Do the Taliban Really Adhere to the Hanafi School of Thought?
Author: Mohaiuddin Mahdi, politician and researcher
One of the criteria for seeking a clear answer to this question is the group’s attitude toward the Persian language, since Persian was the native language of Imam Abu Hanifa, who is the founder and spiritual leader of the Hanafi school of thought — the imam whose followers number in the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world. It was Imam Abu Hanifa himself who issued a fatwa permitting the performance of prayer in the Persian language.
And that is not all. Persian is the native language of the majority of the people of Afghanistan. Persian is the interethnic language of the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people. Persian is the second language of the Islamic world, because it was the first language into which the Quran was translated and interpreted; it is the language through which the entire Middle East, Central Asia and East Asia — all the way to Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines — came to know Islam.
Persian is the language of six great hadith imams, that is, the authors of Sahih al-Sitta: Bukhari, Nishapuri, Sistani, Tirmidhi, Qazwini and Nasa’i.
Persian is the language of early Islamic mysticism; the language of Bayazid Bastami; the language of Abu’l-Hasan Kharaqani; the language of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat; the language of Ali Hujwiri Ghaznavi; the language of Sanai Ghaznavi; the language of Shams of Tabriz; the language of Mawlana Jalaluddin Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi; the language of Abdurrahman Jami of Herat.
Persian is the language of such great thinkers and scholars as Abu Ali ibn Sina Balkhi, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
Persian is the language of great Quranic commentators such as Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Abu’l-Fath al-Razi and Abu’l-Fadl Rashid al-Din Maybudi — the author of the famous mystical commentary Kashf al-Asrar, written in Persian.
Persian is the language of great jurists such as Burhan al-Din Ali ibn Abu Bakr al-Marghinani, the author of Al-Hidaya; Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Bukhari; Abu’l-Layth Nasr ibn Muhammad al-Samarqandi; Shams al-A’imma Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Sarakhsi; Najm al-Din Abu Hafs al-Nasafi — the very scholar whose book Aqida al-Nasafiyya was translated into Pashto by Akhund Darweza.
And finally, Persian is the language of the “Imam of the Afghans,” Akhund Darweza Nangarhari.
Isn’t hostility toward this language obvious evidence of the Taliban’s falsehood and hypocritical pretense in their claims of adherence to Islam and the Hanafi school of thought?
The Taliban have not only inherited the hostility and linguistic fanaticism of previous Afghan governments toward the Persian language, but have in fact gone even further than their predecessors. They have changed the language of government administration; changed the language of inscriptions on signs; changed the names of historic districts and places in Kabul and elsewhere [recently I saw a video report about events connected with Kharabat Street. Behind the reporter, on a sign installed at the entrance to the street, there was a Pashto inscription: “Da Kharabat Kocha”].
The Taliban group, like its predecessors, insists on calling the language “Dari,” even though the name of the people who speak it is mentioned in a hadith of the Prophet: “If religion were at the Pleiades, a man from Persia would reach it.” Meanwhile, in the Islamic era, “Dari” was one of the names and designations of the Persian language. This policy was created to detach the country’s large Persian-speaking community from its history and culture and deprive it of the advantages of sharing a common language with Persian-speaking peoples in other countries.
One of the ways of depriving them of these advantages is to prevent the use of indigenous Persian words and terms under the pretext that they are foreign. A well-known historical example of this approach is the prohibition on the use of the words “daneshgah” and “daneshkada” — “university” and “faculty/institute.” Even though the existence of these words in ancient works in the Persian language has been repeatedly demonstrated — in particular, I myself showed photographs of pages from the book Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abul Fazl Allami, the minister of Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, where the words “daneshgah” and “daneshkada” are used — they did not abandon their ignorance and fanaticism.
Recently, the Taliban’s Ministry of Information and Culture, on the orders of its invisible leader, instructed a group to develop a project for the “unification of the principles of Pashto and Dari orthography.” However, from the very beginning of its work, in the title of this “group” they used the English word “workshop”: “Five-Day Workshop on Correcting and Unifying the Principles of Pashto and Dari Orthography.”
In other words, as Hazrat Saadi said:
Khishti avval chun nihad me'mor kaj,
To Surayyo meravad devor kaj.
If the architect lays the first brick crooked,
The wall will remain crooked all the way to the Pleiades.
(Sangar — all poems have been translated literally.)
Meanwhile, at least for a thousand years, in Persian prose and poetry the word “kоrgоh” has been used in the meaning of a workshop, a place of work and the production of material or spiritual goods.
For example:
In prose, in The History of Bukhara:
“And Bukhara had a workshop between the fortress and the city, not far from the Friday Mosque, where carpets and silk fabrics were woven.”
In poetry — two examples from the works of Manuchehri, a poet at the court of Mahmud and Masud of Ghazni:
Sad korgohi Shushtar kardaast boghi Losh,
Sad korgohi Tibet kardaast dashti Tay.
He turned a hundred workshops of Shushtar into the garden of Lash,
A hundred workshops of Tibet into the desert of Tay.
Or:
Chunon korgohi Samarqand shud,
Zamin az dari Balkh to Khavoron.
Daru bomu devori on korgoh,
Chunon zangiyon, qogazgaron.
Such a workshop Samarkand became,
The land from the gates of Balkh to Khorasan.
The doors, roofs, and walls of that workshop —
Like the works of the Zengids and the makers of paper.
The Taliban deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that these equivalents exist, because, undoubtedly, there are people in this group who know about this issue and who have already been shown these examples. But since no such equivalent exists in the Pashto language, they inevitably have to obstruct the development of the Persian language.
Once, during the republican government, a dispute arose in the same Ministry of Information and Culture over the name of the ministry itself. “Ittelaat wa Kultur” was the option that the majority of representatives of a certain “circle” strongly advocated for approval and adoption — including one of the heads of Shamshad TV — simply so that the Persian name “Ittelaat wa Farhang,” meaning “Information and Culture,” would not be approved.
At one of the meetings, where the majority was on their side, it was temporarily decided that the ministry would be called “Ittelaat wa Kultur.” That same television channel director, delighted that the name “Ittelaat wa Farhang” had not been approved and adopted, performed an attan — a traditional Afghan dance — right in the courtyard of the ministry!
If fanaticism were set aside, it should have been written:
“Five-Day Working Session (korgoh) on Correcting and Unifying the Principles of Persian and Pashto Orthography.”
