Who was -- or is -- the one-eyed mullah, Mohammad Omar, and what is the nature of his calling? So little is known of his real existence -- or so much has been purposefully discounted as a distraction -- that all we are left with are a few fogged impressions and a handful of conjecture. But this shadowy figure remains crucial to gauging the essence and trajectory of the Taliban movement. He is its presiding genius; the saint on the satellite phone. Where would his mission end? At the Shibar Pass? The river Oxus? Is he a second Mahdi, conjuring up the elemental 'swarm-life' of Central Asia's Muslims in an ever-expanding jihad that must constantly break new ground, or risk implosion? Or simply a modest, local hero who shows his face only to admirers lest the charm which overthrew a brutal interregnum and brought about a badly-needed peace will somehow be broken? How much of the plot had God revealed to the Leader of the Faithful?
Seven years after the Taliban movement was founded, the Mullah's features are unknown outside the city of Kandahar where he lives simply with his wife and children. He has been described as 40 years of age, 'unusually tall' for an Afghan, alternatively "heavy-set" or "distinguished" and, according to one journalist, a speaker of Dari with an Iranian accent -- despite being a Pashtun from Maiwand in Kandahar province. His right eye is stitched shut, the result of an encounter with Soviet soldiers when he was a mujahedin commander with the Harakat-I Inqilab-I-Islami party. The left, his few visitors allow, has a "hawk-like, unrelenting" gaze.
He assiduously cultivates this air of enigma in a refusal to be photographed or interviewed and by delegating all but the most crucial encounters with non-Afghans to colleagues or underlings. Dr Norbert Holl, the UN envoy charged with co-ordinating peace efforts after the fall of Kabul in September 1996, cooled his heels for six months before being granted a meeting with the de facto head of the new government. What scant media access the Mullah permits has tended to reinforce his image as a sphinx-like visitor from another plain of being. In a bizarrely-constructed exchange with David Loyn, the BBC's South Asia Correspondent, Mohammad Omar explained -- from behind a curtain and via a third party seated inches away -- that his reluctance to hold face-to-face interviews was because he did not wish to meet anybody who was not "helpful" to his cause. While this put the BBC and UN firmly in their places, it hinted at a fear of contamination, even an element of noli me tangere, that was either strikingly authentic or knowingly theatrical.
The atmosphere in his immediate court, by contrast, is relaxed and informal. Commanders come and go, dipping their fingers into the communal cooking pot and contributing at liberty to whatever discussion is going on. The mullah keeps a strongbox by his side, handing out expenses as and when required. But this is no more than is expected under the code of pashtunwali, in which relations between men are seldom hierarchical. An established leader extends his influence by keeping open house in his hujra, the communal room in which men meet, eat and sleep.
There is nothing remarkable then about the mullah's accessibility to his followers, but the deference they show him is unique in an Afghan context. "Whatever our rank," explained his aide-de-camp, Mullah Hashim, "when we come before him, we consider ourselves as just a simple mujahid." At one level, the comment confirms his followers' willingness to discard their rank and prostrate themselves at the feet of their master but, at another, it shines a light into a non-threatening relationship in which the ultimate mujahid categorically refuses to adopt the authority and trappings of the prince.
Mohammad Omar is neither of the khan class nor a member of the Mohammadzai branch of the Durrani Pashtuns, which had provided Afghanistan with its kings since 1747. This lent a neutrality to his seemingly accidental orchestration -- or re-design -- of local power relations after October 1994, for which he has, anyway, demonstrated a studied disregard. But he could lay claim to a pedigree of a different type -- the Talib -- one that married the Pashtun martial tradition with the high ideals of selflessness and piety that are interwoven with tribal concepts of leadership. And religious legitimacy has the privilege of superceding temporal power during times of emergency, as exemplified by the all-inclusive appeal of jihad, which does not jeopardise local authority unless it opposes the tide of 'faith'.
The Mullah's first explanation of the Taliban's mission was that it had arisen to restore peace, to provide security to the wayfarer and to protect that honour of women and the poor. Although the implication was there, no explicit mention was made of jihad and, indeed, it could not have been until the Taliban had acquired the critical mass needed to present themselves as a popular force for change. But jihad had become something of a hackneyed concept even to Afghans after the events of 1992, when a government of blood-stained communists -- which, nevertheless, possessed some of the legitimacy required in the traditional leadership equation -- was replaced by home-grown Islamists with talents for little more than libertinism. To invoke the word after 1992 was to risk scepticism or the stink of blasphemy.
The culture of the military commander was a degeneration of the old khan system, but the rise of the mullah, under the Taliban, proved to be less a return to the elusive values cherished in pre-communist times than the stupefying of a spiritual tradition that once traced its origins back to the footsteps of the Prophet. Lineage was more crucial in matters of Afghan religion than in temporal affairs. The sayed, the pir and the alim -- Afghanistan's spiritual aristocracy -- comprised a legacy that wove together 'High Church' trends in Islamic thought with a popular belief in spirits and anchored them both in the everyday life of the village. The Taliban buried them all and summoned the mullah, who was a cross between a country parson and a Shakespearean clown, to recite the funeral rights. It is moot to speculate whether the Taliban's rapid ascent reflected disenchantment in the community at large with the customary channels for the transmission of spiritual values. Force of arms, supported by scripture, would always remain the trump among a people who viewed their prosperity as the product of a successful accommodation with impersonal and transient powers. The standing of some sayed -- direct descendants of the Prophet -- and pir -- the reincarnation of the virtue, if not the person, of Sufi saints -- were undoubtedly harmed in the aftermath as their followers embarked on a spree of freebooting, while the ulama -- plural of alim, or religious scholar -- had seen their collective authority as Afghanistan's law-givers consistently undermined by a string of modernising kings and the communist party.
