Engaging with the post-secular moment in post-9/11 Afghanistan: the search for a ‘humanist’ political discourse

Abstract

9/11 and the subsequent war on terror in Afghanistan have severely challenged the idea of a world politics based on secular modernity. While the post-9/11 Afghan society remains troubled with the post-secular conflict between the so-called Islamic-terrorist and secular-democratic forces, the need for a ‘humanist’ political discourse that could pave the way for peace has become paramount. This paper explores the viability of ‘post-Islamism’ as an alternative humanist political discourse. It sets out to demonstrate how a post-Islamic humanist discourse, which is defined by the dialogic process of developing a hermeneutical understanding of Islamic philosophy, has the potential to not only carve the way for peace amidst perilous entanglement between politics and religion in post-secular Afghanistan, but also vindicate Islam of its unjustified denigration in the contemporary world.

Notes

¹ While the Islamic-terrorist forces were represented by the Taliban and al-Qaida, the secular-democratic forces were organized under the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. Both these forces demonstrated post-secular tendencies as they explicitly used the language of ‘religion’ as grounds for mobilizing political support for themselves. Though Afghanistan has a long history of suppressing political attempts at secularization (discussed in detail in the second section of this article) and therefore has never witnessed a truly ‘secular’ era according to the Western standard of secularism conceived as a wall of separation between religion and politics, the successful deployment of ‘radical Islamism’ by the Taliban and al-Qaida as a strategy to rise to power consolidated the centrality of religion in Afghan politics like never before, thereby setting the post-secular parameters of contemporary Afghan society. In its reaction to the radical Islamism of the Taliban and al-Qaida, the so-called secular politics of the US also demonstrated post-secular symptoms. After comparing the US-led military action in Afghanistan to a crusade, US President George W Bush used the term ‘axis of evil’ in his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, to refer to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction. (For an insight into the attempted ‘political correctness’ behind the inclusion of non-Muslim North Korea in the ‘axis of evil’ see Levitt [2005, 108].) The notion of ‘axis of evil’ formed the moral foundation of the US-led global war on terrorism, or the ‘just war’. The official policy guiding this war, widely known as the ‘Bush Doctrine’, announced that no distinction would be made between Islamic terrorists and the ‘rogue states’ that sponsored or harboured them. Therefore, a new form of global war on (Islamic) terror had commenced which indicated the post-secular outlook of the US foreign policy. The recent political discourse in the US on the Islamic or non-Islamic nature of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and on the need to have an appropriate military strategy towards them reinforces the post-secular trend in US politics. For a detailed report on the discourse in the US on ISIS, see ‘Islamic State not Islamic? Kerry, Obama questioned over ISIS claims’, 18 September 2014, Fox News, <http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/18/islamic-state-not-islamic-kerry-obama-questioned-over-isis-claims/>, accessed 26 October 2014.

² Huntington influenced the US foreign policy in his dual capacity as a Pentagon advisor and a political scientist. Pointing out the profound impact of Huntingtonian clash of civilizations discourse on post-9/11 global politics, Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies asked, ‘Is it surprising that many in the West see today’s war on terrorism as the prelude to a renewed clash of civilizations? The question is in every newspaper and magazine. It did not need the right-wing American political scientist Huntington to pose the question—the idea has never actually gone away’ (Sardar and Davies 2004, 53–54).

³ Habermas claims that three overlapping phenomena, more than anything else, converge to create the impression of a worldwide ‘resurgence of religion’: (i) the missionary expansion of the major world religions; (ii) their fundamentalist radicalization; and (iii) the political instrumentalization of their inherent potential for violence. Habermas suggests that the religious reason must not be subordinated to the authority of secular reason in a post-secular society. The religious and the secular have to learn from each other.

