Afghanistan continues to surprise

In the articles in which I conveyed my impressions after my visit to Afghanistan, I said that the Taliban, who took over the administration two and a half years ago after expelling from their country the world's superpower with which they had waged a bitter struggle for twenty years, are not pursuing a settling of accounts with the former regime in Afghanistan. We also added that this in fact reveals a situation that overturns all the perceptions and expectations that have been tried to be built up in the Western media about the Taliban for years. I have had the chance to observe very clearly, from the reactions to my articles, the astonishment these words of ours created in people.

Indeed, whatever perception was created about the Taliban, it was expected that as soon as they came to power they would shed like water and floods the blood of the Afghan people, one of the peoples whose blood has been most easily shed until now. The expectation was that massacres would be carried out, holding to account one by one all the remnants of the former regime that had collaborated with the occupiers during the days of the occupation that caused 400 thousand deaths, perhaps without even any trial.

This expectation was in fact built up so strongly by the occupiers just before they left Afghanistan that the images of people clinging to the wheels and wings of the last occupier planes leaving the country, of people running in desperation after the plane that had begun to move, were engraved in minds.

In fact, just as perceptions of criminality produced for years through the doings of truly terrorist organizations such as DAESH existed, there was a wish to load them onto the Taliban as well. Those who know, of course, know that DAESH's immoderate, lawless, shariah-less violence has nothing to do with Islam, that it is an industrial product they produced with their own hands.

Of course, another expectation that formed this perception is the familiar experiences that all so-called revolutions or regime changes in the West or the East do not take place without creating a settling of accounts with the old order. Whichever revolution you take up, you will see that "the taking of heads" was experienced as an inevitable routine of the process. After the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, or the Iranian Revolution, all persons connected with the old regime received their share from the gallows set up, with or without trial, and the guillotines operated. Eating the old ones is not enough; the revolution eats its own children too.

Revolutions have in fact been experienced as changes of power, and as such none of them has had the dimension of a real revolution. There is no revolution in any aspect of the superiority gained by one race over another race, one ethnic group over another ethnic group, one economic class over another economic class, one armed organization over another armed organization. If you want to see a real revolution, you will look at the revolution of hearts of our Prophet, who made friends and brothers for himself from his mortal enemies and made these friends his "companions" (ashab). That is the real revolution. What can be deduced from there is a politics of friendship, an approach that can revive even your enemies in your call, your approach, your behavior.

The Taliban's administrators say that they see their stance of not creating a settling of accounts and of forgiving everyone as a natural requirement of following the Prophet's Sunnah. Just as the Prophet, when conquering Mecca, did not pursue revenge and forgave everyone. Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqub Mujahid, the roughly 30-year-old son of the Taliban founder Mullah Omar, who took on the Ministry of Defense in the cabinet established afterward, gave the Taliban administrators entering Kabul, as instruction, the very same instruction that the Prophet gave at the conquest of Mecca: "Those who close their homes and take refuge inside will not be touched, those who ask for forgiveness will be forgiven, no one who does not resist with arms will be harmed, empty houses will be entered and never plundered."

These conditions have also been observed to the end. The fear of massacre and plunder soon left everyone, and in fact the mass Afghan migration expected after the Taliban did not occur.

If it had been otherwise, that is, exactly as expected and feared, we might today be facing perhaps ten times the number of irregular Afghan migrants we encounter. So in fact the Taliban are also rendering a serious service on the issue of irregular migration that many countries suffer from, but it is very clear that they do this not merely so that people will not migrate. The only thing motivating them is to abide by the requirements and morality of Islam, and to warm the Afghan people, who are Muslim at their core, even more to Islam.

A general amnesty was declared, and in official state offices, even in the army, the existing officials of the former regime were kept in their posts. That is, not even a "dismissal," with which we are very familiar in an ordinary change of municipality, took place, and this thoroughly increased social sympathy toward the Taliban.

Mawlawi Yaqub continues to astonish by giving the information that even prominent administrators of the former regime such as Ashraf Ghani, Hamid Karzai, and Dr. Abdullah Abdullah can live easily and freely in Kabul.

Anas Haqqani, the youngest son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the leading names of the Afghan jihad against both the Soviets and the US, now 28 years old, while answering TRT World's questions with a wisdom not expected of his age, cites a piece of advice from Umar that guides policies of amnesty: "When the power you hold provokes in you the desire to oppress and be unjust toward those weaker than you, what you should remember at once is that God is absolutely far more powerful than you, but instead of using this power against you, He displays His mercy and compassion."

Haqqani, who says these things, had 4 older brothers killed by the Americans, was himself held in a dungeon for a total of 5 years, 4 of them in solitary confinement, and went through severe torture during this time. Now the only thing he thinks about is peace, unity, and integrity for Afghanistan and, of course, its development while remaining independent. He sees every day, in the country he administers, the people of the former regime who collaborated with the occupiers who caused him those sufferings, and he bears not the slightest feeling of revenge and hatred even toward them.

"What we went through was part of our trial, and by staying on the right path we will in any case receive their reward in abundance. But if we personalize the matter, we will have strayed from the path of the Shariah," he says.

This epic experience, which nobody is willing to see under the names Afghanistan and Taliban, is a heroism even greater than expelling the Americans from the country.

The Western philosophical tradition engages in mind-cracking searches and questionings on subjects such as "forgiveness, the gift," and so on, yet the practice is plain to see: genocides, revanchisms, vengefulness, racism. The Islamic world produces epic practices without doing any philosophy of the matter at all. For those who can see, of course.