A Violent Nexus: Ethnonationalism, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Taliban

Abstract

The Taliban is a prime example of a movement that combines a fundamentalist interpretation of religion with a particular form of exclusionary Pashtun ethnonationalism among the jihadist groups. The existing literature on jihadist groups recognizes this trend in so far as a distinction is made between groups that focus on local objectives and others that pursue global objectives such as attacking Western interests. However, there are important gaps in understanding the mechanisms and implications of the interpenetration of religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism. This article aims to address this gap by unpacking the mechanisms that link religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism as hybrid ideological underpinnings of the Taliban. It argues that a more nuanced understanding of the entanglement of these ideologies is necessary for developing effective strategies for building peace and inclusive societies.

Keywords:

• Taliban
• fundamentalism
• ethnonationalism
• hybridity
• violence
• Islam
• Afghanistan

Nationalism and religious fundamentalism may appear as two distinct and incompatible ideologies. Nationalism seeks to advance the desires and aspirations of a particular national or ethnic community, while religious edicts transcend or prohibit social divisions along these secular social boundaries. The former defends and protects the political and material interests of communities based on myths of common blood and territory. The latter seeks to cultivate a community of faith-based fraternity for spiritual salvation.

However, empirically, religious fundamentalism and nationalism are often closely intertwined, resulting in the rise of some of the most violent movements in recent decades. But how do nationalism and fundamentalism overlap in violent fundamentalist movements such as the Taliban? In their extreme forms, both movements use violence and repression to invent and impose an essentialist understanding of religion and tradition religiously and ethnically diverse societies. The study of these groups is often dominated by a focus on their propensity to use religiously motivated violence against Western influence and interests or national secular regimes. As a result, these groups are generally categorized as jihadists, terrorists, or insurgents. These categories foreground their religious motivations and ideologies, often in the context of the threats they present to Western or international peace and security (Gerges 2009; Wiktorowicz 2006). In so far as nationalism is discussed in the context of the Taliban, the debate is dominated by two opposite positions. One line of research points to the Taliban’s predominantly Pashtun leadership and social following and its use of Pashtun traditions and myths to describe it as a Pashtun ethnonationalist movement (Kamel 2015). Others have argued against categorizing the Taliban as an ethnonationalist movement, pointing to its fundamentalist religious ideology, its general tendency to refrain from explicit ethnicist discourse, and even active opposition to some traditional Pashtun cultural elements (Gopal 2016). At best such dichotomy between religious fundamentalist and ethnonationalist categorization of the Taliban is providing a partial understanding and at worst it is leading to an intellectual deadlock.

This article aims to go beyond these dichotomies by systematically interrogating the role of religion and ethnonationalism as hybrid ideological undercurrents of the Taliban. The article focuses on the Taliban's practice and professed ideology, examining the process of hybridization of a fundamentalist religious ideology with violent, discriminatory tendencies towards other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The analysis presented in this article extends the current literature by highlighting violence and injustices that result from the hybridization of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism. As such, it presents a perspective that highlights local experiences of exclusion, marginalization, and injustices in a field of research that is largely dominated by Western and international security considerations. Furthermore, it contributes to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex political and historical ecology of violent and exclusionary movements, which is imperative in developing effective strategies for building peace and inclusive societies.

Religious Fundamentalism and Nationalism and the Taliban

The roles of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism as the primary ideology of the Taliban have long been the subjects of debates in academic research, policy debates and media commentaries. One line of research has focused on the Taliban’s capacity to selectively tap into and employ elements of religion and nationalism to anchor its religious fundamentalist ideology into a particular nationalist narrative and myths in Afghanistan. Kamel (2015) argued that the Taliban’s resurgence after it was overthrown from power in 2001 can be explained by the capacity of its leaders to selectively exploit Pashtun and Islamic mythomoteurs as part of a strategy of symbolic cultivation. Citing the concentration of the Taliban’s violence in predominantly Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kaplan (2009, 103) argued that “the Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism.” Ayoob (2019) similarly claimed that “Pashtun nationalism now primarily [is] represented, even if in distorted fashion, by a resurgent Taliban.”

However, many would be deeply uncomfortable with accepting the Taliban as a nationalist force or its violent representation of Pashtun culture and traditions or those of Afghanistan more broadly. Consequently, there are many arguments against categorizing the Taliban as a Pashtun ethnonationalist force. Some argue that rather than an indigenous nationalist force, the Taliban is an instrument of Pakistan’s foreign policies of subduing and subverting Pashtun nationalism in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. For example, Saikal (2010, 9) stated that Islamabad used “radical Islamism as a counter-balance to Pashtun nationalism.” Central to this contention is the pattern of historical dependence of the Taliban or Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami on Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and religious groups. The argument is that Pakistan supports these groups to subdue and marginalize Pashtun’s irredentist movements that dispute the Durand Line between the two countries. It has also been argued that the Taliban is not an ethnonationalist force because it violently suppresses Pashtun cultural traditions such as jirgas, and Pashtun traditional figures like tribal elders and liberal/secular Pashtuns and that there are non-Pashtun members within the Taliban movement in Afghanistan (Giustozzi 2010) and Pakistan (Ghufran 2009).

