Islamic scholars question Taliban's ideas

By Kathy Gannon and Richard N. Ostkubg

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP): What sort of religious regime would demand the demolition of grand artworks that have stood for 15 centuries? Or eliminate schooling for girls after age 8? Or chop off the hands or feet of thieves at stadium rallies?

According to the zealous Taliban who have ruled most of Afghanistan since 1996, faithfulness to Islam requires such unprecedented harshness, enforced by police from the omnipresent Ministry of Virtue and Vice.

But Muslim moderates and scholars in other lands say the Taliban are wrong.

Afghanistan's destruction of two monumental Buddha statues in recent days has provoked near-universal outrage, from Muslim leaders as well as art lovers. Egypt's highest Muslim authority, Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel, joined prominent Qatar scholar Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi and others in an emergency mission to urge the regime to reconsider.

The Taliban leaders were not swayed: Islam's stand against idolatry, they said, demands elimination of these and other open- air statues and thousands of art treasures held in Afghan museums, which now reportedly have been destroyed.

"Such behavior comes to undermine the image of Islam and even to make some Muslims skeptical whether their faith can face the challenges of modernism," former Egyptian diplomat Hussein Ahmed Amin wrote this week.

An Afghan scholar in the United States, Amin Tarzi, charges that his homeland's rulers feed off the people's "illiteracy and lack of knowledge of traditional Islamic teachings."

The Taliban employ religion as well as Pashtun tribal traditions "to legitimize their rule based on a terror system," says Tarzi, of the Monterey (Calif.) Institute of International Studies. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group.

Others are simply baffled.

"I personally don't have any idea where they get some of their ideas," says Anis Ahmed, a professor of Pakistan's Islamic University.

Some tenets come from literal interpretation of the Koran, the Muslim scripture, Ahmed explains, but "if you take things literally that will lead to extremism." He says the Koran must be read in light of its context and application in the Sunnah, the authoritative sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Muslim world has largely spurned the Taliban. The Organization of the Islamic Conference refuses to admit the regime and only three of the 56 member nations (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) grant it recognition.

Even neighboring Iran, whose 1979 revolution energized militant Islamists worldwide, spurns the Taliban, although that hostility stems from alleged Taliban persecution of fellow Shiite Muslims. Islam's larger Sunni branch dominates in Afghanistan.

The Taliban emerged in 1994, promising peace and rebelling against warring Islamic factions that had ravaged the country and killed 50,000 people.

They are led by the reclusive Mullah Mohammed Omar, the self- declared "king of the Muslims," and a circle of eight to 10 colleagues from Kandahar in the deeply tribal southeast, near the Pakistan border.

Omar says in a movement magazine that "the Taliban was a simple band of dedicated youths ... determined to establish the laws of God on earth, and prepared to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of that goal."

Taliban means "students," and many followers attended conservative Muslim schools in Pakistan as refugees during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Many studied at Dar- ul Uloom Haqqani in Akora Khattak, one of Pakistan's largest Muslim campuses.

The Taliban follow the severe Deobandi school, named for Deoband, an Indian town where 1,000 students from many nations train to teach and lead mosques at the influential, 140-year-old Dar-ul Uloom.

This is the academic source for the Taliban gender policies. "It is biologically, religiously and prophetically proven that men are superior to women," says Maulana Adil Siddiqu, a seminary spokesman. "Women can be educated and improved, but not to the extent of a man."

The Taliban sometimes depict the limit on girls' schooling as temporary. Their prohibition of women working outside the home is part of strict segregation of the sexes to prevent sexual impropriety. Similarly, women are only allowed outside the home if accompanied by a close male relative.

The government relented on employment to let women work for international agencies, but last year temporarily shut down foreign-run charity bakeries that employ destitute widows.

On education, Tarzi notes that the Koran (7:189; 16:97; 33:35) mandates religious equality and training for men and women alike. He says the scriptural dictum that women should "stay quietly in your houses" and appear only before male relatives (33:32-3,53-5) applied only to the Prophet Muhammad's wives.

"I have not found anywhere in Islamic teachings where women cannot go out, and education is obligatory," agrees Ahmed.

As for the Buddha-smashing, Islam abhors worship of idols and, consequently, pious artists do not depict the human form. Muhammad cleared Mecca of idols when he inaugurated the religion. But Muslims did not believe that required elimination of pre- Islamic statuary when they conquered Egypt and Iran soon after Muhammad's lifetime.

Qatar's Al-Qaradawi issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, this month that the Afghan statues are not active idols and thus do not threaten belief or contradict doctrine.

The Taliban can cite one precedent. Afghanistan's 12th century Sultan Mahmood Ghaznavi rampaged across northern India smashing many Hindu idols. But Tarzi says the sultan probably used religion as a cover for acquiring the gems and precious metals the figures were encrusted with.

There's long been debate over Islamic punishments.

The Koran's prescribed penalty for theft is cutting off the hands (5:38), but Ahmed says this applies only in extreme situations and others cite the very next verse, which teaches God's forgiveness of those who repent. Most Muslim nations today do not mutilate thieves.

On dress, the Taliban require all Afghan women to be shrouded in a burqa from head to toe. But many Muslims follow looser understandings of modesty. The Koran merely tells women to "draw their veils over their bosoms."

Similarly, Afghan men must cover their heads and cannot wear shorts or short-sleeved shirts.

In January, Omar decreed that anyone who converts from Islam to another religion, or who seeks such conversions, will be killed. The Koran (16:104) prescribes "a dreadful penalty" for a Muslim who "utters unbelief," and some other Muslim nations have similar laws, but actual executions are rare.

Other Taliban rules follow fundamentalist Islamic or Pashtun traditions that most believers do not see as faith requirements. Among them:

The only allowable music is religious song, unaccompanied by instruments. (However, police have not interfered with music played privately in worship by the Hindu and Sikh minorities.)

Television, movies and videos are banned. So is kite-flying, seen as a frivolous distraction from a life of prayer.

Public bath houses have been shut down, even though the masses lack running water.

Material published outside Afghanistan is forbidden, and bookstore owners selling material about other religions or critizing Islam face five years in prison.

Men cannot clip their beards or shave (punishable by public beating) or wear long hair over the forehead.

Men's attendance at mosque is enforced by rifle-toting soldiers.

Taxi drivers are publicly beaten if they carry solo women passengers.

Women are encouraged to paint the first-floor windows of their homes black so men cannot peer inside.

Paper bags are illegal for fear recycled paper would include discarded copies of the Koran.

Overall, says Tarzi, the Taliban are in the process of creating a variant that Islam has never before seen, extending far beyond the puritanical Islamic reform that the 19th century Wahhabi movement imposed in Saudi Arabia.

"This is absolutely new," he says. "No other Islamic country comes close."

The phenomenon could spread. Taliban-inspired rules are already being imposed in neighboring rural areas within Pakistan. And Afghanistan is a haven for hundreds of activists who are believed to be preparing to overthrow the more moderate Muslim governments in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Islamic states of the former Soviet Union.