Isn't Afghanistan the concern of the Islamic world?

Anyone who wants the armies the US built by pouring out the world's money to collapse as soon as it effectively withdrew can still read it as an example proving its power. That is, as an event showing that many regimes operating in many places with their established institutions in fact owe their existence and vitality to the actual support of the US.

Our friend Abdullah Muradoğlu reminded us in yesterday's piece. When the former US president Trump addressed the King of Saudi Arabia with all his rudeness, "O King, without us you could not stand for a week, you reign thanks to us," it was as if the threat he meant, which was not so empty after all, had been proven in Afghanistan. Perhaps, starting from this example, some regimes in the Islamic world are being reminded of how much they owe to the US despite everything.

Truly, as if this or some other reminders had been made from somewhere, neither in the Islamic world nor in the Arab world is any proper official statement or stance to be seen on what is going on in Afghanistan. A wait-and-see attitude prevails everywhere.

Yet, leaving aside the Palestinian issue, very few subjects affect, or have affected, the Islamic world as much as what is going on in Afghanistan, and in every respect.

At least over the last forty years, all the events that took place in Afghanistan have found a reflection in the Islamic world, directly or indirectly. During the Soviet occupation Afghanistan was the cause of the entire Islamic world. The whole Islamic world, virtually, took part in the war there, through its volunteers, its official political stances, or the aid of its civil society organizations. Because of this participation the whole Islamic world had a share (reward or burden) in what happened in Afghanistan afterwards. Everyone contributed to the same degree to the tribal or warlord rivalries in the political atmosphere after the occupation and before the Taliban. What happened afterwards also always concerned the Arab and Islamic world.

That is, Afghanistan is not far from any corner of the Arab Islamic world. Nor is any point of it far from the Afghanistan effect. Those in Turkey today who regard interest in Afghanistan as a luxury for the country speak this way, at best, merely out of their ignorance. That the same people, at the end of the day, ask what Afghan migrants are looking for in Turkey is a blindness that would drive anyone with a little sense to distraction. Even if you do not want Afghan migrants or refugees in Turkey, you have to show intense interest in the Afghanistan issue. You have to be in the most intense diplomatic or military activities there. Without doubt, Turkey's interest in Afghanistan goes far beyond even this, being an inevitable consequence of its own horizon of existence.

The Afghanistan issue in fact perhaps begins a process in which a new world will be built. The event should not be seen as consisting merely of the Taliban's capture of Kabul with all its "terrifying" appearances and of course the baggage in perceptions. Truly, it is more correct to read it as an event in which a pressure for change that has been experienced for at least 15 years has burst forth.

For 15 years the US has realized that this kind of social-political engineering activity in the Islamic world is unsustainable. All it needed was to take a courageous step toward turning back and a new political style. When this decision, postponed for 15 years, had to be taken at whatever cost, the way was opened, even if unintentionally, for a wave of change that will not be limited to Afghanistan but will affect the whole world. Contrary to what is supposed, where this wave will carry the world is not at all clear and will be determined entirely by the activities of political actors.

So, what is the attitude or preparedness of the Islamic world, of the Arab world in general, in the face of such a wave of change? Shouldn't the Islamic world in fact be much more organized in the face of such events and be sensitive about developing a common mind?

Unfortunately, no effort in this direction is seen from either the Arab world or the Islamic world. Yet such events might perhaps constitute occasions that increase the aptitude of Muslim and Arab countries for coming together and developing a common mind or solutions.

On this matter one must without doubt set apart Qatar, Pakistan and Kuwait, together with Turkey.

With the office it opened for the Taliban at a very early stage, and with the hosting it has provided it for nearly ten years, Qatar has proven its diplomatic activity, political depth and vision. In defiance of those who reduce its role, with the clichés in their heads, to patronage of the Taliban, even the US, which has been seeking ground for an agreement with the Taliban for 14 years, appreciates this role of Qatar. The Taliban, for its part, seems to have fed the new approach it is showing these days to some extent with the political and intellectual vision it gained from its time in Qatar.

Although spectatorship prevails in official stances toward the Taliban in the Arab world, its official or civil media is no different from Turkey's, doing nothing but trying to demonize the Taliban with its old images. All the Islamophobic material the US has used over the last 25 years to legitimize its presence in Afghanistan and all its activities in the Islamic world has been put into circulation even more in the Arab media than in the Turkish media.

It may be asked here why we confuse Taliban-phobia with Islamophobia. We are certainly not after constructing a sentence defending the Taliban, but all the symbolic productions currently used to vilify the Taliban flow, discursively and inevitably, into the river of Islamophobia. Whether there is a requirement in Islam for the beard, dress, or the burqa, and if there is, what its limits are, does not even occur to anyone at this hour. This much is not even found in the Western press.

Meanwhile, at a point where even German Chancellor Merkel places great hope in the possibility that the Taliban has changed, the Arab world's continuing to carry wood to the fire of Islamophobia with these images of the Taliban seems to point to just one thing: waves of change first strike those who insist on not changing their prejudices.