Taliban

The Taliban formed in 1994 around Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, among students, the literal meaning of the Pashto word taliban, of Deobandi religious seminaries on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. The movement emerged out of the disorder that followed the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 and the subsequent civil war among mujahideen factions, presenting itself to a war weary population as a force that could end the banditry and factional fighting of the period by imposing a single, strict reading of Islamic law across the whole country. It expanded quickly, taking Kandahar in 1994 and Kabul in 1996, and by the late 1990s controlled most of Afghan territory outside the northeast, where the Northern Alliance held out.

This first period of rule, from 1996 to 2001, is remembered internationally for measures including severe restrictions on women's work and education, corporal and capital punishment carried out in public, and the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 as idolatrous. A United States led coalition removed the Taliban government from power in late 2001 following the September 11 attacks, after which the movement fought a two decade insurgency against the internationally recognized Afghan government and NATO forces. It returned to power in August 2021 as foreign forces completed their withdrawal, and now governs the country as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a name that asserts religious rather than purely national legitimacy for its rule.

The Taliban's religious orientation descends from the Deobandi movement, a revivalist current within Sunni Islam's Hanafi school of jurisprudence that originated at the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in colonial India and spread through networks of madrasas in Pakistan's tribal areas, where many of the Taliban's founding figures studied. Deobandi teaching is distinct from, and is sometimes wrongly conflated with, the unrelated Wahhabi and Salafi movements associated with the Arabian peninsula; the Taliban's own jurisprudence draws on Hanafi legal method as interpreted through this specifically South Asian revivalist lineage, combined with Pashtun customary law, Pashtunwali, which the movement has never fully subordinated to its religious rulings.

Since its 2021 return to power, the movement has governed through instruments including a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which enforces its interpretation of Islamic law in public life, and has imposed restrictions on female secondary and university education and on women's presence in most forms of public employment. The Taliban's own account holds these measures to be required by its reading of Sharia; international bodies and many Islamic scholars outside the movement dispute both the theological reasoning and the underlying legal method, a disagreement this atlas records as a live and ongoing dispute rather than a settled question.