⁴ Charles Taylor argues that secularism is a way of managing the diversity of religious, non-religious or anti-religious views without privileging one over another. In a discussion on ‘Rethinking secularism: the power of religion in the public sphere’ at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, held on 22 October 2009, Taylor delivered a lecture on ‘Why we need a radical redefinition of secularism’. The audio recording of the lecture is available at <http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/11/02/rethinking-secularism-audio/> accessed 30 May 2013>.

⁵ Talal Asad states that the separation between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ is a modern construct. Modern scholars such as Freud and Marx asserted that the material conditions of this-worldly life produce the idea of superstitious religion, the imagined God, the illusion of religion, the false consciousness of supernatural being, etc. Thus, the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former.

⁶ In the nineteenth century, British concerns over the possibility of a Russian invasion of British India promoted interest in Afghanistan and eventually led to three Anglo-Afghan wars. (For details see Shah [1978, 75].) After the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Afghanistan was forced to sign the Treaty of Gandamak and compromise its freedom in the field of foreign affairs. (For the full text of the treaty of Gandamak see Aitchison [1909, vol 2, 344–345].) After the end of the First World War in 1919, when Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central European powers, thereby recognizing the sovereignty of Afghanistan, the King of Afghanistan, Amanullah Khan, started to pressure the British government to recognize his rule. In the absence of any reply from the British, he declared war against them on 4 May 1919. Amanullah successfully wriggled Afghanistan out of British domination and the British were made to sign a peace treaty in August 1919 recognizing the complete independence of Afghanistan.

⁷ In recent times, one can witness the rise of a twofold trend in Afghan politics. First, there has been a growing distance in the relations between the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Taliban publicly distanced themselves from al-Qaida by releasing a statement that they would provide a ‘legal guarantee’ that they would not intervene in foreign countries if international troops withdrew from Afghanistan. This statement caused a flurry of dissent from al-Qaida-linked militants, who posted sharply critical statements on a number of Islamic-extremist websites. Al-Qaida declared a global jihad and rejected any collaboration with what were seen to be enemy governments, thereby signalling a parting of the ways with the Taliban. Second, there has been a renewal in the ties between the present Northern Alliance government of Afghanistan and the Taliban. Marking a shift from the traditional strategy of the Bush regime, Barack Obama encouraged the Northern Alliance to develop closeness with the Taliban. He stated that he would support efforts by the Northern Alliance government to open the door to those members of the Taliban who abandon violence and respect human rights and their fellow citizens. Such Taliban members have been labelled ‘good Taliban’. The discourse on distinguishing between ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad Taliban’ aims to peel off the reconcilable Taliban leaders from the irreconcilable ones. The recent willingness of American and Afghan officials to drop the names of ‘good Taliban’ from the United Nations (UN) blacklist of terrorists further testifies to the growing intimacy between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. Against the backdrop of this attempt to mellow a section of the Taliban, the dramatic rise of the Islamic State organization, formerly known as ISIS, and its proclamation of a so-called caliphate portend a new and more brutal face of al-Qaida-style global jihadism. A large section of the so-called ‘bad Taliban’ has reportedly joined ISIS. Nevertheless, Ahmed Rashid (2014) opines that the political impact of ISIS appears identical to that of the erstwhile Taliban. He argues, ‘In many ways, what the group [ISIS] is doing to Syria and Iraq resembles what the Taliban did in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 1990s.’ Rashid contends that, like the Taliban’s, ISIS’s war so far has been ‘about conquering territory rather than launching an Al Qaeda-style global jihad’.

⁸ Arkoun opines that any political discourse can reach the majority of the people only if integrates and articulates the most common and shared ideological elements from popular traditions or the social imagery, which represent a historical continuity outliving any political discourse.

⁹ SM Shirokogoroff, the pioneer of the ethnos theory, stated that ethnic units are processes, not static phenomena. The speed of such processes varies geographically and leads to unequal developments even within an ethnic group. (See Shirkogoroff 1935, 12–23.) According to Shirokogoroff’s assertion, the Pashtuns in Afghanistan are not a unified category. They subdivide themselves into thousands of tribes/gunds according to a genealogical charter that they use as a basis for unity and solidarity as well as fission and conflict.

