Sunni parties

Islamists

Hizb-i islami: radical Islamists, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Its recruits are amongst those who were educated in the secular government schools and also some ʿulama from the Kabul region. Mainly Pashtun.

Hizb-i islami (Khalis): moderate Islamists, led by Mawlawi Yunus Khalis. Its recruits come from those educated in the government schools and the ʿulama of the Khugiani and Jadran tribes as well as in the region of Kabul and Kandahar. Pashtun.

Jamʿyyat-i islami: moderate Islamists, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Its recruits come from amongst those educated in the government schools (both religious and secular), the ʿulama in the north and naqshbandi in the north. Mainly Tajik.

Traditionalists

Harakat-i inqilab-i islami: moderate clerical party, led by Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi. It gains recruits from the ʿulama educated in private madrasa. Mainly Pashtun.

Jabha-yi nejat-i milli (National Liberation Front): secular, led by Sebghatullah Mujaddidi. Its recruits come mainly from the tribes, the establishment of the old social order and the naqshbandi in the south.

Mahaz-i islami (Islamic Front): Royalist, led by Pir Sayyad Ahmad Gaylani. Its recruits come from the establishment of the old social order, the tribes and the qadiri in the south. Mainly Pashtun.

Who are the Mujahidin? It is possible to distinguish between three categories of fighters. The armed resistance, men who have enrolled permanently (maslaki: “professionals”, nizami: “soldiers”, mutaharek or sayyar. “mobile troops”), number some 150,000 for the whole of Afghanistan, that is to say as many as the Russians had in 1983. Next come the part-time soldiers (mahalli: “locals”, molki: “civilian forces”), generally belonging to one of the parties and organised by a local base, but who are only mobilised in a crisis and who meanwhile cultivate the land. Finally, every Afghan who has a weapon and lives in the liberated zones is potentially a mujahid. It is the first category which we shall concentrate on here.

The active members of the resistance are always organised at a local level by bases which are much alike in all parts of the country, whether they are functioning in tribal zones or not and whichever party they represent. Nevertheless, whenever it is a question of engaging in a higher level of combat, divergences begin to appear in the way of thinking, the outlook and in organisational structure.

The general characteristics of the military organization

Bases, networks and areas

To plan a military strategy, it is necessary to go beyond the purely local level and to be able to operate on a regional, or even on a national, scale, and this means facing up to the problem of the qawm with all its potential for creating division.

Afghanistan has always been at the crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Iran and Central Asia. Although a tradition of popular uprising stems from the Iranian Khorassan, the religious currents which swept Afghanistan from the sixteenth to the twentieth century all came from India and it was in the east of the country, on the frontier, that rebellion took place. Afghanistan, on the threshold of the subcontinent, has invaded India many times. Many dynasties in northern India, including that of the Moguls (1526–1852), were founded by princes who had come from Afghanistan. The cultural similarities between the countries are very marked, and Persian was for a long time the language of the court at Delhi. Above all, until 1947 India was the main educational centre for Afghan ʿulatna; it also provided them with the opportunity of coming face-to-face with other religions (Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity) or with heresies (the syncretism of Akbar), which acted as a stimulus to Muslim reform. There was little dispute concerning the frontier with Iran, apart from the conflict about Herat. The north of Afghanistan was disputed between the Uzbek khan and the Amirs of Kabul, but no popular religious movement (this area was Sunni) made itself felt until the arrival of the Bolsheviks. The general decay which set in during the Bukhara regime also had its effect on intellectual life.

The spontaneous uprisings against the communist regime which broke out in 1978 and 1979 were directed as much against the state itself as against the Marxist government. The imposition of communism on the country may be seen as a new and even more radical phase of the penetration of the countryside by the state bureaucracy. These two dimensions, opposition to the state and the rejection of Marxism, are closely interlinked. Yet the attitude of the countryside towards the state has always been more ambivalent than might at first appear: the Afghan state was born in the tribal lands; the symbols of authority which it exercises are not foreign to peasant experience and many of the leaders of the resistance movements visualised a state – for them an Islamic state. At the same time the recent history of Afghanistan is one of revolts against the central power and of resistance to the penetration of the countryside by state bureaucracy.

