One of the biggest catastrophes that befell Afghanistan after the jihad against the Soviet Union was the arrival of Wahhabism in Afghanistan.
Author: Farid Yunus, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology and Islamic Philosophy, California State University, Member of the Sangar Advisory Board
It is October 2022 and the political situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating day by day. The wars are being continued by the Afghan National Resistance Front under the leadership of young Ahmad Masood and significant progress has been made.
The recent attack by 21st-century Kharijites on September 30, 2022, on Kabul's Koj educational center, where the majority of students were women, Shiites, and Hazaras, showed the fact that the Taliban were initially unable to ensure the country's security because they themselves are fanatical Sunnis. They are anti-Shia and do not believe in religious freedom and are involved in these attacks.
The Taliban, ISIS, the Haqqani Network, and other groups whose activities are not Islamic drink water from the same spring and are Arab sheiks and Wahhabis who are committing genocide and anti-Shia in Afghanistan. This is not a new phenomenon and this crime is supported and funded by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are persecuting the Shiites of Yemen and have executed the great Shiite scholar Sheikh Baqir al-Nimr.
One of the greatest disasters that befell Afghanistan after the jihad against the Soviet Union was the infiltration of Wahhabis into Afghanistan. Afghanistan today is no longer the liberal Hanafi Sunni country it was fifty years ago.
What is the solution?
Afghanistan's delicate position as a buffer zone between East and West has hampered the peace process in Afghanistan. Afghanistan cannot achieve lasting peace without the cooperation of the international community, especially major powers such as Russia and the United States of America. The main solution in terms of global and regional politics is to make Afghanistan neutral and non-bloc, which should be achieved within the framework of an international conference.
Thus, from a strategic point of view, the hands of regional powers are cut off. But this regional peace cannot guarantee inner peace unless the people of Afghanistan are free to choose their way of life. This means that religion should not be imposed and Afghanistan's civil society should serve to make Afghanistan civil and develop a citizenship system in which all people have equal rights before the law. Ethnic and religious domination must be abandoned.
After almost 50 years of wandering, Afghanistan must create a new political and social system so that no one in the country feels inferior. In 21st-century Afghanistan, no nation is superior to another, and no nation is in the majority. No religion has superiority over other religions, no religion is in the majority, and no man has superiority over a woman, and no woman has superiority over a man, except in piety and knowledge. In a country with cultural diversity, discrimination, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness cannot guarantee peaceful coexistence.
The socio-political structure of Afghanistan must change completely. I wrote in 2013 that for peaceful coexistence, it is necessary that the languages in Afghanistan, especially Persian, which is the majority, as Pashto, and Uzbek, are recognized equally officially as in Switzerland, where French, German and Italian are official. The names of villages that were renamed during the time of Nader Khan Pashtun should be returned to their original names. Organizations and national centers should be named in the languages of all ethnic groups.
So Afghanistan will calm down from an internal point of view. How can people in a country trust each other when their daughter is considered a second-class person? How can the people of a country trust if their native language is not respected? How can the people of a country trust when they see that their lands are deliberately usurped? How can people trust each other when their people are in the minority, and from the point of view of Islamic sociology there is neither a minority nor a majority?
Afghanistan, along with the fact that it must stop the war, must change its social structure in order for peace to come. And this is conceivable only through civil society and that's it.
