Asslamulaikum,
The one who is bathed in the so called enlightened moderation, and who has the mind and the concept that Infidels can solve our problems, and can bring peace, they are just crying far...................................
The man who has called the Taliban, Mujahideen of Islam, barbarians, I don't understand wether he likes Americans, Bush Chacha, or other remaining Jews???????????????????????
The Govt of Taliban proved to be the Duplicate, and it showed a glimpse of KHILAFAT!!!!!
We are crying that they are the enemy of Islam, wt do u want more!!!!!!
A Govt which was Islamic peaceful and full of justice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Wt do u want more?????????
To be continueed.................................
Great, we have another cyber mulah!
Talibans as we know today donot respect nor practice the great teachings of Islam and have done more harm to Islam and muslims around the globe than any other group or government.
Let me show you their real face:
Full text of the Saudi Arabian Government's statement on the breaking off of diplomatic relations with the Taleban
IslamForToday.com Tuesday, 25 September, 2001
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia supported, with all its resources, the fraternal Afghan people during their heroic jihad for independence, which made Afghanistan occupy a special place in the hearts of advocates of people's rights to freedom and independence everywhere, until God ordained victory and Afghanistan won independence and freedom.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regrets that the government of Taleban has exploited Afghanistan's special place not to build ties of fraternity, progress and construction, and not to consolidate the noble meanings represented by Islam, but to turn its territory into a centre for attracting, training and recruiting a number of misled people of all nationalities, especially from the citizens of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to carry out criminal acts.
These acts contradict all creeds. In addition, the Taleban government continues to refuse to hand over those criminals to be brought to justice.
Despite everything that has happened, the Taleban government is continuing to use its territory to shelter, arm and encourage those criminals to carry out terrorist acts that terrorize safe and innocent people and spread panic and destruction in the world. This has hurt Islam and has distorted the reputation of Muslims throughout the world.
The Taleban government has not heeded the contacts and attempts made by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to persuade it to stop sheltering criminals and terrorists and training and inciting them, and stop turning its territory into a shelter and safe haven for them.
The Taleban government has also not responded to the efforts made in this regard. The latest effort was the contact by His Excellency Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf with the Taleban government.
In the light of this, the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announces the severing of all ties with the Taleban government. While announcing this, the government stresses that it continues to side with the Afghan people and support everything that could achieve security, stability and prosperity for Afghanistan.
"The Afghan people would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country."
By Tamim Ansary, September 14, 2001.
I've been hearing a lot of talk about "bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age." Ronn Owens, on San Francisco's KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but "we're at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?" Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we "have the belly to do what must be done."
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I've lived in the United States for 35 years I've never lost track of what's going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I'm standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They're not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It's not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats' nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today's Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They'd slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don't move too fast, they don't even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn't really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban - by raping once again the people they've been raping all this time.
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let's pull our heads out of the sand. What's actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden's hideout. It's much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we'd have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I'm going. We're flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: That's bin Laden's program. That's exactly what he wants. That's why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It's all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he's got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that's a billion people with nothing left to lose; that's even better from Bin Laden's point of view. He's probably wrong -- in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean -- but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours.
Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?
English Muslim lawyer Aisha Harris contrasts the Taleban's treatment of women with the Islamic ideal.
In September 1996, the Taliban took control of Kabul and a large portion of Afghanistan. They immediately sent women back to their homes, closed all educational establishments for women, banned them from working, ejected them (old, sick and infirm) from hospitals, and forced them to be covered from head to foot when outside the home. At any moment, if not already in place, women will also need the written consent of the nearest male relative to travel anywhere. This revolution has the stamp of those other repressive regimes all over it - Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria. It is what ... the Muslim Brotherhood, and all other organizations of a like nature want - the complete subjugation of women and the complete denial not only of their human rights, but their rights as women of Islam given to them by the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.a.w) 1400 years ago.
From all the usual Human Rights orientated Western Governments has come what? A deafening silence. Where are the modern Islamic writers ready to condemn, the Western (and Muslim) feminist writers banging the drums for women's rights, the United Nations? The total silence merely confirms this thought - that a human right is what the local dictator says it is going to be!
