The Deobandi sect and the Taliban’s cheerleaders in the UK

The Taliban is now bedding in for its second regime in Afghanistan and desperate Afghans continue to flee what is likely to become a brutal, heavily armed theocracy. Meanwhile in the UK it has come as a shock to many that some British Muslims applaud the Taliban’s resurgence.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme, the Islamic sharia council member Khola Hasan claimed that ‘every single person that I know, as a Muslim’ was celebrating the return of the jihadist group and that ‘The problem is that we don’t give [the Taliban] a chance’, sparking outrage from more liberal minded British Muslims. ‘What an atrocious lie it is to say that “all British Muslims celebrate the resurgence of the Taliban”’ fumed Dr Taj Hargey, Imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation in the Daily Mail. ‘Only religious militants and Sharia fanatics welcomed the Taliban’s assumption of power,’ he added.

How could Hasan – brought up with the rights and freedoms conferred by a western secular democracy – downplay the ascendance of a group that has flogged people for dancing or listening to music, deprived women of education and work, jailed them for fleeing forced marriages, publicly stoned adulterers, terrorised religious minorities and beheaded ‘collaborators’ with western forces?

The Taliban had ‘grown up’, argued Hasan.