Now, at least for the time being, we have reached the end of our journey across the Pashtun Borderland through the last few centuries, in our attempt to trace the ideational roots of those who gained international renown as “The Taliban”. What emerges is a rather complex and multilayered picture that seems to make it even more difficult to adequately frame “The Taliban”. However, it would perhaps have to be considered a disproportionate effort if the only result were to affirm that the ideational and ideological underpinnings of those who, as the ṬIT and IEA, governed most of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, and have done again, since the summer of 2021, are not so straightforward, as investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid prominently claimed back in 2000 (and confirmed in each of the subsequent editions and revisions of his best-selling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia).1