Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in 

Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); 

Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam, enlarged ed. (New 

Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

talaq

  See 

divorce

.

Taliban

 

(Pashto: “students”; also Taleban)

The most notorious Afghan Islamic movement to 

appear in the last decade of the 20th century was 

the Taliban. Composed of Pushtun (the dominant 

ethnic group in a

Fghanistan

) students and fight-

ers who had been recruited from Afghan madra-

sas (schools) and refugee camps in p

akistan

, it 

surprised the world in 1996 by defeating veteran 

a

Fghan

 

mUJahidin

 militias and seizing control of 

Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. Under the leadership 

Taliban

  

657  J

---

of Mullah Muhammad Umar (b. ca. 1959), the 

Taliban government, known as the Islamic Emir-

ate of Afghanistan, became a brutal regime based 

on an inflexible code of strict Islamic rulings. It 

formed an alliance with 

al

-q

aida

, the Arab terror-

ist organization led by U

sama

 

bin

 l

adin

 (b. 1957) 

and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), and 

it was suspected of complicity in the September 

11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. 

Taliban rule was effectively ended by a U.S.-led 

invasion known as Operation Enduring Freedom 

in November 2001.

The Taliban movement developed during the 

10-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–

89) and the chaotic civil war that broke out among 

Afghan mujahidin warlords when the Soviets were 

forced to withdraw. Some five million Afghans 

had to flee their country during these troubled 

times, most of them going to neighboring Pakistan. 

There, a generation of Afghan refugee children 

grew up knowing little of the world around them 

but conflict and poverty. They were indoctrinated 

with radical Islamic ideology in schools founded in 

both Afghanistan and Pakistan by the J

amiyaatUl

U

lama

-

i

 i

slam

 (JUI), a powerful Pakistani Islamist 

organization with links to the reformist tradition 

of d

eoband

. JUI 

Ulama

 were Sunnis affiliated with 

the  h

anaFi

  l

egal

  s

chool

, but the curriculum in 

their madrasas promoted a combination of Wah-

habi conservatism and jihadism, a militant form of 

Islam. Wahhabi influence became especially strong 

in these schools because the Pakistani government 

had allowed them to receive Saudi funding. The 

Taliban also obtained military training and combat 

experience by joining with older Afghan veterans 

in their war against the Soviets.

The youthful, 

stUdent

-based movement won 

widespread support among Afghan Pushtuns liv-

ing in Kandahar by offering an Islamic alternative 

to the corruption and wanton violence of rival 

Afghan militias. Starting in 1994 the Taliban also 

began to receive significant support in arms and 

cash from the government of Pakistan through its 

Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that 

country’s counterpart to the Central Intelligence 

Agency (CIA) of the United States. Pakistan had 

long been a major supporter of different Afghan 

militias, and at that time it believed that its strate-

gic and commercial interests in the region would 

be best served by backing this newly formed 

Islamist movement. The Taliban would never have 

been able to gain control over most of Afghanistan 

without this support. Their regime, however, was 

not recognized by most of the world’s nations. 

Only Pakistan, s

aUdi

 a

rabia

, and the United Arab 

Emirates had done so by 1998.

The Taliban government quickly earned inter-

national condemnation for the harsh measures 

it took to impose its narrow understanding of 

Islam on the country. Allied with the JUI, which 

operated madrasas and jihadist training camps, 

it persecuted and killed thousands of Hazaras 

(Afghan Shiis) and threatened other non-Pushtun 

ethnic groups in the country. It prevented Afghan 

girls from going to school and 

Women

 from work-

ing outside the home, and even required them 

to wear burqas whenever they went out, or else 

they could be publicly beaten. Women were also 

denied adequate medical care. Meanwhile men 

were obliged to grow long, untrimmed beards and 

attend mosques for prayer. In its anti-Westernism 

and antimodernism, it banned television, films, 

music, and even kite flying. Violators and oppo-

nents of the regime were subject to harsh Islamic 

punishments, including death by stoning. The 

violence committed by the government against 

its own people was effectively captured in The 

Kite Runner, an award-winning novel by Khaled 

Hosseini (a film version appeared in 2007), an 

Afghan immigrant physician and writer living in 

the United States. The world was also horrified 

when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed two famed 

colossal images of Buddha in Bamyan that had 

survived for 15 centuries. The Taliban considered 

them to be pagan idols.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996 

they cautiously agreed to allow Usama bin Ladin 

to establish new bases and training camps in the 

K  658  

Taliban

---

country. Bin Ladin, who had helped the Afghan 

mujahidin fight the Soviets in the 1980s, returned 

there with his family and followers in 1996 after 

being driven out of s

Udan

 as a result of pressure 

by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States on 

the Sudanese government. The Saudi government 

attempted to have the Taliban arrest and place him 

in their custody, but, instead, the Taliban retained 

their alliance with him and used al-Qaida fight-

ers in their operations against opponents in the 

country. Bin Ladin, in turn, used Afghanistan as a 

base to declare 

Jihad

 against the United States and 

i

srael

, and to condemn the Saudi government for 

allowing foreign “unbelievers” to occupy the land 

of Islam’s two holiest mosques—those of Mecca 

and Medina. When al-Qaida bombed U.S. embas-

sies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tan-

zania, in 1998, the United States retaliated with 

cruise missile attacks on two al-Qaida camps in 

Afghanistan. The U.S. attack did not inflict much 

damage, but it strengthened al-Qaida’s position, 

allowing it to move forward with plans that led to 

the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen (2000) and 

the 9/11 attacks on the mainland United States in 

2001. A core group of Taliban fighters and their 

leaders survived the U.S.-led invasion of Novem-

ber 2001 and retreated to remote regions along the 

Afghan-Pakistani border, from which they have 

launched attacks on the new Afghan government 

and coalition forces. By 2006 they had regained 

enough strength, with the help of income derived 

from opium production, to increase the number 

and effectiveness of attacks against their enemies. 

It is thought that Mullah Umar still serves as a 

Taliban leader.

See also 

bUrqa

; i

slamic

 

government

; i

slamism

; 

madrasa

; 

reFUgees

; 

reneWal

 

and

 

reForm

 

move

-

ments

; 

terrorism

; W

ahhabism

.