What's in a Name? Or -Stan by Your Land

Reader Comments From The Fray:


Your etymology of 'Taliban' was more or less correct but I thought some annotation might be of general interest. Talib was originally an Arabic word with the general meaning of 'student.' It was absorbed into Persian after the fall of the Sasanian empire to Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD, and then into Pashto, a related Indo-European language spoken by members of the Pathan ethnic group in present-day Afghanistan, after those tribes finally fell to the forces of Baghdad two centuries later. In the process it naturally took on local plural endings and other grammatical markers (the Arabic plural is 'tullab').

'Talib' only acquired the specialized connotation of 'student in a religious school' (madrasa) in late nineteenth century British India, after the Crown began to set up nonreligious schools in competition with the madrasas. This classic divide-and-conquer strategy succeeded in a typically perverse manner. While many of the non-talibs joined the Muslim League that split Pakistan from India in 1947, the madrasas fell under the influence of the reactionary Deobandi movement, founded by an imam from Uttar Pradesh. Deobandis took their inspiration from the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an Arabian preacher of the late eighteenth century whose puritanical philosophy also became the official doctrine of the Saudi emirate.

The British, famously, were unable to conquer any of the Pathan-dominated areas beyond the Khyber Pass between Peshawar (now Pakistan) and Jalalabad (now Afghanistan), but a sizable minority of Pathans was left in the northeast provinces of British India. Most of them became aligned with the Deobandi madrasas, which clashed for reasons of class, ethnicity and educational background with the reformist Muslim League.

The Taliban religious hierarchy, then, was drawn from Pathans originating on both sides of the Pass who had studied in the Deobandi madrasas of Peshawar and other localities in western Pakistan. These schools had a long history of financial and pedagogical support from Arab Wahhabis: most prominently the kingdom of Ibn Saud. When, in the post-Soviet vacuum, the Taliban "returned" to Afghanistan--bankrolled by Arab zealots like Usama bin Laden whose understanding of Wahhabism was even more extreme than that of the Saudis--they aligned themselves with local ethnic Pathan fighters. The locals were often more interested in their ideology as a means than as an end in itself; the violent cult of bin Laden, of course, seems to have cottoned to them for both reasons.

I mention all this partly to illustrate that the very word Taliban, no less than the militia that took it for an emblem, is a capsule history of Afghanistan over the last millennium or so--and partly because, in his New York Times column Sunday, William Safire accused the Taliban (among many other sins) of 'ungrammatical Persian.' Apparently he is branching out into the Near Eastern linguistic know-it-all business: led on this importunate path, perhaps, by his many, um, jihads.

--ADAS

(To reply, click here.)

(9/26)

• E.J. Dionne: Obama, Iraq and a Hard Place
• Fareed Zakaria: America Is Not at War
• Robert Novak: Mutiny on the GOP Bounty
• Michael Kinsley: Al Franken, Funny but Serious