It is a sectarian movement and the vast majority of Indian Muslims rejected it. The school developed in British colonial India and was a way for Indian Muslims to assert their identities against British Christian rule and the Hindu majority. I think of Deobandis as sort of like Haredim or ultra-Orthodox among Jews. The old Taliban had been formed in seminaries of the Deoband school of Islam. What I would say about the Taliban is that they are an outlier in the Muslim world. The US constitution does not have such a provision, in part because the Equal Rights Amendment was successfully opposed by the U.S. The Tunisian constitution, passed by a constituent assembly in 2014 that was dominated by the pro-Islam Renaissance (al-Nahda) Party, specifies the equality of women and men. Here’s a picture I snapped in Tunis in late spring, 2012. Likewise, there are all kinds of Muslims. And today’s KKK was an important constituency for Trumpism and influential on the former guy’s policies. But I’d just like to point out that the KKK had enormous influence in the Democratic Party in the 1920s and that it took over the state of Indiana for a while in the 1920s, having the governor, a majority of the state assembly, and 250,000 cadre members. New York Times journalist David Sanger complained when I said that, saying that the Taliban took over a whole country and the KKK is a fringe. In my view, the Taliban resemble the Ku Klux Klan. If we go back in time, you have your Protestant Peasants War in the early 1500s in Germany. There, you have millions of ordinary Catholics and Protestants but also the virulent Christian terrorist organization, the Lord’s Resistance Army. And we haven’t even gone into Evangelicalism in Brazil or all the different ways Christianity is practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. And then you have mainstream American Roman Catholicism. You have your Order of the Solar Temple cult inside Catholicism. Then you have your mainstream Presbyterians and Congregationalists. You have your Kentucky snake handlers and your QAnon militants, some of whom carried guns at the Capitol insurrection. I addressed a similar question regarding ISIL in a Nation essay, How Islamic is the Islamic State?Īll you have to do is think about the manifestations of Christianity. Muslims are nearly 1/4 of humanity and, as you might imagine, their practice of Islam varies widely. I sympathize with his despondency that the European and North American press can still ask a stupid question like that in 2021. 20 years and there are so few signs as a society we have moved on at all or learned anything. Just had a call from a journo asking if I could go on live to debate whether the Taliban represent Islam. Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – British academic Abdul-Azim Ahmed of Cardiff University, an expert on mosques in the UK, complained on Twitter that he was invited onto television to debate whether the Taliban represent Islam:
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