A thread about the Taliban by @james_e_baldwin

A thread about the Taliban & sharia law. Everyone knows the Taliban run a brutal and oppressive legal system. But there are different ways a legal system can be bad and understanding how the Taliban’s is bad, and how it isn’t, is crucial for understanding their enduring appeal 1/


The Taliban’s version of sharia law is misogynistic, placing extreme restrictions on women’s lives, & imposes brutal criminal punishments. This obviously very bad. People often call it a strict interpretation, but this is misleading. If you strictly applied sharia you wouldn’t 2/


be stoning people to death etc (will explain later). It’s a radical interpretation of sharia law

As the scenes in Kabul show, a lot of Afghans are justifiably terrified of this. But many Afghans support the Taliban, hence their success. So do they want to lock women in their 3/


homes and stone people? Some do, but many others don’t, and tacitly support, or decline to oppose, the Taliban anyway. Why?
(NB: this is not an argument about morality. Obviously you can say that such people are still culpable, but it doesn’t help us understand the situation) 4/


Apart from whether its rules are just, the other measure of a legal system is whether it’s “just” on its own terms. Are rules applied consistently? Can people enforce what limited rights they have? Do judges rule for the party with the strongest claim, or the biggest bribe? 5/


On this measure, the Taliban’s legal system scores well, at least in comparison with the other legal regimes on offer in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s central pitch to the population has always been a legal system that’s harsh but fair. In the 90s, when the country was ruled by 6/


competing warlords, after a decade of mass displacement and a complete collapse of the state, you can see why this would appeal. Small farmers had their land appropriated by the warlords’ goons. Merchants couldn’t get their invoices paid. There was looting and kidnap rackets 7/


In the context, many found the Taliban better than the status quo. A functioning legal system, even one as oppressive as the Taliban’s, allows people (or at least men) to function economically better than no legal system, or a hopelessly corrupt one. 8/


Why is this important? First, it’s crucial to developing a strategy that could defeat the Taliban. I don’t know what such a strategy would be, but building a kleptocratic colonial regime in league with drug cartels was probably the worst option. Second, it helps us avoid 9/


exoticizing the Taliban. Building an alternative legal system and demonstrating its superiority to the official one is a classic insurgent strategy. The IRA did it in Ireland in the 1910s/20s. It takes form of sharia in Afghanistan because that’s the available cultural script 10/


But we won’t understand it if we treat it simply as a product of an alien culture

This analysis of the Taliban has been common for years. US understood & tried to build a justice system but failed as the political system they created was too corrupt. A recent study is a book 11/


by Frank Ledwidge, Rebel Law, which I use when teaching this topic. Unfortunately it contains a few bits of colonialist nostalgia, but the overall analysis is good and I like the fact that he presents the Taliban and other islamist insurgencies in a comparative frame (using 12/


the IRA example) rather than treating them purely in terms of ideology. I reviewed it for the LSE Review of Books if anyone’s interested. End/

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/09/20/book-review-rebel-law-insurgents-courts-and-justice-in-modern-conflict-by-frank-ledwidge/


Addendum: explaining my earlier comment on stoning. Yes, this is a punishment from classical Islamic law. But if you strictly applied the law (as it existed for a millennium until the 1970s), you wouldn’t do it, as procedural law rendered it effectively inapplicable. The only 14/


acceptable proof was confession, or 4 adult free male Muslim witnesses of impeccable morality, who had witnessed the actual penetration “like the pen in the mascara pot.” Obviously unlikely such witnesses would exist (if they had seen it, would they pass the morality test?) 15/


If they did, jurists said they were not obliged to testify, and it was morally better if they didn’t. False accusation was punished with 80 lashes, and a witness in a failed prosecution was liable to this. If the prosecution succeeded, the witnesses had to throw the stones 16/


So the jurists couldn’t have made it any clearer the penalty shouldn’t be used. Even if someone confessed they must repeat it 4 times while the judge encouraged them to retract.Some jurists even said that climbing out of the stoning pit and running away counted as retraction 17/


Similar procedural hurdles were applied to other harsh penalties like amputation. Even death penalty for murder was discouraged. When British took over India their main complaint was that sharia was too lenient. So whatever Taliban are doing, they aren’t applying sharia strictly


I hope no idiots read this thread as an endorsement of the Taliban or sharia law. It should be obvious that I don’t support either. I do study the history of sharia law and think that understanding things is important


pps – when the British in India found sharia too lenient, this was by comparison to 18th-century English criminal law, which imposed the death penalty for all kinds of trivial things. It wouldn’t look lenient by our standards today!


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