In every upheaval throughout history, women and female children are the first to suffer. In any war, women are seen as fair game by men, there to be raped, tortured and humiliated for male gratification. Has anyone stopped to think how sick and perverted such an attitude is - how it makes the perpetrators "non-men," and tarnishes all decent, loving men?
In Pakistan, women are routinely raped by anyone who has a grudge against their families, and the humiliation of their women-folk strikes at the honor of that family. Women who have been raped are punished, flogged, and imprisoned. Despite the fact that there was a female prime minister, the men got off scot-free. Often the women are then killed by their own families, because of their dishonor.
In Iran, after the Ayatollah Khomeni's revolution, more than 20,000 young virgin girls of the opposition were raped by their prison guards before they were executed, in order to prevent them going to Paradise! What perverted view of the Prophet's teachings was responsible for that decision? This is not Islam, neither is what the Taliban are doing. This is about power, and the misuse of such power to subjugate half of a population.
The Prophet Muhammad (s.a.a.w) said it was the duty of every Muslim, male and female, to be educated. He did not say females could only learn to read the Qur’an, and then stop at the age of eight years. The Qur’an tells women: "Draw your head coverings across your necks and bosoms." There is nothing about covering from head to foot. The chador and veil originate from pre-Islamic Persia, and was a sign of the status of upper class women. Slave girls did not cover themselves in this way, neither did any other female servant. Indeed, in the Hajj, no woman is permitted to wear any sort of veil.
As Islam expanded, the veil/chador was absorbed as part of the culture. However, it is not, and never has been, part of the Islamic teaching. Clothing of both men and women is meant to be modest and loose fitting, so that the detailed outlines of the body are not on show. How often though, do we hear of men being told to dress modestly and Islamically (they have to be covered from waist to knee in loose garments), yet they are seen in very tight jeans and trousers. This is un-Islamic, but they are more concerned that women should dress to the standards men set.
Only the wives of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.a.w) were secluded, and that happened later on in the Prophet’s life to symbolize their special place in Islam. His first wife Khadijah never veiled, and was never secluded. She ran an import and export company sending caravans across the East, employed men including the Prophet, and managed the finances. Seclusion was never intended for any other women, which is made quite clear in the Qur'an and the Hadith - women did work in the Prophet's time. They went into battle and some fought alongside the Prophet, others were battlefield nurses, skilled in the patching up of wounds and the use of herbal remedies. Yet others ran their own businesses, such as leather-making. Contrast this with women under the Taliban’s rule, who are denied vital medical treatment. If they do not want women to be seen by strange men, then the answer is women doctors and surgeons and all female clinics and hospitals, not preventing women from receiving treatment, and thus further denying them a basic human right.
In the Prophet's time and indeed in moderate forward thinking Muslim countries today, women are respected and honored. To turn a sick woman out of her hospital bed is against all the teachings of Islam, which again and again requires believers to show compassion to those who are sick in any way. Mothers particularly are revered In Islam. The Prophet Muhammad (s.a.a.w) said that paradise lies at the feet of mothers, and upon being asked by a new male Muslim to whom he should show respect, the Prophet replied: "First your mother, second your mother, third your mother, and fourth your father." Where is that respect now in Afghanistan and elsewhere?
Female children are looked upon as second best, and Muslim women have been punished for producing girl children; the husband forgetting that it is the male who decides the sex and not the female. Girl children were frequently taken out and abandoned to die at birth, a practice condemned by the Prophet 1400 years ago, although it still goes on in less enlightened countries. Men forget that without women, they would not be here. Every child needs a human womb in which to grow. The Prophet himself had daughters (his male children dying in infancy), and he loved them dearly, particularly his beloved Fatimah, about whom he said: "Whoever hurts her, hurts me."
Do the Taliban and all the other regimes dedicated to the oppression of women put themselves above the teaching of the Prophet, and God's Holy Book, the Qur’an? It would seem so. They are the unbelievers, the un-Islamic, the oppressors, and the blasphemers. The Shari`ah law is also a compassionate law, in that for any offence it prescribes no less than four witnesses, who are unbiased and of good standing, and who have no axe to grind. Offenders are to be given the opportunity to repent their crimes, before any punishment takes place. Only as a last resort is the full penalty exacted. The Taliban and those regimes like them should read what the Shari`ah says and act upon it correctly, not superimpose their own interpretation. The level of ignorance of Islam displayed by these people is overwhelming.