To oppose state and society is always somewhat artificial. Yet in Afghanistan this separation is rooted in everyday experience. It is apparent in rural villages, where the administrative buildings are set apart from the people's dwellings. It may be seen in the clothes worn and the general behaviour of individuals performing their roles in society. And it makes itself felt in the patterns of everyday speech. For the peasant the state is alien, and the relationship between the peasantry and the state official is characterised by a profound and mutual contempt.

The phenomenon of Islamism in Afghanistan is of recent origin and owes more to the Egyptian Muslim Brothers than to Indian fundamentalism (in spite of the importance of Maududi). While it stands within the fundamentalist tradition, it nevertheless represents a complete break from Afghan cultural tradition. The Islamists are intellectuals, the product of modernist enclaves within traditional society; their social origins are what we have termed the state bourgeoisie – products of the government education system which leads only to employment in the state machine. Except for the group of “professors” in the faculty of theology, they do not consider themselves to be scholars (ʿulama) but as intellectuals (roshanfikr).

The Islamists are almost all products of the government education system, either of the scientific schools, or of the state madrasa. Very few of them have had an education in the Arts. On the campus, they mostly mix with the communists, to whom they are violently opposed, rather than with the ʿulama, towards whom they have an ambivalent attitude. They share many basic beliefs in common with the ʿulama (Qurʾan, sunnat, etc.), but Islamist thought has developed from contact with the great Western ideologies, which they see as holding the key to the West's technical development. For them, the problem is to develop a modern political ideology based on Islam, which they see as the only way to come to terms with the modern world and the best means of confronting foreign imperialism.

After the insurrection, the local members of the resistance sent delegations to Peshawar or to Iran to get arms for the various parties. It was necessary to belong to a party, mainly for logistical support in negotiating aid from outside and organising supply networks. A party made it possible to hope that the traditional segmentation of society might be overcome. It could also be represented politically in the outside world, which would be quite impossible if the resistance was no more than an aggregation of warring fronts. In a word, a party provided access to the political arena. At the same time, the ideology of the jihad, which is always dominant in Afghanistan in time of war whatever the sociological structures, brought to the forefront feelings of identity of purpose and unity amongst members of the resistance. For the peasant population and the traditionalist ʿulama, neither of whom are influenced by Islamist ideology, the party is a way of giving visible reality to the umma: to belong is to refuse to accept the divisions within society and to affirm unity. Nevertheless, while one may accept the fact that it is necessary to belong to a party, the choice of party remains unexplained. Knowing that the Afghans have not much interest in ideology, one might think that the choice of party is a pragmatic decision: you belong to the group which provides you with weapons.

The war map

For the Russians there are three Afghanistans: strategic Afghanistan, the Iranian glacis and the areas in which they have no interest. As we know, the resistance has not deployed its troops in line with strategic considerations. Soviet disposition of troops and strategy determines the military activity of the resistance, who only become involved in fighting when Soviet units appear inside their territory. When there are only government troops, a modus vivendi is soon established between the two sides.

Strategic Afghanistan

That part of Afghanistan which is of strategic importance is shaped somewhat like an hour-glass in which the Salang Pass is the neck. It includes the northern plains from Shibergan to Kunduz, the strategic road from Termez to Kabul and from Kabul to Jellalabad, the capital and its immediate environs as far as Logar. It is a rich, well-populated area, which has the only geological resources in the country that could be exploited in the immediate future by the Russians (gas and oil fields at Shibergan and copper mines at Aynak in Logar). This is where the main urban centres are (except for Herat and Kandahar). Finally, it is the main route to India.

The Russians have built two of their three major bases there (Bagram and Kilagay). This is the only region in Afghanistan where they have established a series of small military posts along the road, and most of their troops are concentrated in this area.

