Islam in Afghanistan
, mainly the Hanafi school, is the largest and the state religion of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Islam in Afghanistan began to be practiced after the Arab Islamic conquest of Afghanistan from the 7th to the 10th centuries, with the last holdouts to conversion submitting in the late 19th century. It was generally accepted by local communities as a replacement of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, local tribes began converting to the new religion. Islam is the official state religion of Afghanistan, with approximately 99.7% of the Afghan population being Muslim. Roughly 85% practice Sunni Islam, while around 10% are Shias. Most Shias belong to the Twelver branch and only a smaller number follow Ismailism.
After the Islamic conquest of Persia was completed, the Muslim Arabs then began to move towards the lands east of Persia and in 652 captured Herat. By the end of the 10th century CE the Turkic Ghaznavids subdued Kabul Shahi kings.
History
During the 7th century, the Rashidun Caliphate Arabs entered the territory that is now Afghanistan after defeating the Sassanid Persians in Nihawand. After this colossal defeat, the last Sassanid emperor, Yazdegerd III, fled eastward deep into Central Asia. In pursuing Yazdegerd, the Arabs entered the area from northeastern Iran via Herat, where they stationed a large portion of their army before advancing toward northern Afghanistan.Many of the inhabitants of northern Afghanistan accepted Islam through Umayyad missionary efforts, particularly under the reign of Caliph Hisham and Umar ibn AbdulAziz. In the south, Abdur Rahman bin Samara made incursions into Zabulistan which was ruled by the Zunbils.
File:The Surrender of Kandahar.jpg|thumb|upright|A miniature from Padshahnama depicting the surrender of the Shia Safavid at Kandahar in 1638 to the Sunni Mughal army commanded by Kilij Khan
During the reign of Al-Mu'tasim and his successors, Islam was generally practiced by most inhabitants of the region, and after Abbasid decline, under Ya'qub-i Laith Saffari, Islam was the predominant religion of Kabul and other major cities of Afghanistan. The father of Abu Hanifa, Thabit bin Zuta, was born in the territory that is now Afghanistan. He emigrated to Kufa, where Hanifa was born. Later, the Samanids propagated Sunni Islam deep into Central Asia, and the first complete translation of the Qur'an into Persian was made in the 9th century. Since then, Islam has dominated the country's religious landscape. Islamic leaders have entered the political sphere at various times of crisis but rarely exercised secular authority for long.
The remnants of a Shahi presence in Peshawar were expelled by Mahmud of Ghazni in 998 and 1030. The Ghaznavids were replaced by the Ghurid dynasty who expanded the already powerful Islamic empire. The Friday Mosque of Herat is one of the oldest mosques in the country, believed to have been first built under the Ghurids in the 12th century. During this period, known as the Islamic Golden Age, Afghanistan became the second major center of learning in the Muslim world after Baghdad.
After the Mongol invasion and destruction, the Timurids rebuilt the area and once again made it a center of Islamic learning. Shia Islam made its way to southern Afghanistan during the Safavid rule in the 16th century. Until Mir Wais Hotak liberated the Afghans in 1709, the Kandahar region of Afghanistan was often a battleground between the Shia Safavids and the Sunni Mughals.
Conquest by Abdur Rahman Khan
The first systematic employment of Islam as an instrument of state-building was initiated by King Abdur Rahman Khan during his drive toward centralization. He decreed that all laws must comply with Islamic law and thus elevated the Shariah over customary laws embodied in the Pashtunwali. The ulama were enlisted to legitimize and sanction his state efforts as well as his central authority. This enhanced the religious community on the one hand, but as they were increasingly inducted into the bureaucracy as servants of the state, the religious leadership was ultimately weakened. Many economic privileges enjoyed by religious personalities and institutions were restructured within the framework of the state; the propagation of learning, once the sole prerogative of the ulama, was closely supervised; and the Amir became the supreme arbiter of justice.File:Men praying in Afghanistan.jpg|thumb|Men praying at the Hazrat Ali Mazar in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif
Abdur Rahman Khan's successors continued and expanded his policies as they increased the momentum of secularization. Islam remained central to interactions, but the religious establishment remained essentially non-political, functioning as a moral rather than a political influence. Nevertheless, Islam asserted itself in times of national crisis. Moreover, when the religious leadership considered themselves severely threatened, charismatic religious personalities periodically employed Islam to rally disparate groups in opposition to the state. They rose up on several occasions against King Amanullah Shah, for example, in protest against reforms they believed to be western intrusions inimical to Islam.
Subsequent rulers, mindful of traditional attitudes antithetical to secularization, were careful to underline the compatibility of Islam with modernization. Even so, and despite its pivotal position within the society, which continued to draw no distinction between religion and state, the role of religion in state affairs continued to decline.
The 1931 Constitution made Hanafi Shariah the state religion, while the 1964 Constitution simply prescribed that the state should conduct its religious ritual according to the Hanafi school. The 1977 Constitution declared Islam the religion of Afghanistan, but made no mention that the state ritual should be Hanafi. The Penal Code of 1976 and the Civil Code of 1977, covering the entire field of social justice, represent major attempts to cope with elements of secular law based on, but superseded by, other systems. Courts, for instance, were enjoined to consider cases first according to secular law, resorting to Shariah in areas secular law did not cover. By 1978, the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan openly expressed its aversion to the religious establishment. Nonetheless, Islamic rhetoric was still utilized by PDPA politicians throughout its existence, with Hafizullah Amin declaring that the PDPA was based upon Islamic principles. The largely secular PDPA rule precipitated the fledgling Islamist Movement into a national revolt; Islam moved from its passive stance on the periphery to play an active role.
