Religious leaders have been learning how to promote and maintain Afghanistan's new stability. The residents of Mosahi village were deeply frustrated. The international peacekeeping force, ISAF, had built them a bridge across the Logar River — but the local mullah promptly issued a decree forbidding its use, because it had been constructed by what he described as infidels. So they went to Maulavi Mohammadjan Fazali, the imam of Kabul's Mandai mosque, who told them that the local mullah's decree was "nonsense". Now, the villagers happily use the bridge without having to worry that they are committing a sin.
| Yes, Virginia. There is a difference between piety and stupidity. It's just that sometimes it's not very obvious. These poor yokels won't use a bridge because some ignorant holy man who's only read one book in his life tells them it's sinful. |
Fazali was one of 25 religious leaders in Kabul who last month took part in a peace workshop conducted by the Sanayee Development Foundation, an Afghan non-governmental organisation. At the workshop the mullahs and imams were given training in how they can promote peace and reconstruction through their preaching. "I told them that the money spent on the bridge is part of the funds given to Afghanistan," Fazali said, after he spoke to people in Mosahi. "And besides, even the Holy Prophet got help from non-Muslims during the wars."
| Normally, I'm against this kind of stuff in the U.S.A. It always comes out as touchy-feely claptrap, and they want to sell you audio tapes and self-published books by the lecturer at inflated prices. Apparently in Afghanistan there's a need for it, if only to explain the very basics, things like blowing the other person away is the last step in an argument, not the first, for instance, or don't marry your sister, even if she does have a cute butt... |
Ulema - religious scholars – such as Fazali are highly respected in Afghan society and people tend to look to them for guidance. The Sanayee programme, the Haj ministry and even the World Health Organisation, WHO, have begun engaging this influential groups of clerics to support progressive changes in the country. Now, instead of preaching against political enemies and talking about abstruse theological points, the clerics are taking a more practical approach.
| That's kind of what us benighted infidels have come to expect from clergymen — an idea that hasn't caught on in the Islamist world. One of Afghanistan's biggest problems is that its inhabitants don't have opinions, they have fatwahs. Imagine going through life without being able to make a decision for yourself, having to check with the local turban at every turn. They've got an entire nation convinced they're not bright enough to make their own decisions. |
Workshop trainer Abdullah Kakaar told IWPR, "We taught them how to resolve disputes between people and how to bring peace instead." The workshop participants also discussed how to end prejudices about ethnicity and language, as well as family problems. Kakaar pointed out that the Islamic world had advanced systems of education in centuries past, "If the ulema preach education, then everyone will send their children to school, and when all the people are educated, peace and security can come to the country."
| They had advanced (for the time) systems of education in the past, but that was before they decided they only needed one book and that the only opinion that matters is the local mullahs. Only mullahs can engage in argument. Everybody else has to shut up or they'll literally go to Hell. When people get educated — meaning absorbing some other people's ideas, comprehending them, widening one's horizon past the confines of a single turban-constricted skull — then they get dangerous. They might start thinking things that mullahs might not approve of. And then the mullahs would have to kill them. |
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