Vice, Virtue, and Vitriol: The Resurrection of Former Taliban Minister Maulvi Qalamuddin

Vice, Virtue, and Vitriol: The Resurrection of Former Taliban Minister Maulvi Qalamuddin

Maulvi Muhammad Qalamuddin, the former chief of Amr-e-Bil M’arouf wa Nahi Anil Munkar (the General Department for the Preservation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice) in the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996-2001, has been chosen as a player in President Hamid Karzai’s “High Council of Peace.” [1] The peace council that President Karzai is actively promoting was formed with the stated goal of negotiating a settlement with the Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) and other deadly non-state actors whom Karzai often terms “our brothers” in that these movements are largely made up of Afghan nationals. In September 2010 when the Karzai government initially announced the 68-member council, including Qalamuddin, the Taliban rejected the idea outright based on the presence of foreign troops stationed in the country. The Taliban released a statement in reaction to the development stating that their “Islamic Emirate” had no use for any style of track two negotiations with Karzai’s “powerless government” (Tolo News, September 28, 2010).

Recently, the United Nations Security Council split Resolution 1267 (1999)—the al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee—in a bid to decouple the two movements to foster peace building in Afghanistan. After lobbying by the Afghan government and purportedly the British and American governments, Qalamuddin and four other former high-ranking Taliban commanders involved in the High Council of Peace may be removed from sanctions if the amended Security Council resolution is altered further pending future deliberation (AFP, June 18). Qalamuddin portrays himself as a simple, pious man with humble motives who has little to lose or gain from any controversial international machinations regarding his name. Though he may indeed live a comparatively quiescent existence today, it should not be forgotten that Qalamuddin, a staunch veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad, was no marginal Taliban actor. Along with heading the loathsome religious police (of which some sources describe him as its deputy head), he also chaired the Afghan Olympic Committee and was listed as the Deputy Minister for Mosques and Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. Many Kabulis cannot let go of bitter memories from the period of his tenure when his sandal-clad shock troops subjected men and women to humiliating public beatings for the smallest infraction of Qalamuddin’s doctrinaire code.

During his notorious heyday, Qalamuddin quickly gained a reputation for issuing rigid and often cruel edicts that made the difficult lives of Afghans markedly more miserable. As the Taliban gained infamy for persecuting Afghanistan’s ethnic and religious minorities, most notably the Shi’a Hazara, Qalamuddin ruthlessly ordered the closure of a network of underground Shi’a girls schools in Kabul that provided an education for perhaps the country’s most embattled demographic. [2] Qalamuddin was personally responsible for formally banning women from working in the public space during the five core years of the Islamic Emirate’s existence. Without a hint of irony, he stated that it was necessary to restrict women’s movements due to a lack of security while the Taliban’s singular achievement was the elimination of insecure, warlord-torn environments in Afghanistan’s cities and roads. In a 1997 interview, Qalamuddin laid out his rationale: “We have security problems…Women must be completely segregated from men…We fought for Shari’a law and this is the organization that will implement it. I will implement it come what may.” [3] Officially, Qalamuddin was merely enforcing the edicts issued by Mullah Muhammad Omar that were deemed essential to cleanse Afghan society of un-Islamic influences. 

At the height of his power, a force of 400-odd men patrolled Kabul meting out punishments to citizens for almost absurd indiscretions under Qalamuddin’s strict orders. [4] Qalamuddin, today a sullen, remorseless man, once careened around downtown Kabul in a pick-up truck beaming instructions from a jerry-rigged loudspeaker ordering his thugs to wantonly demolish television sets in order to ostensibly eradicate the influence of ‘idolatry’ (AFP, July 30, 1998). Qalamuddin did not want the Taliban’s Afghan subjects influenced by Bollywood films’ projection of Hindu and Sikh culture which he viewed as divisive, corrupting element in 1990s Afghanistan. All it would take to eradicate such foreign influences, primarily those of Indian pop culture rather than Western, was to simply ban technological advances that crept into the heavily isolated heart of Central Asia, or so the thinking of Maulvi Qalamuddin went. Qalamuddin insisted that his religious police sought only to eradicate “vice” in Afghanistan’s public space in order to create the Islamist utopia that the Taliban movement sought to implement by force. [5] In his efforts to create a purely Sunni state inspired by the Deobandi thought of late Islamic India, he defended the practices of the Emirate’s religious police to an Egyptian journalist at the time: “We see it as our responsibility to combat these vices because they harm the Islamic society we are seeking. In addition, our silence about them would be tantamount to encouraging the spread of vice.” [6]

Today, the Afghan Taliban have embraced the imagery and sound of new media wholeheartedly as the primary component of the propaganda war against their Afghan and Western adversaries. The movement that once confiscated televisions and strung up cassette tape from trees at checkpoints is now engaged in a major campaign of disseminating songs and video clips via Afghanistan’s expansive mobile phone network in efforts to promote itself as a nationalist, anti-occupation force thereby gaining the critical rural support it needs to sustain itself (Afghan Recovery Reports, June 23). The Taliban’s depressing edicts, once enforced so vigorously by Qalamuddin a decade ago, are only as valid as they are useful, as the movement must constantly adapt in the war-fighting environment.

