Establish Justice Before Cutting Hands  

 

(A response to Dr. Haitham Al-Haddad's article: A roadmap for the Taliban)

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Taliban Part 1: My comment below is in response to Dr. Haitham’s following words from the above article:

 

“Let us show them that Islām wants to establish justice in society before it wants to threaten to cut the hands of thieves. Let us show them that Islām cares for them and wants to improve their social and economic welfare system before it wants to force them to wear hijab and grow their beards. Therefore, the leaders of the Taliban and the leaders of other mujahidin groups should work hard to establish security in Afghanistan.”

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The last 15 years or so seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye but I seem to remember lots of articles about the original Taliban of Mullah Omar (not this current Taliban) in the old Islamic Awakening discussion board. I'm sure I remember reading how the Taliban were just students until they rose up, initially to rescue a poor man's wife who had been kidnapped by some unsavoury warlord. I also remember an article about how, before the Taliban, the birds in Kandahar used to fly with one wing, the other covering their posterior, but that with the Taliban, birds flew with both wings (a reference to how they protected poor, young boys from being sodomised by warlords). Furthermore, I remember sister Yvonne Ridley mention how, in the entrance exams to an educational institute in Afghanistan (after the Taliban were deposed), more girls passed than boys, showing that girls must have been educated during the rule of the Taliban. There was also the view that although burkas were compulsory under the Taliban, it was a small price to pay if it meant that women could safely go out in public as, prior to that, mass rape of young girls and women was all too common. Finally, I'm sure I remember that they gave poor farmers a wage so that they did not have to grow and sell heroin crops to get themselves out of poverty, and wasn't there a story about a man who left his bag/wallet on a street in an Afghan city and how he returned a few days later to find that it was still there as no one had dared steal it.

 

There seems to be an unjust, growing trend that whenever Muslims try to establish some sort of a Shari'ah based system, whether it was in the past in Afghanistan under Mullah Omar or more recently in Iraq and Syria, it is viewed purely as a system that is about the carrying out of punishments (hudood) when it does in fact establish justice and security as well as improve the social and economic welfare systems, even in the extremely challenging situations that they find themselves in. Just because the mainstream media keep away from us the images such as those of zakah being distributed, of young people sitting their medicine exams and of centres opened to resolve the conflicts and difficulties of ordinary people including the ahl al-Dhimmah, doesn't mean that they didn't happen.

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​Wal-hamdu lillahi rabbil 'alamin (March 2023 originally a comment made in 2020 in response to an article-it has now been amended to include slightly more information)

 

For Taliban Part 2 see Taliban: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

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Umm Hafab

https://protectyourthaghr.wixsite.com/home/establish-justice-before-cutting-hands

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