Each of these lines of argument point to a specific dimension of the Taliban as a more complex, multilayered movement (Ibrahimi and Farasoo 2022). The Taliban’s genesis after 1994, as Roy (2002, 154–155) contended, was the outcome of multiple local and external developments, including the transformation of local religious networks during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, the increased connection of these networks with international Islamist networks, and Pakistan’s decision to embrace the Taliban as a strategic tool of its Afghanistan policy. As Hyman also stated (2002, 312), “if the material godfathers of the Taliban were Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) … its spiritual godfathers are the Jami'at-i Ulama-I Islam.” Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, as these experts have repeatedly noted, was central to its ability to survive and reorganize after it was overthrown from power in 2001.

However, the divide between these two positions reflects an understanding of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism as incompatible ideologies. In principle, nationalism and religious fundamentalism as pure ideologies are irreconcilable forces. Religions tend to promote universal messages that are at odds with the narrow and exclusionary conceptions of social identities by nationalist movements. Nationalism as Gellner (1983, 1) argued is a political ideology that posits “that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” Furthermore, nationalism is also commonly conceived as a secular force that is incompatible with religious fundamentalism. In fact, modernist scholars saw nationalism as a secular phenomenon that developed in the wake of the weakening of religion’s influence after the Enlightenment in Europe. For example, Anderson (2006, 11) argued that “in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought.” The new national community, Anderson argued, was emerging out of the disintegration of the traditional cultural systems such as religious community and the dynastic realm.

However, the connection between religious fundamentalism and nationalism is neither historically new nor unique to the Taliban and Afghanistan. In the context of the post-2003 US invasion, Iraq also witnessed the emergence of a range of militias with multiple and overlapping ideological tendencies. Dodge (2008, 99) argues that although these militias were “formed as a response to the security vacuum, they have attempted to legitimize themselves by the deployment of hybrid ideologies—sectarian, religious and nationalist.” Ayoob and Lussier (2020) see the hybridization process resulting from a shift towards political Islam in the wake of the failure of ethnic and national resistance movements in Muslim-majority countries to secure autonomy from repressive regimes or independence from foreign powers. They argue that in the process “ethnonational movements become ethnoreligious ones” (Ayoob and Lussier 2020, 118). These cases reflect broader patterns of the relationship between religion and nationalism, which has led to violent conflicts between groups that invoke major religions in many parts of the world. In fact, religion is seen as a resurgent force that underpins many nationalist movements around the world. Brubaker (2012) offered four ways of understanding the relationship between nationalism and religion. First, some scholars treat religion as analogous to nationalism and its other constituent components such as race and ethnicity. A second group of scholars have drawn on religion to explain nationalism and its varieties in specific contexts. A third strand of research focuses on religion as a component of nationalism, exploring the dynamics of interpenetration between the two phenomena. A fourth line of research is concerned with the influence of religion on nationalism in creating a distinct form of religious nationalism.

Hybridization of Ethnonationalism and Religious Fundamentalism

In this article, I take the third approach identified by Brubaker (2012) to explain the entanglement of religious fundamentalism with a particular variant of Pashtun nationalism as a process of hybridization of two distinct but empirically compatible ideologies. To lay out a necessary conceptual framework, it would be useful to draw on the concepts of boundaries and contents of social identity categories. The concepts are primarily developed in studies of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism and are consequently useful in explaining the intersection of ethnic, national, and religious identities. Before the advent of constructivist scholarship in recent decades, social identities were defined by their contents, including the objective and cultural components that constituted these identities. As one of the early critics of essentialist conceptions of these identities, Fredrick Barth (1969, 15) argued that studies of ethnicity should focus on the “ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses it.” However, subsequent researchers have pointed to the importance of studying not only the social boundaries that separate groups but also the cultural and material materials that develop within those boundaries. Emphasizing the significance of studying ethnic boundaries and contents, Conversi (1999, 554) made the following distinction between the two interrelated aspects of group identities:

“Content” here is taken to mean whatever is enclosed in a boundary; whereas the boundary represents the subjective perception of ethnicity what separate in-group from out-group[,] content is instead the objective repertoire, heritage, and treasure, which can actually convey, emphasize, and enrich the cultural experience of belonging. To simplify, boundary relates to psychology, while content relates to culture; in some ways the former is invisible, the latter is visible.

As constructivist scholarship posits, ethnic boundaries and contents are not fixed and unchanging realities. The fluidity of these boundaries and contents can be observed throughout the history of modern Afghanistan. Afghanistan was established as a territorial unit with marked boundaries during the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901). The centralized state he built continues to dominate the political imagination of subsequent political elites and nationalist movements and demonstrates remarkable parallels to the Taliban’s Islamic emirate a century later. However, it would also be a mistake to compare Abdur Rahman Khan or the Taliban leaders with nationalist leaders of the 20^th century who unified their nations in struggles for political independence from foreign colonial powers or domination. On the contrary, both Abdur Rahman Khan and the Taliban relied on the patronage of foreign powers to subjugate, divide, and colonize the country’s diverse cultural populations. Similar to the Taliban’s strategic dependence on Pakistan, the Iron Amir's methods of centralization of power involved relying on an external power (British India), utilizing Islam and intergroup mobilization and isolating the country from foreign cultural influences (Ibrahimi 2017, 53–86). Of course, the Taliban’s clerical emirate is in stark contrast to Abdur Rahman Khan’s kingship, which subjugated the clerics to the authority of his throne. The main point is that Abdur Rahman Khan set a model of centralized repressive rule that continues to hinder the development of an inclusive national identity and serves as a precedent for exclusionary and violent movements such as the Taliban.