The central issue we have addressed in this book has been the aptitude of the Islamist movement to carry out a modernisation of society. After ten years of war, we can assess to what extent, if at all, new political structures have been able to bypass traditional segmentation, and whether Islamic law might have provided an alternative to both tribal common law and a pervasive endemic violence. The final picture is contrasted, but suggests a global failure with some local breakthroughs. But the war has definitely altered the traditional fabric of the Afghan society.

The re-traditionalisation of the new political structures and leadership

The sudden withdrawal of the Soviets, as well as of the government troops in many areas, deprived the Mujahidin of both a common enemy and of a raison d'étre. As we have seen the strategy of a qawm is to enhance its local power and to fight state encroachments. When the state withdraws, as has been largely the case in 1988, the main danger comes from the next qawm, even if the antagonism is expressed in political terms.

In fact, the Mujahidin have never been able to replace a traditional structure by a modern political one. The “de-ideologisation” of the Afghan war that followed the Soviet withdrawal entailed a process of “retraditionalisation” of the Afghan resistance. The situation in Afghanistan is not, on both sides, a mere return to tradition.

The Communist coup d'état is outside the limits of the present study. But after having studied the historical background of the Afghan resistance movement, we should analyse in greater detail the popular uprisings and the coming into being of the resistance. The prime cause of the uprisings was the authoritarian way in which the new regime imposed its reforms a few months after the coup of 27 April 1978.

The ideological framework of the reforms

The three major aspects of Khalq policy were agrarian reform, the elimination of illiteracy and the strengthening of the state machine. The communist leaders have always been conscious of the fact that they have been creating a revolution by proxy, faced with a nebulous working class and an apathetic peasantry. Obsessed by Amanullah's precedent, they thought that it was necessary to strike swiftly and ruthlessly before the “counter-revolution” was able to organise itself. To achieve this they adopted three means: repression, made possible by the existence of a loyal and well-equipped army; agrarian reform which, they thought, would win the support of the mass of the people; and the elimination of illiteracy, in order to rescue the people from the influence of the clergy and to spread the new ideology.

The Khalq are, at one and the same time, theoreticians and activists. The mistakes made by the government can be traced to “Khalq thought”.

The breeze of infitah, President Sadat's “open door,” wafted through Cairo University as well as the national economy, polity, and society. There were hints of infitah in Nasser's last three years, but it took Sadat's purge of his Nasserist rivals in 1971 and the October War of 1973 to clear the way for major changes in foreign and domestic policy. Sadat abandoned the Soviet Union for the United States as superpower patron, drew close to conservative Saudi Arabia in return for financial support, and made a peace treaty with Israel when other Arab states refused to follow. But the Israeli treaty broke the nascent Saudi-Egyptian alignment, forced Egypt into complete financial dependency on the US, and isolated her diplomatically from the Arab world. In the economic sphere to which the term “infitah” primarily applied, Sadat opened Egypt to foreign trade and investment, encouraged private enterprise while retaining the large public sector, and tried to satisfy the urban poor with subsidies on basic commodities and the affluent with imported luxury goods. First Sadat and then Mubarak experimented with a freer press, a more independent judiciary, and opposition parties. At the universities, the return to election of three candidates for dean, the abolition for a time of the university guard, and the easing of restrictions on student activities symbolized the “opening.”

Late in December 1950, Fuad I University celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in lavish style. Soon to be renamed Cairo University by the Free Officers who swept away the monarchy, it had begun as the private Egyptian University in 1908 with Prince Ahmad Fuad as its first rector. In 1925 Fuad as king had the satisfaction of refounding the Egyptian University as a full-fledged state institution; after his death it was renamed in his honor.