¹⁰ The idea here is not to conflate ‘religious peity’ and ‘Pashtun identity’. Rather, these are separate yet inter-related factors explaining the rise of the Taliban. The Taliban evoked sharia and adopted the strategy of mobilizing Pashtun and not other ethnic groups (the Taliban emitted an anti-Shiite sentiment). The Taliban’s commitments to sharia and to ethnic Pashtuns were two distinct issues underlying the overall strategy of the Taliban.

¹¹ Asef Bayat traces early examples of post-Islamism in the reform movement in Iran in the late 1990s and the country’s Green Movement today, Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party, Egypt’s Hizb al-Wasat, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD) and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Each was originally fundamentalist but over time came to critique Islamist excess, the violation of democratic rights and the use of religion as a tool to sanctify political power. They all eventually opted to promote citizens’ rights within the framework of a democratic state. See Bayat (2011).

¹² In the twentieth century, small communities of Baha’is, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Sikhs lived in Afghanistan’s multicultural society. However, most members of these communities emigrated during the civil war and Taliban rule. According to the ‘International Religious Freedom Report’ released by the US Department of State in 2011 (see <http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2011/sca/192917.htm>), the non-Muslim Afghan populations had been virtually eliminated by 2001 except for a small population of native Hindus and Sikhs. Though some members of religious minorities have returned since the fall of the Taliban, others have left Kabul due to economic hardship and discrimination. Out of the 64 gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship) that existed before the Mujahideen era, only three active gurdwaras exist in Kabul and ten in other parts of the country. There are only five remaining Hindu mandirs (temples): two in Kabul, one of which shares a wall with a mosque, and one each in Jalalabad, Helmand and Kandahar. While many gurdwaras were seized during the Mujahideen era, 18 temples were destroyed or rendered unusable due to looting during the civil war. There are only four synagogues: one in Kabul and thre in Herat, which are no longer in use for lack of a Jewish community. Some Afghan citizens who converted to Christianity as refugees in third countries have returned. However, there are no public Christian churches in Afghanistan. Afghan Christians worship alone or in small congregations in private homes, while churches for the international community of various faiths are located in several military bases, Provincial Reconstruction Team centres, and the Italian embassy in Kabul. Buddhist foreigners are allowed to worship in Hindu temples. The followers of the Baha’i faith, who have survived in the country for approximately 150 years, are predominantly based in Kabul. Reportedly, more than 300 Baha’i members live in Kabul and another 100 live in other parts of the country.

¹³ The opinions of Razmak, Maduda, Roshan, Ayubi, Saihoon, Rasif, Paikan and Farid were expressed in the series of interviews conducted by the author during her visit to Kabul in July 2011.

¹⁴ Siddharth Dev Burman, a UN bureaucrat posted to Kabul, pointed out in an interview with the author that contemporary Afghan society has no middle class, as Afghans belonging to the upper middle class have settled in Western countries while Afghans belonging to the lower middle class have become refugees in Pakistan in the aftermath of the post-9/11 war on terror in Afghanistan.

¹⁵ For a detailed discussion of strategies for transforming the Afghan war economy into a peace economy see Rubin (1999), Das (2002), Ahmad (2002), Ottaway et al (2002), UN Office on Drugs and Crime (2003), Goodhand (2004) and Pugh et al (2004).

¹⁶ For a comprehensive understanding of the aims, values and discourses disseminated by the AHA, see <http://afghanhumanist.com/>, accessed 31 October 2014.

¹⁷ Commenting on the philanthropic nature of Quranic economics, Michael David Bonner (2005) writes, ‘The underlying principles of Quranic economics include “purification”— giving up a portion of wealth as alms—and the “return” of property. Just as God distributed his “surplus” as a gift that can never be reciprocated, so were Muslims expected to give freely and unstintingly.’