However, this top-down and exclusionary variant has always been challenged by rival conceptions of nation and nationhood. Consequently, the contents and character of the nation, group identities and their relations with the state have been the subjects of intense, and often violent, contestations. As Edwards (1996) documented, since its birth the Afghan state was confronted by deep divisions created by different value systems of tribal solidarity, kingship and religion among the Pashtuns. Mahmud Tarzi, who is regarded as the first intellectual architect of modern Afghan nationalism, attempted to articulate a national identity through a series of articles in Siraj al-Akhbar in the second decade of the 20^th century. He outlined religion (din), state (dawlat), homeland (watan), and nation (millat) as the core interrelated elements of the nation-state in the country (Gregorian 1967; Nawid 2016).

As Afghanistan’s subsequent history demonstrates, the conceptions of religion, state, and nation varied from one political regime to another and between the top-down state-led impositions and bottom-up social resistance against the nationalizing projects of state elites. Amanullah Khan adopted much of Tarzi’s ideas in programs of state-led modernization but only to be violently overthrown in 1929 by conservative groups that employed religion and tradition as instruments of mobilization against the state. In recent decades, religion and national traditions, as the core components of national identity, have found expression in terms such as Afghaniyat (Afghanness) and Islamiyat (Islamicness). The ethnonym Afghan, which was historically used to refer to Pashtuns, was officially adopted as a marker of the national identity of all citizens of the country in the 1964 constitution. Subsequently, while the term is commonly used internationally as the descriptor of citizens of the country, domestically many groups challenge such general categorization of all inhabitants of the country, viewing it as the imposition of the identity of one ethnic group over others. During the Republic era from 2001 to 2021, the state used educational curriculum to promote Islam, watan, qawm (ethnic identity) and Afghaniyat as the core components of national identity (Sungur 2022). Similarly, Islam as a religion of the vast majority of the population is often accepted as a framework for national cohesion and solidarity and a source of laws. However, political groups and ruling regimes have used widely divergent interpretations of Islam, ranging from moderate application of religion in state policies to ultraconservative programs for social control. Consequently, when it comes to nationalism in Afghanistan and conceptions of national identity, it is important to consider varieties of nationalisms (religious, ethnic, territorial, and civic) and religious interpretations (secular, moderate, and fundamentalist).

The Taliban embodies a unique hybridization of religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism. In this article, I seek to elucidate this process. Firstly, I draw an analytical distinction between ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism as ideal types situated at opposing ends of the spectrum. Consequently, I contend that Afghanistan manifests a range of nationalist and religious fundamentalist tendencies throughout its modern history, with diverse movements vying to shape national and ethnic identities and their social boundaries. Among the Pashtuns, these include figures like Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who championed non-violence through the Khudai Khidmatgar resistance movement against British colonial rule in India, as well as groups like the Taliban. Although theoretically incompatible, the positions of various fundamentalist and nationalist forces have frequently shifted along the spectrum.

Secondly, I posit that the oscillation between ideal-type secular nationalism and religious nationalism can be attributed to the mechanisms of change in social boundaries. Tilly (2004) identified several key mechanisms that drive such changes, including encounter, imposition, borrowing, conversation, and incentive shifts. When individuals affiliated with different social networks come into contact with one another, they tend to establish social boundaries that delineate the spaces occupied by their respective distinct social groups. These social boundaries can also arise through the imposition of categorizations and differentiations by state authorities. Despite their distinct social affiliations, groups often engage in conversations and various forms of interaction, which can either solidify or alter social boundaries. Additionally, groups may adopt organizational models and approaches from other groups, leading to the formation of new social boundaries. The dynamics of cooperation within a particular social space and conflicts with groups across social boundaries can result in incentive shifts, wherein certain forms of within-boundary relations are rewarded, while cross-boundary contacts are penalized.

Thirdly, I contend that the intermingling of these mechanisms leads to a process of hybridization, blending religious fundamentalism and ethnonationalism. Hegghammer (2009, 32) employs this term to illustrate the convergence of “ideal justifications for violence” and the associated blending of enemy hierarchies. Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda exemplify this by directing violence towards Western powers (the “far enemy”) or local political regimes (the “near enemies”). However, these groups do not always neatly align with external enemy hierarchies, as some focus on a combination of near and far enemies, and priorities may shift over time. In this article, I employ the concept of hybridization to describe the process of fusion of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism in the case of the Taliban.