"The extreme position taken by the Taliban hardly deserves to be considered an 'interpretation' of Islam... It is really an aberration in violation of the most basic tenets of the faith." Dr. Laila Al-Marayati calls for a fuller understanding among Muslims of Islam as "a religion that embraces the value of women without subjecting them to sequestration."
Jay Leno and his wife Mavis donated $100,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation to expand its campaign to end "gender apartheid" in Afghanistan. That is where, after years of civil war, the Taliban emerged as the ruling faction and has imposed harsh measures on all of Afghani society, and particularly against women, in the name of Islam. There is no question the efforts of the Lenos, the Feminist Majority and others like them are laudable. There is, however, the question of whether they will help.
There is certainly need for change. Under the Taliban, a strict gender segregation has been imposed. Women and girls are denied the right to education and adequate health care. Many women have been removed from the workplace and they are prevented from moving about freely. Violations of the dress code, which compels women to wear a "burqa" that covers her from head to toe, including a face-covering, are met with physical punishment.
But permanent change in Afghanistan can only come from a fuller understanding of Islam as a religion that embraces the value of women without subjecting them to sequestration.
Indeed, the extreme position taken by the Taliban hardly deserves to be considered an "interpretation" of Islam. That implies the position has some degree of validity, when it is really an aberration in violation of the most basic tenets of the faith.
To the Taliban and other extremists, Western -- and especially feminist -- views on women are often blamed for many of the social ills that plague society today, including exploitation of female sexuality, rape, high-risk sexual behavior, the disintegration of the family, and moral decadence in general.
Given this view, the Taliban believe their own policies are more protective of women -- and, therefore, more enlightened.
Changing the situation will require the Taliban and other Muslim leaders to look within Islam itself, rather than through a cultural lens not their own. In so doing, they would find that promoting women's rights does not mean compromising and capitulating to the "West." Rather, it means they are being consistent with their commitment to the message of Islam they seek to uphold.
Any government that professes to enforce shari'a (Islamic law) must be aware that the essential purpose of shari'a is to guarantee for every citizen five broad rights encompassing all aspects of human endeavor. These are the rights to life, intellect, family, property and religion. These rights mirror fundamental freedoms as they have been articulated in the major human rights documents of this century.
By obstructing Afghani women's enjoyment of these rights, the Taliban leadership expose their own ignorance of Islam. The right and obligation of every Muslim to education is spelled out by the Prophet Muhammed in his insistence Muslims must seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave and in his emphasis of divine rewards for those who specifically educate their daughters.
Preventing women from being cared for by male physicians -- especially when female physicians are in short supply -- contradicts rulings by Muslim jurists that rules regarding modesty are not violated when greater interests of health and safety are in play. Removing women from the workplace condemns them and their families to a life of destitution, controverting the Koran, which says "men shall have a benefit from what they earn and women shall have benefit from what they earn."
The obsession with enforcing gender segregation at the expense of women's needs reflects an imported extreme view that is most likely meant to satisfy foreign influences supporting the Taliban. By imposing strict measures against the most vulnerable segments of society, the Taliban can appear to be upholding "Islamic law" while they utterly disregard the inherent complexities involved and the checks and balances that must be applied.
The institution of corporal punishment (lashings, amputations) without due process, the suppression of minorities such as the Shi'a in Mazar-e-Sharif, and the oppression of women enable the Taliban to stake their claim as a bona fide "Islamic" state.
Exerting financial pressure in Afghanistan, engaging in diplomatic maneuvers, and contributing large sums to the Feminist Majority Foundation may have short term beneficial effects -- they at least serve to increase awareness. But the repressive policies of the Taliban are doomed to persist until they and others who share their views can appreciate the spirit of egalitarianism expressed in the Koran.
Dr. Laila Al-Marayati is a Los Angeles physician and past president of the Muslim Women's League.
The Taleban's is not so much an austere interpretation of Islam as one that distorts, often violates the words and spirit of the faith. Which is why Muslims everywhere have joined the international chorus of condemnation.
