It's really interesting, especially the bit on Sharia Law - which comes after the book review.
A thread about the Taliban & sharia law. Everyone knows the Taliban run a brutal and oppressive legal system. But there are different ways a legal system can be bad and understanding how the Taliban's is bad, and how it isn't, is crucial for understanding their enduring appeal 1/
The Taliban's version of sharia law is misogynistic, placing extreme restrictions on women's lives, & imposes brutal criminal punishments. This obviously very bad. People often call it a strict interpretation, but this is misleading. If you strictly applied sharia you wouldn't 2/
be stoning people to death etc (will explain later). It's a radical interpretation of sharia law
As the scenes in Kabul show, a lot of Afghans are justifiably terrified of this. But many Afghans support the Taliban, hence their success. So do they want to lock women in their 3/
homes and stone people? Some do, but many others don't, and tacitly support, or decline to oppose, the Taliban anyway. Why?
(NB: this is not an argument about morality. Obviously you can say that such people are still culpable, but it doesn't help us understand the situation) 4/
Apart from whether its rules are just, the other measure of a legal system is whether it's "just" on its own terms. Are rules applied consistently? Can people enforce what limited rights they have? Do judges rule for the party with the strongest claim, or the biggest bribe? 5/
On this measure, the Taliban's legal system scores well, at least in comparison with the other legal regimes on offer in Afghanistan. The Taliban's central pitch to the population has always been a legal system that's harsh but fair. In the 90s, when the country was ruled by 6/
competing warlords, after a decade of mass displacement and a complete collapse of the state, you can see why this would appeal. Small farmers had their land appropriated by the warlords' goons. Merchants couldn't get their invoices paid. There was looting and kidnap rackets 7/
In the context, many found the Taliban better than the status quo. A functioning legal system, even one as oppressive as the Taliban's, allows people (or at least men) to function economically better than no legal system, or a hopelessly corrupt one. 8/
Why is this important? First, it's crucial to developing a strategy that could defeat the Taliban. I don't know what such a strategy would be, but building a kleptocratic colonial regime in league with drug cartels was probably the worst option. Second, it helps us avoid 9/
exoticizing the Taliban. Building an alternative legal system and demonstrating its superiority to the official one is a classic insurgent strategy. The IRA did it in Ireland in the 1910s/20s. It takes form of sharia in Afghanistan because that's the available cultural script 10/
But we won't understand it if we treat it simply as a product of an alien culture
This analysis of the Taliban has been common for years. US understood & tried to build a justice system but failed as the political system they created was too corrupt. A recent study is a book 11/
by Frank Ledwidge, Rebel Law, which I use when teaching this topic. Unfortunately it contains a few bits of colonialist nostalgia, but the overall analysis is good and I like the fact that he presents the Taliban and other islamist insurgencies in a comparative frame (using 12/
the IRA example) rather than treating them purely in terms of ideology. I reviewed it for the LSE Review of Books if anyone's interested. End/
Book Review - Rebel Law, Insurgents, Courts and Justice
Addendum: explaining my earlier comment on stoning. Yes, this is a punishment from classical Islamic law. But if you strictly applied the law (as it existed for a millennium until the 1970s), you wouldn't do it, as procedural law rendered it effectively inapplicable. The only 14/
acceptable proof was confession, or 4 adult free male Muslim witnesses of impeccable morality, who had witnessed the actual penetration "like the pen in the mascara pot." Obviously unlikely such witnesses would exist (if they had seen it, would they pass the morality test?) 15/
If they did, jurists said they were not obliged to testify, and it was morally better if they didn't. False accusation was punished with 80 lashes, and a witness in a failed prosecution was liable to this. If the prosecution succeeded, the witnesses had to throw the stones 16/
So the jurists couldn't have made it any clearer the penalty shouldn't be used. Even if someone confessed they must repeat it 4 times while the judge encouraged them to retract.Some jurists even said that climbing out of the stoning pit and running away counted as retraction 17/
Similar procedural hurdles were applied to other harsh penalties like amputation. Even death penalty for murder was discouraged. When British took over India their main complaint was that sharia was too lenient. So whatever Taliban are doing, they aren't applying sharia strictly
I hope no idiots read this thread as an endorsement of the Taliban or sharia law. It should be obvious that I don't support either. I do study the history of sharia law and think that understanding things is important
pps - when the British in India found sharia too lenient, this was by comparison to 18th-century English criminal law, which imposed the death penalty for all kinds of trivial things. It wouldn't look lenient by our standards today!
2 comments:
This is how the Taliban started:
There are lots of stories about how Omar mobilised the Talibs under his command.
“The most credible story”, writes Ahmed Rashid in his book, Taliban, “is that in the spring of 1994, Singesar neighbours came to tell him that a commander had abducted two teenage girls.” They were taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar attacked the base with some 30 Talibs, freed the girls and hanged the commander from the barrel of a tank. From the base, they captured arms and ammunition, beginning a long journey of bloody militancy.
As for lastgreek's comment:
U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies
KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.
After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.
source: U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies
Just for the record, I'm not pro-Taliban.
As an aside, I thought buggery was a Greek thing.
Homosexuality: sexual attraction to persons of the same sex. In ancient Greece, this was a normal practice.
Pedagogical pederasty
Those scholars who prefer the historical approach are convinced that pederasty originates in Dorian initiation rites. The Dorians were the last tribe to migrate to Greece, and they are usually described as real he-men with a very masculine culture. According to the proponents of this theory, pederasty came to being on the Dorian island Crete, where grown-up men used to kidnap (consenting) adolescents. It is assumed that this practice spread from Crete to the Greek mainland. In the soldiers' city Sparta, it was not uncommon when a warrior took care of a younger recruit and stood next to him on the battlefield, where the two bravely protected each other. Especially in aristocratic circles, pederasty is believed to have been common.
source: Greek Homosexuality
Also, I saw this joke the other day:
The Greeks invented the threesome. But it was the Romans who thought of adding women.
source: joke link
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