Taliban Discourses on Religion, Ethnicity, and National Identity

Among the major contemporary fundamentalist movements, the Taliban can be distinguished by its relatively poor intellectual and ideological discourse. Among the group’s leaders, there are no intellectual figures that can parallel other Islamist thinkers such as Abu A'la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, or Ruhollah Khomeini in articulating a coherent ideological discourse. Outside their ranks, none of the Taliban’s leaders, including Mullah Omar, its founder, or Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, are recognized for their credentials as intellectuals or Islamic scholars. Consequently, beyond its prolific media activities, which often work as a propaganda operation, the Taliban has rarely spelled out a detailed intellectual discourse on issues of governance, nationhood, national identity, and cultural and ethnic representation. The group’s leaders have addressed issues of ethnicity and national representation only to respond to the criticisms of its ethnically exclusive and discriminatory policies. In response to such criticisms, the group’s leaders have even declared that they consider divisions and discrimination based on ethnicity as prohibited (haram) in Shari’a. For example, in April 2023, in a meeting with a group of Shi’a clerics, the Taliban’s acting deputy prime minister, Mawlawi Abdul Kabir, stated that the Taliban “considers ethnic discrimination as prohibited (haram) and that there are no differences between Shi’a and Sunni compatriots” (Bakhtar News Agency 2023).

However, some important insights into the Taliban’s thoughts can be gained through rare publications of the group’s ideologues. One such important source is Abdul Hakim Haqqani’s 2022 book, entitled Al Emarat Al Islamiyah wa Nezamuha (Islamic Emirate and its System). After August 2021, Haqqani was appointed as the Taliban’s Chief Justice and is one of the close confidants of the group’s leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada. The book has not attracted much international attention, but it offers unique insights into thoughts of the Taliban leaders about a range of issues. It included a foreword by Akhundzada who approved its publication after it was reviewed by a group of Taliban religious scholars.

Consequently, Haqqani’s book offers a rare insight into the thinking of senior ideological figures of the Taliban. As its title suggests, the book attempts to provide a religious justification for the Taliban’s emirate and rejects any alternative forms of government based on inclusion and representation. Pertinent to this article, the book makes a series of points about religion and tradition that illustrates the intersection of the group’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam with a particular conception of nationhood in the country. First, Haqqani promotes a particularly intolerant and exclusionary interpretation of the Hanafi jurisprudence with a highly consequential impact on religious minorities such as Shi’a Muslims and others, and also those of other Sunni schools like the Salafi. For example, the author asserts that “the practice of non-Hanafi religions is viewed as a shame/disgrace, especially among ordinary people” (Haqqani 2022, 37). The author then proceeds to argue that an Islamic state must not appoint minorities as judges, arguing that the appointment of minorities as judges was one of the reasons that led to the downfall of the Ottoman Empire.

Second, while the book is framed in religious terms and heavily referenced to Islamic sources, it makes an important distinction between Shari’a and tradition, which offers insights into the Taliban’s ideological approach towards governance and representation of cultural and social diversity in Afghanistan. The author states that in Afghanistan, besides Shari’a:

it is necessary to take into account the nature of the Afghan people in matters of life, such as dress, appearance, language, and other things that do not contradict the Shari’a because a custom that is not contrary to the Sharia is considered respectable in Shari’a (Haqqani 2022, 39).

Customs and traditions are acceptable, according to the author, because they are second nature to the people of the country. However, not every custom is considered respectable by the author as on the same page he argues that “as for the second nature that developed in the era of American domination and their allies, which came from the West, it is not the original Afghani nature, so it is not respectable.”

These passages underscore an essentialist understanding of national customs and traditions, which like the Taliban’s views on religion, are essentialist, and conservative and justify a program of leveling out social and cultural diversity. Although Haqqani’s references to culture and traditions are general in nature, his understanding of “Afghan” traditions is shaped by the social upbringing of the Taliban leaders in madrassas of the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As seen by the Taliban’s intolerance towards cultural diversity, this discursive narrative justifies violence and repression in the name of religion as well as customs and traditions.

The Hazaras and the Taliban

The hybridization of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism manifests most violently in its relations with the Hazaras of Afghanistan. As a distinctive ethnic group that is also predominantly following Shi’a Islam, the Hazaras bear the brunt of the Taliban’s religious and ethnic exclusion and discrimination. Between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban perpetrated a series of massacres against the Hazaras, including the August 1998 killing of Hazaras, which Ahmed Rashid described as “genocidal in its ferocity” (2000, 73).

Since its return to power in August 2021, the Taliban has instituted a system of rule that discriminates against the Hazaras politically, culturally, and economically. Politically, the Taliban’s Islamic emirate has excluded Hazaras from any leadership roles in politics and administration of the country. While Hazaras protested about continued discrimination and lack of meaningful representation under the Republic from 2001 and 2021 (Bose, Bizhan, and Ibrahimi 2019), the Republican system and constitutional recognition of fundamental rights and freedoms provided them with avenues to voice their aspirations both from within the state structure as well as in political opposition, civil society, and the media. Hazara politicians served as vice-president, ministers, and members of parliament and a young generation of professional Hazaras took leading roles in the media and civil society. Hazaras had also invested considerable hope and commitment to the success of the liberal democratic transformation of the country as they saw in the process the potential end of their historical persecution and marginalization through equal citizenship rights, including political participation (Ibrahimi 2016). These tendencies combined with the bitter memories of their persecution at the hands of the Taliban in the 1990s means that Hazaras had little meaningful relationship with the Taliban insurgency until 2021.

