Glatzer, 1997; Maley, 1998c; Marsden, 1998; Rashid, 2000;
Griffin, 2001). The Taliban were notsimply an example of vil-
lagers coming to the cities. Their values were not the values of the
village, but the values of the village as interpreted by refugee
camp dwellers or madrassa students who typically had not known
normal village life. They were a pathogenicforce, whose view of
the world conspicuously omitted the pragmatic moderation which
historically had muted the application of tribal and religious codes
in Afghan society. Bernt Glatzer once quoted a tribal leader
remarking that ‘a shame that nobody talks about is no shame’
(Glatzer, 1977: 158). Willem Vogelsang quotes an equally vivid
observation from an elder: ‘One half of the Koran is fine, the other
half we write ourselves’ (Vogelsang, 2002: ix). Neither of these
observations could have come from a talib. Nor were the Taliban
at all representative of Afghanistan’s social complexities: they were
an overwhelmingly Sunni Pushtun group, and many of them were
fiercely hostile to Afghanistan’s ethnic and Shiite minorities.
‘Beware of the beggar who becomes king’, runs a well-known
Afghan proverb. The undisputed leader of the Taliban, from its
inception to its collapse, was Mulla Muhammad Omar. He had lit-
tle mass charismatic appeal, and was a poor speaker, but was
respected for his piety by the top leadership of the movement. He
had lost an eye as a combatant during the war against the Soviets,
and plainly found his injury mortifying: he did not allow himself to
be photographed, and in a meeting with one senior visitor kept
twisting his head to hide his disfigurement. Omar, with the careful-
ly managed acclamation of a group of ulema, took the title of Amir
al-Momineen(‘Commander of the Faithful’), and to legitimate his
authority, appeared in public with one of Afghanistan’s most sacred
treasures, the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad (Khirqa-i mubarak)
(Maley, 1998c: 19). Following this nomenclature, the Taliban re-
titled their country ‘The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’. The
deployment of this title was symbolically significant: it marked a
claim to absolute authority, and a decisive repudiation of power
sharing, or indeed of politics. When one knows one is right, there is
no reason to give scope to others to propagate error.
The Rise and Rule of the Taliban, 1994-2001 223