By Haroon Siddiqui, The Toronto Star, March 4, 2001
HAD THE Taleban not been isolated from the world by the American-led economic sanctions, starved of resources of which they had few to begin with, rendered too helpless to do anything for their 1 million internally displaced people fleeing drought or civil war, reduced to being mute witnesses to the death of starving and shivering children in winter refugee camps, would the rulers of Afghanistan have been less likely to destroy priceless pre-Islamic treasures?
Perhaps.
But of this there is little doubt: We would have had greater credibility in trying to save Afghanistan's historic treasures had we been more helpful in saving its human beings.
While that debate goes on, there is another: What is the Islamic critique of the Taleban rampaging all statues, including two giant 2,000-year-old Buddhas?
Not much different than the secular world's. For these Philistines are ignorant of the theology they invoke to justify their tyrannical rule.
Theirs is not so much an austere interpretation of Islam as one that distorts, often violates the words and spirit of the faith. Which is why Muslims everywhere have joined the international chorus of condemnation.
The Taleban's shaky grip on religious doctrine shows in the confusing edict of their spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Graven images are blasphemous, he ruled. Idols are insulting to Islam. "They are the gods of the infidels.'' But they could be preserved so long as they were not worshipped. Then changing his mind, he said all statues must be smashed, the way Prophet Muhammad destroyed the idols of Mecca. And he wondered about the worldwide fuss: "All we are breaking are stones.''
The old Islamic injunction against drawing the human form is similar to the Christian and Jewish prohibition of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.''
Swept aside long ago - with the impeccable logic that if pictures and TV can show and transmit the word of God, how can they be illicit? - the ban is now preserved only by the Luddites who, like those of any faith, fear any innovation.
Citing Muhammad's actions in Mecca 1,400 years ago to justify intolerance today is theologically false, says Islamic scholar Mohammed Zahid of Toronto:
"The Ka'ba was the historic monotheistic centre of worship, established by Abraham, but later filled with idols. The prophet overturned that aggression,'' but went on to establish a multireligious state.
Islam extended to Christians and Jews, whose prophets they shared, full protection of the state, calling them dhimmis, from dhimma, guarantor. Declared Muhammad: "Whoever oppresses a dhimmi, I shall be his prosecutor on the Day of Judgment.''
The sharia, the governing law of a Muslim state, dictated harmonious relations for the whole millet, multireligious community. The duties of the governor included ensuring that non-Muslims lived free of religious harassment.
The state was to provide non-Muslims even the right to be tried under their own religious laws - a feature not duplicated by any other system, "legal exclusivism being the very essence of national or political sovereignty,'' in the words of the authoritative Cultural Atlas Of Islam (Macmillan, New York, 1986).
When Muslims conquered Persia, they extended full protection to Zoroastrians.
When they defeated the Byzantines, the caliph signed a treaty granting Christians "security of their persons and all their properties, their churches and their crosses, large and small.''
When the first Muslim conqueror came to the Indian subcontinent in 711, not far from where the Taleban rule, he had never heard of Hindus or Buddhists. So he sought instructions from head office in Damascus. There the caliph called a synod of senior theologians. They wrote back that minorities "must remain free to worship their gods as they please, to maintain their temples and to determine their lives by the precepts of their faiths.''
The Taleban would be unaware of all this. Ironically, also most people in the West. They are seeped in the folklore, rooted in the legacy of the Crusaders and replenished daily by the dictates of modern geopolitics, that Islam was spread by the sword and is, inherently, intolerant.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Muslims often ruled empires where the faiths of the non-Muslim majority thrived --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some conquerors and rulers, as those of any faith, did invoke religion to spill much blood and destroy many holy places, including Hindu temples in India. But the greater truth remains, to which the Taleban also remain oblivious: that Muslims often ruled empires where the faiths of the non-Muslim majority not only survived but thrived, and their religious relics and monuments were preserved, proof being that we have them today - European churches, the Pyramids, Petra, the temples of India and beyond.
The Taleban - as indeed some other Muslim rulers these days, even if far less obscurantist than they - may read the Quran, the holy book in Arabic, but clearly don't understand and certainly don't follow its clear dictates:
Let there be no compulsion in religion. (2:256)
Whoever wills, let him believe; and whoever does not will, let him disbelieve. (18.29)
Also, an entire short chapter (111):
Say: O ye unbelievers.