Palace officials intended the 1950 ceremonies to present thirty-year-old King Faruq as the worthy heir of his father Fuad and his grandfather Khedive Ismail, the respective founders of the university and of the Royal Geographical Society, which was simultaneously celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary. Everyone knew that this image of King Faruq was contrived. Ismail and Fuad, for all their shortcomings, were able and dignified men; Faruq was a playboy and a national embarrassment.

For unknown reasons, one founding father of the university, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, was not in evidence at the jubilee. It seems unlikely that even King Faruq's desire for the limelight could have pushed this mentor of a generation of secular liberal nationalists offstage. Lutfi was a disciple of reformist shaykh Muhammad Abduh and had come to national prominence as editor of the newspaper al-Jarida before World War I.

The ideal of a university above politics is one thing, but reality is quite another. Taha Husayn's return in 1936 to the deanship from which Ismail Sidqi's strong-arm government had removed him four years earlier was a partial triumph for university autonomy. By then, student demonstrations had become a way of life. Students spearheaded demonstrations for independence, skirmished on behalf of the fractured national parties, and protested policies which threatened their academic success or future job prospects. For professors, academia was emerging as a route to a cabinet seat, increasing the temptation for academics to become politically involved. In the 1940s Taha's and Lutfi's successors proved unable to channel the political energies of their students constructively. The malaise that gripped Egypt and the Arab world pervaded the campus. The Gordian knot, as Nasser put it, had to be cut, the “role wandering aimlessly in search of a hero,” filled.

University autonomy and the purge of Taha Husayn

Taha's dismissal in March 1932 came during King Fuad's last and most sustained bid for autocracy. He was working through Prime Minister Ismail Sidqi, who in 1930 replaced the 1923 constitution with one which concentrated power completely in the king's hands. The British did not object.

The opening of access

Like Taha Husayn, Nasser was a populist who believed that the poor had a fundamental right to education. A dozen years into the revolution, a report set out the official view of the progress in higher education:

Considering university education a right, not a privilege, Nasser declared it free on July 26, 1962, the tenth anniversary of King Faruq's abdication.

Al-Azhar

University Rector and Minister of Justice Husayn Rushdi was speaking at the university's ground-breaking ceremonies for a new building on March 31, 1914; six days later he would add the prime ministry to his duties. Rushdi's vision of fraternity between the Egyptian University and al-Azhar was the ceremonial fluff expected on such occasions. In fact the “twin brothers” were already quarreling over their birthright.

The traditional kuttabs and the more advanced mosque schools led by al-Azhar had served well enough down through the centuries when literacy was expected of only a few. Unlike the European universities, which started as formal corporations of masters, al-Azhar proceeded mainly by custom without written regulations or elaborate hierarchy.

The University was obliged to organise the entry into the class-rooms, admitting only those who showed a registration card. In this way they kept out a sizable number who were making their way into classes as though they were public lectures.

All the pleading of Taha Husayn's friends could not get the blind student's servant-guide past the literalistic doorkeeper.

Like its private predecessor, the state-run Egyptian University defined its mission partly in relation to its great rival, al-Azhar. To most people the Egyptian University stood for the modern, the secular, and the Western, and al-Azhar for the traditional, the Islamic, and the indigenous. There was truth in these images, though both institutions fell short of their ideal types and came to have more in common than they cared to admit. Religion was never absent from Cairo University, and secular Western influences penetrated al-Azhar.

One secular-religious conflict rose over the right to train Arabic language teachers for the state schools. The Egyptian University, al-Azhar, and Dar al-Ulum each claimed the right exclusively. Fighting off al-Azhar's attempts to swallow it, Dar al-Ulum eventually joined Cairo University. Losing a similar battle, the School for Qadis was enfolded back into al-Azhar. Secular-religious tensions also showed up in the sometimes awkward position of Copts at the university. The influence of European orientalists at the university and the Khalaf Allah affair of 1947 illuminate other aspects of the issue.

The Egyptian University and al-Azhar's job blight

The university that “had no religion but knowledge” offended Azharis for whom knowledge, society, and life itself were a seamless Islamic web.