Determining whether the rise of the mullah was tantamount to the dumbing down of a richer spiritual and legal tradition is hampered by the opacity of the Taliban movement and the convergence of its military and religious agendas. The young Taliban, who rallied to the cause, and many of their leaders were the product of the Deoband school of Sunni thought, founded 130 years earlier in Uttar Pradesh, India, which, in the absence of any domestic school of theological studies, had exerted an influence on Afghanistan's spiritual leadership equal to that of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, the alma mater of ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani.
The Deobandis represent the extreme of attempts to regulate the personal behaviour of their pupils, having issued nearly a quarter of a million fatwa on the minutiae of everyday life since the beginning of the century. There is eyewitness testimony of children, chained to their lecterns, rocking back and forth as they learn by rote a Koran, written not in Pashtun, but in Arabic. Boys enter the system as wards, exchanging life in a poor family, for bed, board and an austere catechism that one will one day lead to life as a mullah. It is tempting to identify in this early separation from female relatives the origins of the extreme misogyny which, even more than the objective of a pure Islamic state, lent cohesion to the Taliban as they marched into, and subdued, non-Pashtun lands.
But Taliban misogyny went so far beyond what is normally intended by that word that it qualified as a kind of 'gynaeophobia', one so broad that the merest glimpse of stockinged foot or varnished finger was taken as a seductive invitation to personal damnation. Official Taliban policy, in a very immediate sense, stigmatised females as the evil eye made omnipresent -- and a cause for real fear -- in the communities the rank-and-file occupied.
They had to be covered, closeted and, where necessary, beaten to prevent more sin from being spewed into society. The penalty for women showing their faces in public was set by the Office for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police established in Kabul, at 29 lashes. Part of this anxiety was sexual and could be attributed to the highly-charged rules of pashtunwali, by which girls embark on the perilous road to puberty at seven when they are first sequestered from boys and men. From then until marriage, youths have no licit contact with the opposite sex beyond the members of their own family. In Kandahar, the custom of seclusion had given rise to a rich and colourful tradition of homosexual passion, celebrated in poetry, dance and the practice of male prostitution. Heterosexual romance, by contrast, was freighted with the fear of broken honour, the threat of vendetta and, ultimately, death by stoning, if the heart were found out. In Pashtun society, man-woman love was the one that dared not speak its name: boy-courtesans conducted their affairs openly. The Talib grew to maturity on the gruel of orthodoxy, estranged from the mitigating influence of women, family and village. This ensured that early recruits to the movement were disciplined and biddable. If their gynaeophobia appeared the product of a repressed homosexuality on the march, Taliban cohorts also conjured up echoes of a medieval children's crusade, with its associated elements of self-flagellation and an innocent trust in the immanence of paradise.
It was logical that trainee Taliban should regard the graduates of their course -- the mullah -- as the natural officer class in the movement's subsequent career. Among the dozen or so Taliban leaders to achieve public prominence, only Sher Mohammad Stanakzai, acting foreign minister and the main point of contact with the outside world after the fall of Kabul, eschewed a title that became inseparable from the movement's corporatist image. Well-travelled and fluent in English and Urdu, Stanakzai was, perhaps, too worldly, to 'un-Afghan' to qualify for the newly-empowered honorific of mullah. But it is not safe to assume that the Taliban's other leaders, compared with Stanakzai, were more authentic, religious spokesmen. Despite his near-messianic status, Mullah Mohammad Omar "has not too much religious knowledge", according to Mullah Mohammad Hassan, Governor of Kandahar. The versatility of the Taliban elite, who alternate as military chiefs, governors, ministers, as well as mullah, combined with the engrained Afghan practice of adopting noms de guerre -- Ahmad Shah Massoud is not the main opposition leader's given name -- argues in favour of the thesis that the movement merely clothed its membership in ecclesiastical titles to disguise their origins. This process of 'clericalisation' similarly transformed each enemy defection into a Damascene conversion, just as the enforcement of sharia-based edicts in non-Pashtun regions added a patina of religion to what was essentially the imposition of martial law. It also veiled a coat-rack of skeletons. 'Mullah' Mohammad Hassan of Kandahar had nothing to do with the religious world before his emergence as the Taliban's number three, while 'Mullah' Borjan, the movement's Rommel, was a former Afghan army officer who had served under King Zahir Shah. A number of other key military appointments -- Shah Sawar, artillery commander north of Kabul, and General Mohammad Gilani, the Taliban air commodore -- were members of the Afghan national army until 1992, making a mockery of Mullah Mohammad Omar's claim that his goal was to rid Afghanistan of 'time-serving communists'. The title 'mullah', it seems, had as much connection with spiritual integrity, as the term 'comrade' with solidarity.
Also by Michael Griffin:
Satellites and Stars
Reaping the whirlwind: The Taliban movement in Afghanistan by Michael Griffin is published by Pluto Press (http://www.plutobooks.com/).