Qalamuddin is a product of the Dar-ul Uloom Haqqani madrassa in the town of Akora Khattak, Khyber-Pukhtoonkhwa Province (then named the Northwest Frontier Province). The same madrassa produced Jalauddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani Network and one of the most dreaded insurgent leaders in the war theater of eastern Afghanistan-western Pakistan (The Nation [Islamabad], July 19, 1997). As one of the most feared, hardliner Taliban leaders, Qalamuddin has been a staunch ally of Pakistan, which sheltered and educated him. When Pakistan conducted a highly controversial series of underground nuclear bomb tests in a remote corner of its Balochistan Province, Qalamuddin was quick to defend Pakistan’s escalation of a South Asian nuclear arms race. “We support these tests which show to the superpowers that Muslims can also be nuclear power…according to Islamic Shari’a, the Muslims have to defend their territory and honors. For this defense it is very good if they have sophisticated arms equal to that in the hand of their enemy [India]” (AFP, June 2, 1998). 

Maulvi Qalamuddin went underground following the dissolution of the Islamic Emirate in Kabul and Kandahar in mid-November 2001. He managed to evade Afghanistan’s nascent authorities for a nearly a year and a half until he was captured in Logar Province in April 2003 (Reuters, April 17, 2003). Though the concept of reconciling with the Afghan Taliban has gained much attention in 2011, it is not an entirely recent development. Qalamuddin was released from prison in September 2004 following successful lobbying efforts by members of his tribe in Logar Province (Deutsche Press Agentur, September 14, 2004). [7] The Karzai government thought he would be more useful as a conduit for talks with ‘moderate’ Taliban. Afghan Chief Justice Fazel Hadi Shinwari cited Qalamuddin’s extension of an “olive branch” to his Taliban brethren upon his release as a justification for renewed amnesty efforts and pressed the U.S. military to release 80 Taliban fighters from Bagram Air Base to encourage more reconciliation (AFP, January 17, 2005). Although the Afghan judge, who hailed the release of Qalamuddin as a potential avenue for peace talks, stated that Qalamuddin swiftly went to speak to his comrades about some kind of settlement, the Taliban immediately denied such exchanges ever took place. Qalamuddin likely had other ideas upon gaining his freedom. The man who once implemented al-Qisaas (the Law of Equality in punishment stipulated in the Quran), whereby a male relative is forced to execute a member of his family who has been convicted of manslaughter under Islamic law—while the victim’s family observes—is now being courted as a potential peacemaker, having supposedly met outgoing International Security Assistance Force chief General David Petraeus. [8] 

In September of 2005, Qalamuddin ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga (Lower House of parliament) to represent his native Logar Province in national legislative elections (Pajhwok Afghan News, September 16, 2005). At the time he announced his candidacy, he told an Afghan daily that his aim was “to serve the people and promote national peace and solidarity,” which indicated that he maintained a strong desire to remain relevant in the Afghan political sphere (Arman-e-Melli, May 24, 2005). The arc of Qalamuddin’s life reads like that of the perennially troubled nation from which he hails. From anti-Soviet jihadi to Deobandi zealot to fugitive to prisoner to political candidate to teacher, Maulvi Muhammad Qalamuddin remains both a symptom and a symbol of what plagues Afghanistan. While not unrepentant about his Taliban past, he has been brought into the fold to a degree judging by the mere fact of his living openly in Hamid Karzai’s Kabul while his former overlord, Mullah Muhammad Omar, has been in hiding for close to a decade.

As the idea of coming to a negotiated settlement with the Afghan Quetta Shura Taliban gains more and more traction in the eyes of the international community, Qalamuddin has the potential to become an important interlocutor if he indeed has sufficient credibility with those still fighting NATO-led forces in the country. The man who gained infamy for trying to keep Afghanistan a closed, retrograde society may be asked to walk on the world stage, albeit behind closed doors, if he is to be included in meaningful talks aimed at easing the withdrawal of American and allied soldiers. The obstacle to involving Qalamuddin in potential third-country meetings, for which he will need to be definitively removed from the Taliban sanctions list, will be opposition from international human rights and women’s rights organizations who want Qalamuddin kept isolated. The man who once dictated the height of women’s heels is now being courted to possibly end a multi-front, inter-ethnic, international war in which he was a key antagonist. 

Notes

1. Neamatollah Nojumi, The Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p.154.
2. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al-Qa’ida, and the Holy War, (London: Pluto Press, 2003), p.160.
3. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp.105-107.
4. Kamal Matinuddin, The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994-1997, (Darby: Diane Publishing Co, 1999), p.37.
5. Fahmi Huwaydi, Taliban: Jund Allah fi al-Ma’rikah al-Ghalat (Arabic), (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2001), p.81.

6. Fahmi Huwaydi, op cit.

7. Some sources list Qalamuddin as having been released in 2005. See: “The Consolidated List established and maintained by the [UN] 1267 Committee with respect to Al-Qa’ida, Usama bin Laden and the Taliban and other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with them,” October 27, 2008, p.17.
8. Muhammed Moosa, “The Taliban Movement and Their Goals,” Darul Ifta-e w’al Irshad, Peshawar, June 20, 1998.