I worship not that which ye worship,
And ye do not worship that which I worship;
I shall never worship that which ye worship,
Neither will ye worship that which I worship.
To you be your religion; to me mine.
Arrogant zealots rebuff the pleas of the 55-nation Organization of Islamic Conference not to destroy Afghanistan's pre-Islamic heritage
March 12, 2001
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers on March 12 rejected the arguments of leading Islamic scholars and protests from around the world and said they were obliterating the last traces of the country's ancient Buddhist statues.
A delegation from the 55-nation Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) flew out of the southern Afghan town of Kandahar after two days of talks with the Taliban failed to produce any result, a Pakistan-based Afghan news service said.
The Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted a Taliban spokesman, Mullah Abdul Hayee Mutmaen, as saying in Kandahar that the Afghan ulama, or scholars, had rejected the call by the OIC's Islamic scholars to halt the campaign to destroy all the country's statues on the grounds they are un-Islamic.
In Paris the head of the United Nations cultural agency UNESCO confirmed that two towering statues of Buddha, carved into sandstone cliffs near the central town of Bamiyan more than 1,500 years ago, had been destroyed, and condemned the action as "a crime against culture."
"It is abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of the Afghan people and indeed of the whole of humanity," said UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura in a statement.
It took the Taliban, which is based in Kandahar and pursues an austere view of Islam, several days to demolish the statues, 53 meters (175 feet) and 38 meters high and carved at a time when Afghanistan was a center of Buddhist culture.
The OIC delegation, led by Qatar Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Ahmed Bin Abdullah Zaid Al Mahmoud, included Egypt's top cleric, the Mufti Nasr Farid Wassel, and other widely respected Muslim clerics and scholars.
Mutmaen said the OIC scholars could give no religious justification for preserving the statues and had argued only that the time was not right for such a course of action.
"The Afghan ulama replied that for us the present time is right and suitable," AIP quoted Mutmaen as saying. It said the Afghan ulama had insisted that Islam orders the destruction of all idols.
Earlier on March 12, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil repeated what he had told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on March 11 - that all movable statutes had been destroyed since the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued an order for their destruction on February 26.
Annan said on March 11, after meeting Muttawakil in Islamabad, that the Taliban's destruction of the statues was "lamentable."
Taliban Information and Culture Minister Qudratullah Jamal told Reuters earlier that it had not been easy to demolish the two giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan.
"The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can't knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff. They are firmly attached to the mountain," Jamal said.
The Bamiyan statues were among the best known of the thousands of Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, and word of their impending destruction triggered worldwide alarm. Many others have already been smashed during looting of Afghan museums.
Western countries saw the destruction as an assault on the world's cultural heritage, while countries with large Buddhist populations saw the statue smashing as religious bigotry.
Annan said the destruction of Afghanistan's heritage could make it more difficult to raise aid for the impoverished country, but urged potential donors to remember that assistance is not aimed at the rulers.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been uprooted by war in the past year and hundreds have died of cold and malnutrition this winter.
Source: Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters, Kabul, March 12, 2001
The mullah probably had the most recent attack in mind, where the vast majority killed or injured were fellow Afghanis (8 killed, over 70 injured); one US soldier died.
"Taliban kill mullah critical of suicide attacks," from the AP, November 14 (thanks to Dionysios):
KABUL, Afghanistan - Suspected Taliban militants killed a religious leader in western Afghanistan after he criticized the use of suicide attacks as a weapon of war in the country, an Afghan official said Friday.
Militants kidnapped Shamsudin Agha in Farah province's Anar Dara district on Tuesday, days after he led prayers condemning the practice of using suicide attacks, said provincial police Chief Abdul Ghafar Watandar.
Suicide attacks are one of the Taliban's preferred tactics in their assaults against Afghan and foreign troops. Most of the victims of such attacks have been civilians.
Authorities recovered Agha's body on Wednesday night, Watandar said.
Violence by the Taliban and other insurgent groups has spiked this year to record levels. Attacks are up 30 percent from 2007, military officials say...
Woman gets beaten for dropping her veil