The only prominent Hazara to join the Taliban was Mehdi Mujahid, a Hazara from Balkhab district of Sari Pul, who joined the group after running into trouble with the former government over land disputes and allegations of kidnaping. Following the fall of the Republic, Mujahid became the Taliban’s intelligence chief in the province of Bamyan before being appointed as governor of Balkhab. Ironically, Mehdi also became known as Mawlawi, a religious title for Sunni clerics, demonstrating the cultural and social cost of Taliban membership on the country’s diverse religious and cultural groups. However, in 2022, Mehdi demanded greater representation for the Shi’a Hazaras in the Taliban administration in Kabul and criticized the Taliban’s closure of secondary schools for girls. Eventually, Mujahid openly challenged the Taliban from his home district of Balkhab, where he also attracted a significant following (Goldbaum, Rahim, and Hayeri 2022; Siddique 2022). In July 2022, the Taliban launched a massive air and ground assault that forced Mujahid into hiding and committed atrocities against the civilian population of the district. In August 2022, the Taliban regime claimed that it had killed Mujahid in Herat while he was attempting to flee to Iran.

The Interim Taliban Administration announced in September 2021, completely excluded Hazaras from the cabinet. Subsequently, the Taliban appointed Hazaras as deputy ministers of Public Health, Urban Development and Housing, and Economy (KabulNow 2022). However, the reduction of Hazara’s representation to the positions of deputy roles in marginal ministries did little to alleviate the concerns of exclusion among the community. In addition to the exclusion of Hazaras from the leadership positions such as cabinet ministers, the Taliban systematically removed Hazaras from a range of other state institutions in Kabul and the provinces, replacing them with predominantly Pashtun members of the group. The courts provide an illustrative example. Before August 2021, there were about 100 Hazaras among the 2500 judges across the country. According to Rustam Talash, a former Hazara judge, the replacement of Hazaras with Taliban appointees in the courts was so thorough that in January 2022 “there were no Hazara judges, and not even a clerk and an ordinary employee left in the judiciary and all were sacked for one reason” (Etilaatroz Daily 2022a; Rawadari 2023, 22).

These patterns of systematic exclusion of Hazaras from government positions are particularly striking in provinces and districts where the Hazaras form a majority of the population. The provinces of Day Kundi, Bamyan and Ghazni offer illustrative examples. The UN Special Rapporteur, Richard Bennett (2023, 8–9), found that:

in Bamyan, Daikundi and Ghor Provinces, the Taliban has replaced a number of former government employees at the Departments of Justice, Agriculture and Irrigation, Mines and Petroleum and Education, including at Bamyan University and in the municipalities, almost certainly due to their ethnic affiliation.

In Bamyan, which in recent years had emerged as a Hazara political and cultural center, the Taliban appointed largely Pashtuns to key positions of administration as governors, police chiefs, mayors and even heads of provincial departments of ministries. Most notable among the new Taliban officials in the province is Abdullah Sarhadi, a Taliban hardliner, who was appointed as governor of the province. Sarhadi served as a military commander during the previous Taliban rule, where he presided over the massacres of Hazaras and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan (Human Rights Watch 2001; Proctor 2022).

In response to these policies, a group of predominantly Shi’a clerics attempted to lobby the Taliban to demand formal recognition of Shi’a jurisprudence, including the application of Shi’a jurisprudence in privates matters of the followers of Shi’a Islam and pushed for political representation at the state level. In April 2023, the Taliban’s Ministry of Higher Education rejected a demand by the Shia ulema to include teaching Shi’a jurisprudence in the country’s university curriculum. The decision by the ministry’s council argued that “the demand of the Shi’a ulema was impractical because one system [of higher education] requires one curriculum and law” (BBC Persian 2023). The Taliban had previously suspended teaching Shi’a jurisprudence in Bamyan University the only university where it was formally taught to its predominantly Hazara students under the previous government.

Hazaras have faced not only formal exclusion from state institutions but also a consistent pattern of violent attacks targeting their mosques, cultural and educational centers, sports clubs, and residential areas. While the Islamic State—Khorasan claims responsibility for many of these attacks, there are unclaimed incidents that raise suspicions of involvement by anti-Hazara networks within the Taliban. Since the Taliban's return to power, these attacks have persisted, exacerbating the political and socioeconomic marginalization of the Hazara community. In his report to the UN Human Rights Council in February 2023, Richard Bennett (2023, 7), the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Afghanistan, found that,

From 30 August 2021 to 30 September 2022, in 22 recorded attacks against civilians, at least 334 were killed and 631 injured. Of that number, 16 attacks, including three against educational facilities, targeted the Hazara population specifically. On 30 September 2022, an attack against the Kaaj Educational Centre in the Dasht-e-Barchi area of Kabul claimed the lives of 54 individuals and injured another 114.

The report further noted that “this type of attack seems to be widespread and systematic and bears the hallmarks of international crimes” (Bennett 2023, 8).

