The Taliban say they want to rule Afghanistan within the strict rules of Sharia. What does that mean? We asked two experts; Laila al-Zwaini and Anne Kwakkenbos.
Laila al-Zwaini is a lawyer and Arabist and served as head of the United Nations rule of law mission in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009. Anne Kwakkenbos is a Gender, Peace & Security expert at the aid organization Cordaid.
Will of God
Sharia are the rules that you must follow to live as a good Muslim. “Every Muslim must follow the will of God and it is found first of all in the Quran and the Hadith, it describes the sayings and customs of the prophet Mohammed,” said Laila al-Zwaini.
But those rules are interpreted in different ways in different areas, within a certain bandwidth. So THE sharia does not exist in the strict sense of the word. The Taliban variant is considered very strict, and according to many Muslims their strict rules no longer fall under Sharia.
The Origin of Sharia
“Over the centuries, scholars have formulated derived and new Sharia rules by debating the interpretation of the Qur’an and Hadith,” explains al-Zwaini. Those jurists were spread over different regions of the former Islamic world. They took into account local laws and customary law, which resulted in different schools of law.”
After the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic empire, some of the Sharia rules were enshrined in law for the first time in history. “That is why Sharia is applied differently in countries such as Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco,” says Zwaini.
Mixture
The ideology of the Taliban is also a mixture of general Islamic law rules and local customary law, says al-Zwaini. In this ideology, for example, women have far fewer rights than in other Sharia variants. That is because it is mixed with common law, the pashtunwali, of the Afghan/Pakistani population group Pashtun, in which there are many restrictions for women.
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