustrate that governing a nation-state requires not only moral integrity or piety but a good deal of worldliness too, and this is not to be mistaken with materialistic greed.
A modern nation state needs a government that is legitimated on representation, and is accountable and responsive to the needs of disparate sectors of society.
Two decades of radicalised political Islam has shown that this is a task not suited for traditional religious scholars whose claim to authority is said to derive from God, and who approach the sacred texts like a manual rather than a guide to manage human affairs in all its vastness and complexity.
The human intellect and man's experience in history are accorded a very lowly place in this scheme. Such a narrow and rigid view of religion leads to an obsession with imposing strict moral rules to the neglect of major concerns of normal governance in a modern society, even neglecting basic values of compassion, mercy and forgiveness that people tend to associate religions with.
Salvation, in the final analysis, is a personal matter and the state should not overburden itself with this responsibility.
The world can only hope that 20 years of misery and destruction of Afghanistan would drive enough sense into those who will shoulder the responsibility of rebuilding the "bombed to stone age" nation as they meet in Bonn this week. Equally, the sincerity of the international community will be put to the test.