Furthermore, since August 2021, several Hazara communities have forcefully been evicted from their lands in the provinces of Helmand, Day Kundi, Uruzgan and Balkh. In a detailed investigation of the forced evictions of hundreds of Hazara families from their lands in Patu and Gizab districts of Day Kundi, Reuter and Schröder (2021) concluded that “the most powerful ethnic group, the Pashtuns, are taking the homes and farms of their Shiite neighbors.” Patricia Gossman, a Human Rights Watch researcher stated that the “Taliban are forcibly evicting Hazaras and others on the basis of ethnicity or political opinion to reward Taliban supporters” (Human Rights Watch 2021).

In the meantime, Pashtun nomads, who historically played a key role in the subjugation of the Hazaras by the Afghan state and dominated the economic and trade relations between the Hazara areas and the rest of the country (Ferdinand 1962), returned to the Hazara areas (Etilaatroz Daily 2022b). Backed by Pashtun Taliban officials, the nomads began to lay claims not only to the pasture and agricultural lands of the region but also revived disputes that are decades old. In assessing the Taliban’s approach to the inevitable disputes between locally helpless Hazaras and mostly armed Pashtun nomads, Foschini (2022) found that, “In all these cases, the local Taliban authorities’ modus operandi has been to side with the Kuchi/Pashtun party and enforce compliance with their demands by meting out collective punishments to local communities.”

In Hazara areas, the return of Pashtun nomads to their privileged position backed by coercive power of Pashtun Taliban officials in local administration revives a historical pattern that Canfield (1975, 6) described as “subjugation of one ethnic group by another, and of one religious sect by another.” Similar patterns of ethnic and religious discrimination in conflict resolution are also reflected in other types of disputes between not only Shi’a and Sunni litigants but also between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns in other provinces such as the province of Badghis (Rawadari 2023, 22).

Violence and Hybridization Process

How does a religious fundamentalist movement act as an exclusionary ethnonationalist force in contravention of its Islamic teachings on equality and fraternity, at least, among Sunni Muslims? One might argue that the persecution of Hazaras results from the Taliban’s Deobandi anti-Shi’a tendencies. However, the persecution of Hazaras did not begin with the Taliban, and consequently, there is a deeper and recurrent dynamics of ethnic discrimination and marginalization that informs the Taliban’s imagination of state-society relations. This deeper dynamic impacts Hazaras most violently but drives the Taliban’s violent homogenization of cultural differences and diversity among both Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns alike. The Taliban seeks to redefine and fundamentally transform Pashtun identity, culture and traditions. This process of homogenization involves violent suppression of alternative conceptions of Pashtun culture, traditions and their relationship with other ethnic groups in the country (Azami 2012). Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban have violently supressed alternative cultural, artistic and political expressions of Pashtun identity. Many leading Pashtu poets, including Abdul Bari Jahani, and Matiullah Torab, have publicly criticized Taliban’s policies, including their exclusion of non-Pashtuns from political power (Hasht-e Subh Daily 2023).

The violent imposition of ultra-conservative and Pashtun-centric identities is not limited to the Hazaras alone. The Taliban’s emirate has instituted a system of rule that discriminates against the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and other ethnic and cultural groups. A 2023 report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team of the UN Security Council (2023, 6) described the Taliban’s approach towards governance as “highly exclusionary, Pashtun-centered and repressive towards all forms of opposition.” The report further noted that the Taliban’s appointments in cabinet and provincial levels (five non-Pashtun ministers in the Taliban’s cabinet and 25 Pashtun governors among the 34 provinces) reflected “the Taliban’s Pashtunization strategy of the 1990s” (Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team 2023, 6). Furthermore, the Taliban has actively promoted Pashtu over Dari as demonstrated in the widespread replacement of bilingual signs of government and public institutions with Pashto and their opposition to the celebration of Nowruz, an ancient tradition widely celebrated across the country (Alexe 2022; Hasht-e Subh Daily 2022a). Although there are a number of Tajik, Uzbek and Turkman members of the Taliban, the predominance of Pashtuns in the leadership and key positions of power within the Taliban has actively limited the capacity of these individuals to act on behalf of and protect the interests of these communities against active policies of discrimination and marginalization.

Consequently, a fuller account of the intersection of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism must consider the Taliban’s historically learnt ideologies of ethnic and religious exclusion as well as its adaptation through encounters, conversation and borrowing from a range of other social and political forces. The patterns of exclusion, mass evictions and forced return of Pashtun nomads to the Hazara areas provide some important insights into the recurrent dynamics of imposition of top-down ethnic and economic relations that have their origins in the foundation of the modern state in Afghanistan during the last decades of the 19^th century. As Shahrani (2008, 156) argues the dynamics of the Taliban’s treatment of other ethnic groups as internal “colonial” subjects,

maybe best understood within the context of the troubled history of the “modern” Afghan buffer state, perpetually indebted to foreign patrons and consistently hostile toward its subjects in general, and to the Turkic- and Tajik (Persian)-speaking peoples of western, northern, and central Afghanistan in particular.

The Taliban’s return to power reflects an attempt to reconstruct the historical ethnonational state established by Abdur Rahman Khan, especially in distribution of resources and ownership of land and natural resources. In this respect, the Taliban’s imposition of top-down exclusionary and violent nationalism has important parallels with the forced conquest of Hazarajat in the 1890s and the genocidal eviction of Hazaras from their lands in what are now provinces of Uruzgan and several districts in the north of Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul.