Politicized Islam in Afghanistan represents a break from Afghan traditions. The Islamist Movement originated in 1958 among faculties of Kabul University, particularly in the Faculty of Islamic Law, which had been founded in 1952 with the stated purpose of raising the quality of religious teaching to accommodate modern science and technology. The founders were largely professors influenced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a party formed in the 1930s that was dedicated to Islamic revivalism and social, economic, and political equity. Their objective is to come to terms with the modern world through the development of a political ideology based on Islam. The Afghan leaders, while indebted to many of these concepts, did not forge strong ties to similar movements in other countries.
The liberalization of government attitudes following the passage of the 1964 Constitution ushered in a period of intense activism among students at Kabul University. Professors and their students set up the Muslim Youth Organization in the mid-1960s at the same time that the leftists were also forming many parties. Initially communist students outnumbered the Muslim students, but by 1970 the Muslim Youth had gained a majority in student elections. Their membership was recruited from university faculties and from secondary schools in several cities such as Mazari Sharif and Herat. Some of these professors and students became the leaders of the Mujahideen rebels in the 1980s.
Radicalization and NATO presence
The 1979 Soviet invasion in support of a communist government triggered a major intervention of religion into Afghan political conflict, and Islam united the multiethnic political opposition. With the takeover of government by the PDPA in April 1978, Islam had already become central to uniting the opposition against the communist ideology of the new rulers.File:Mujahideen prayer in Shultan Valley Kunar, 1987.jpg|thumb|Mujahideen praying in Kunar Province during the 1980s Soviet–Afghan War
The Soviet invasion and the Iranian Revolution not only led national uprisings but also the importation of foreign radical Muslims to Afghanistan. The mujahideen leaders were charismatic figures with dyadic ties to followers. In many cases military and political leaders replaced the tribal leadership; at times the religious leadership was strengthened; often the religious combined with the political leadership. Followers selected their local leaders on the basis of personal choice and precedence among regions, sects, ethnic groups or tribes, but the major leaders rose to prominence through their ties to outsiders who controlled the resources of money and arms.
With the support of foreign aid, the mujahideen were ultimately successful in their jihad to drive out the Soviet forces, but not in their attempts to construct a political alternative to govern Afghanistan after their victory. Throughout the war, the mujahideen were never fully able to replace traditional structures with a modern political system based on Islam. Most mujahideen commanders either used traditional patterns of power, becoming the new khans, or sought to adapt modern political structures to the traditional society. In time the prominent leaders accumulated wealth and power and, in contrast to the past, wealth became a determining factor in the delineation of power at all levels.
File:Flickr - DVIDSHUB - International brothers, sisters in faith gather at Kandahar Air Field for Eid al-Adha.jpg|thumb|Muslims praying together during an Eid al-Adha worship service at Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan
With the departure of foreign troops and the long sought demise of Kabul's leftist government, The Islamic State of Afghanistan finally came into being in April 1992. This represented a distinct break with Afghan history, for religious specialists had never before exercised state power. But the new government failed to establish its legitimacy and, as much of its financial support dissipated, local and middle range commanders and their militia not only fought among themselves but resorted to a host of unacceptable practices in their protracted scrambles for power and profit. Throughout the nation the populace suffered from harassment, extortion, kidnapping, burglary, hijacking and acts dishonoring women. Drug trafficking increased alarmingly; nowhere were the highways safe. The mujahideen had forfeited the trust they once enjoyed.
In the fall of 1994 a Deobandi group called the Taliban came forth vowing to cleanse the nation of warlords and criminals. Their intention was to create a "pure" Islamic government subject to their own strict interpretations of the Shariah. Many Pakistani politicians supported the Taliban, including Sami ul Haq who is regarded as the Father of the Taliban. A number of its leaders were one-time mujahideen members, but the bulk of their forces were young Afghan refugees trained in Pakistani Deobandi madrassas, especially those run by the Jamiat-e Ulema-e Islam Pakistan, the aggressively conservative Pakistani political religious party headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman, arch rival of Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of the equally conservative Jamaat-e-Islami and longtime supporter of the mujahideen.
Headquartered in Kandahar, mostly Pashtuns from the rural areas, and from the top leadership down to the fighting militia characteristically in their thirties or forties and even younger, the Taliban swept the country. In September 1996 they captured Kabul and established the first iteration of thr Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which existed until 2001. The meteoric take over went almost unchallenged. Arms were collected and security was established. At the same time, acts committed for the purpose of enforcing the Shariah included public executions of murderers, stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, a ban on all forms of recreation such as kite flying, chess and cockfights, prohibition on all forms of entertainment like cinema, television, and music, proscriptions against pictures of humans and animals, and an embargo on women's voices over the radio. Women were to remain as invisible as possible, behind the veil, in purdah in their homes, and dismissed from work or study outside their homes. They were toppled by a combined Afghan-NATO military force in late 2001. The majority of them escaped to neighboring Pakistan from where they launched an insurgency against the current NATO-backed Afghan government. Peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government were ongoing as of 2013.
By 2021, however, the Taliban returned to power and re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with similarly restrictive legislation like the first incarnation.