The Christian Post - The Taliban’s sweeping takeover of Afghanistan is dominating world news. Tomorrow, we’ll examine America’s decision to withdraw through the lens of Scripture and Christian theology. For today, let’s ask some prior questions: Who are the Taliban? What does God think about them? How should we respond biblically to them?
Who are the Taliban?
In my 2011 book, Radical Islam: What You Need to Know, I explained the origins of the Sunni Islamist group known as the “Taliban” (from the Pashto for “students”). According to the most common explanation, when two teenage girls were kidnapped and raped in 1994 by followers of a warlord in Afghanistan, a group of 30 students joined their village cleric, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in rescuing the girls and hanging the group’s commander from a tank barrel.
Their group grew in strength and popularity, eventually gaining the support of religious parties within neighboring Pakistan.
In the chaos of post-Soviet Afghanistan, their enforcement of order and law was a welcome relief to the population. They conquered Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, at the end of 1994. Two years later, they captured the capital city of Kabul. By 1998, they occupied 90% of the country.
Before long, it became clear that the Taliban would enforce a puritanical version of Islam akin to Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. They....READ MORE
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