 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-2001344218,00.html
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| Repressed homosexuality? |
| Michael Griffin The Taleban |
| Seven years after the Taleban movement was founded, the features of its leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, are unknown outside Kandahar, where he lived with his wife and children until the events of September 11. He has been described as about 44 years old and “unusually tall” for an Afghan; alternatively “heavy-set” or “distinguished”. His right eye is stitched shut, the result of an encounter with Soviet soldiers when he was a Mujahidin commander with the Harakat-I Inqilab-I-Islami Party. The left eye, his few visitors allow, has a “hawk-like, unrelenting” gaze. He assiduously cultivates this air of enigma in a refusal to be photographed, and by delegating all but the most crucial encounters with non-Afghans to colleagues or underlings. He has visited Kabul once since the Taleban captured it five years ago. What scant media access the Mullah permits tends to reinforce his image as a sphinx-like visitor from another plane of being. The atmosphere in his immediate court, by contrast, is relaxed and informal. Commanders come and go, dipping their fingers into the communal cooking pot and contributing at liberty to whatever discussion is going on. The Mullah keeps a strongbox by his side, handing out expenses as and when required. This is expected under the Pashtun tribal code, known as pashtunwali, in which relations between men are seldom hierarchical. Muhammad Omar’s first explanation of the Taleban’s mission was that it had arisen to restore peace, to provide security to the wayfarer and to protect the honour of women and the poor. But the rise of the mullah under the Taleban proved to be less a return to the elusive values cherished in pre-communist times than the stupefying of a spiritual tradition that once traced its origins back to the footsteps of the Prophet. The sayed, the pir and the alim, Afghanistan’s spiritual aristocracy, comprised a legacy that combined “High Church” trends in Islamic thought with a popular belief in spirit possession and anchored them in the everyday life of the village. The Taleban buried them all and the mullah, a cross between a country parson and a Shakespearean clown, recited the funeral rites. The young taleb, or religious students, who rallied to the cause were the product of the Deoband school of Sunni thought, founded 130 years earlier in Uttar Pradesh, India. The Deobandis represent the extreme of attempts to regulate the personal behaviour of their pupils, having issued nearly a quarter of a million fatwa on the minutiae of everyday life since the beginning of the 20th century. Boys enter the system as wards, exchanging life in a poor family for bed, board and an austere catechism that will one day lead to life as a mullah. It is tempting to identify in this early separation from female relatives the origins of the extreme misogyny that, even more than the objective of a pure Islamic state, lent cohesion to the Taleban as they marched into and subdued non-Pashtun lands. But Taleban misogyny went so far beyond what is normally intended by the word that it qualified as a kind of “gynaeophobia” so broad that a glimpse of stockinged foot or varnished nail was taken as a seductive invitation to personal damnation. Women had to be covered, closeted and, where necessary, beaten to prevent more sin from being spewed into society. Part of this anxiety was sexual and could be attributed to the highly charged rules of pashtunwali under which girls embark on the perilous road to puberty at seven when they are separated from boys and men. From then until marriage, youths have no permissible contact with the opposite sex beyond the members of their own family. In Kandahar, the custom of seclusion had given rise to a rich tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance and the practice of male prostitution. Heterosexual romance, by contrast, was freighted with the fear of broken honour, the threat of vendetta and, ultimately, death by stoning. In Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy courtesans conducted their affairs openly. The taleb grew to maturity on the gruel of orthodoxy, estranged from the mitigating influence of women, family and village. This made early recruits to the movement disciplined and biddable. If their gynaeophobia appeared the product of a repressed homosexuality on the march, Taleban cohorts also conjured up echoes of a medieval children’s crusade, with its associated elements of self-flagellation and an innocent trust in the immanence of paradise. The versatility of the Taleban elite, who alternate as military chiefs, governors and ministers, as well as mullahs, combined with the ingrained Afghan practice of adopting noms de guerre, argues in favour of the thesis that the movement merely clothed its membership in ecclesiastical titles to disguise their origins. This process of “clericalisation” similarly transformed each enemy defection into a Damascene conversion, just as the enforcement of Sharia-based edicts in non-Pashtun regions added a patina of religion to what was essentially the imposition of martial law. It also veiled a coat rack of skeletons. “Mullah” Muhammad Hassan, the Governor of Kandahar, had nothing to do with the religious world before his emergence as the Taleban’s number three, while “Mullah” Borjan, the movement’s Rommel until his death in 1996, was a former Afghan army officer who had served under King Zahir Shah. Other military figures were in the Afghan Army until 1992, making a mockery of Mullah Muhammad Omar’s claim that his goal was to rid Afghanistan of “time-serving communists”.
Michael Griffin is the author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com). |