As a movement, the Taliban is also an amalgamation of a range of social and ideological forces with various tendencies along the ethno-nationalist and religious fundamentalist spectrum. The word Taliban (Persian and Pashto plural for Talib, meaning a student or a seeker of knowledge) reflects the ideological origins of its founders and ideologues that emerged from the madrassas across the Afghanistan—Pakistan borders. These religious schools grew massively in number and enrolment thanks to funding and resources that were provided by the Saudis and other Islamic countries during the 1980s. Many of the founding leaders of the Taliban were formerly members of Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi's Harakat-e Enqelab-e Islami, an overwhelmingly Pashtun mujahedin organization during the 1980s. Thus, as in their madrassas, the social and political outlooks of these individuals were shaped in an almost entirely Pashtun environment, with little contact with the country’s diverse ethnic and cultural landscapes. However, as the Taliban’s war on Pashtun traditional elders demonstrates, the group does not represent Pashtun traditional values and culture. As Maley (1998, 20) argues the Taliban reflects “values of the village as interpreted by refugee camp dwellers or madrassa students most of whom have never known ordinary village life.”

The Taliban’s emergence in 1994 also occurred in a highly ethnically charged period in Afghanistan. With the fall of the last pro-Soviet Muhammad Najibullah in 1992, Pashtuns also lost control of the capital Kabul. The event, which was interpreted as an indication of the decline of Pashtuns in Afghanistan (Ahady 1995), gave rise to some of the most chauvinistic expressions of Pashtun nationalism. This tendency can be observed in Saqawi Duwum, a book published in Pashto in Germany under the pseudo name Samsur Afghan in 1998. As the book’s title, meaning The Second Water Carrier, suggests the author invoked the memory of the short reign of Habibullah Kalakani in 1929 to mobilize Pashtuns against Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud, who like Kalakani, are pejoratively described as a water carrier. The book concludes with a series of recommendations of mass settlement of Pashtuns among the Tajiks, Hazaras, and other groups in the provinces in the north of Kabul, in Bamyan as well as provinces in northern and western Afghanistan. The author calls for forced removal of non-Pashtuns from these provinces as part of a strategy of forced cultural mixing and creation of a Pashtun belt around the country (Afghan 1998, 153–161). The Taliban would not formally subscribe to such ideologies of ethnic cleansing and many Pashtuns would actively oppose such strategies, but the existence of such narratives points to the continued reverberation of extremist tendencies that have periodically found support among some rulers in Kabul.

As it expanded as a political force after its emergence in 1994, the Taliban interacted with a range of other groups, including ethnonationalists, global jihadists, and everyday citizens and local power brokers in different areas of Afghanistan (Ibrahimi and Akbarzadeh 2020). For example, during the first period of its rule, the Taliban attracted a sizeable number of former military officers of the Khalq faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan who played an important role in reviving and operating the Taliban’s rudimentary military by operating tanks, artillery, and helicopters. As Roy (2002, 154) notes, like the Taliban, the Khalqi officers were the products of deep social transformation in Pashtun communities:

Interesting enough, this new generation shared many patterns with the Communist Pakhtuns: they were not born among the tribal aristocracy and were enlisted in schools at very young ages (military for the Communists and religious for the Taliban), whose recruitment cut across tribal affiliations, thus developing a relation both with a supranational community (the world revolution for the Communists and the Muslim ummah for the Taliban) and an ethnic one (the Pakhtuns, whatever tribal affiliations). It is not by chance that many former Communist officers joined the Taliban against Massud.

The relationship between the Taliban and former communist Khalqis was short-lived as the Taliban fired most of these military officers by 1998 after they no longer needed their military skills (Sinno 2008). In addition to integrating groups within its organizational networks, the Taliban complements their clerical and tribal networks (Farrell 2018) by interest-based relationship with a range of allied groups that may directly or indirectly support the group to secure and protect their material and political interests. These include local Pashtuns who were marginalized by rival actors that had dominated local politics and resources under the former government of Afghanistan. In Hazara areas in Central Highlands and the provinces in the north and northeast, local Pashtuns, including naaqelin (Pashtuns who were transferred by successive Afghan regimes to these provinces), also find an interest in supporting repressive Pashtun rulers that support their claims to lands and other resources among the Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbek communities. In the period after August 2021, multiple reports have emerged of the forced displacement of local Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Tajiks in the provinces of Jowzjan and Takhar by Pashtuns, who, similar to the dispute resolution patterns in Hazara areas, are backed by Taliban Pashtun commanders (Nazar and Siddique 2021). In these words of Foschini (Foschini 2022), “The re-settling and empowering of Kuchis in these areas would thus be part of that strategy through a continuation of policies by Afghan kings (from Abdul Rahman to Zaher Shah) to engineer the migration of Pashtuns by allocating land.”

There are a diverse range of Pashtun groups that seek to return to these provinces, including seasonal nomads and others who belong to Pashtun tribes who were settled in these provinces by previous Afghan governments and are generally known as naaqelin or transferees (Ibrahimi 2017, 98). There still others who are reportedly new groups, including some from across the border in Pakistan. In June 2023, it was reported that the Taliban were planning to settle large numbers of Pakistani Pashtuns, mostly members of Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in the province of Takhar and along the Qosh Tepa Irrigation Canal, a 285-kilometre-long canal that diverts water from the Amu Darya from Kaldar district in the province of Balkh (Hasht-e Subh Daily 2022b; KabulNow 2023). These reports have given rise to widespread concerns that the Taliban are embarking on another phase of Pashtunization of these provinces. In the words of Foschini (2022),

Though claims that the Taleban Emirate is implementing a fully-fledged project of Pashtunisation of the country, including by bringing in Pashtun settlers from the other side of the Durand Line (that is, Pakistani nationals), might be a little far-fetched, local Taleban leaders have shown themselves interested in exploiting landless Kuchi and other Pashtun returning refugee groups for purposes of political and military control.

This combination of ideological and interest-based convergence between the core Taliban and a range of allied groups results in incentive shifts whereby groups find it instrumentally prudent to align themselves with a group that is likely to advance their interests. These forms of interest-based and pragmatic attraction to the Taliban are also reinforced by general shifts in psychological environments that result in a social cascade, when “beliefs and perspectives spread from some people to others, to the point where many people are relying, not on what they actually know, but on what (they think) other people think” (Sunstein 2009, 90). As Jamal and Maley (Jamal and Maley 2023) have described in detail, social cascades have historically played crucial roles in sudden change of regimes in Afghanistan, including the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and the collapse of the Republic in 2021. A particular type of cascade that Jamal and Maley discuss in their book is what they call “bandwagoning cascade,” to describe a process of shift in political loyalties from one political regime to another on a prudential calculation of ensuring one’s safety and security over their principled commitments (Jamal and Maley 2023, 152).

It might be tempting to conclude that the combination of ideological and interest-based support by Taliban supporters or allied groups turns the Taliban into a durable force with a high level of legitimacy. Following the return of the group to power in 2021, there has been a tendency to assume that it enjoys some level of support, at least, among the Pashtun areas. In the absence of elections and freedom of the press, the level of popular support for the Taliban is hard to ascertain under the present circumstances. However, there is important empirical evidence that shows the Taliban is a very unpopular force across Afghanistan. The Asia Foundation Survey of the Afghan People, which was nationally conducted from 2009 to 2019, offers some important insights. For several years, the survey asked respondents if they had any sympathy for the armed opposition groups, which primarily referred to the Taliban. In 2019, the survey found that 85.1 percent of the respondents had “no sympathy at all” for the Taliban (The Asia Foundation 2019, 68). Given the repressive rule of the Taliban after August 2021, it is hard to imagine that it has achieved any higher degree of popularity. Consequently, although the intersection of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism has proven to be an enabler of the Taliban’s violence, these dynamics are also undermining its long-term durability and legitimacy.

Conclusion

This article examined the processes of hybridization of ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism and their roles in justifying and perpetrating violence and exclusion by the Taliban in Afghanistan. It examined ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism as homogenizing forces that seek to level out cultural diversity to impose an essentialist and imagined conception of religion and tradition on the diverse cultural and ethnic landscape of Afghanistan. The discussion of the genesis of the Taliban in the context of external (state and jihadist) interventions and dislocation of more than four decades of instability also demonstrated how the movement is also drawing on conservative interpretation of Pashtun nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and thus represents a recurrent dynamic of violence and group-based exclusion and marginalization. These dynamics manifest locally in the forms of violence on both Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns alike. Although Hazaras suffer the worst of Taliban’s violence, the Taliban’s essentialist conception of tradition and religion tend to be informed by a deeper historical dynamic of the Afghan state that continues to undermine the prospects of long-term stability and political development.

Consequently, although the Taliban’s combination of religious fundamentalism and a particular variety of ethnonationalism has achieved a degree of success in providing cohesion for different networks, it also presents the group with its most potent threat to its long-term future. The Taliban’s political worldview does not recognize the need for popular legitimacy through representation or addressing the profound social and economic crisis that afflicts the country. The impact of the group’s ideological remaking of the country and its populations is so profound that it will generate resistance to its long-term survival as a group.

The argument presented here has important policy and academic implications. The analysis of the article also calls for greater attention to researching and understanding the complex dynamics and the Taliban’s external ties with foreign jihadist groups and regional states such as Pakistan and its local manifestation and intergroup violence. The parallel drawn between the Taliban and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan’s domestic repression and concession to a foreign power is illustrative of how local and regional politics intersect and overlap to contribute to instability, violence, and exclusion. An improved understanding of these dynamics should place understanding and addressing the dynamics of exclusionary ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism at the center of efforts to resolve conflicts and chart a path towards long-term peace and stability.

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Niamatullah Ibrahimi

Niamatullah Ibrahimi is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe University. His research interests include terrorism and political violence, contentious politics, nationalism and ethnic politics, and post-conflict governance and security dynamics. He has published several journal articles and is the author of The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion, and Struggle for Recognition (London: Hurst & Co., 2017), and co-author (with William Maley) of Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State (London: Routledge, 2020).