A lone grave, its dirt mound shaded under the drooping branches of a mulberry tree and kept adorned with flowers, has become a daily stop for seminary students and staff members near Togh-Bairdi in northern Afghanistan.
It is the burial site of Mawlawi Shah Agha Hanafi, a revered religious academic who founded the seminary about two decades ago and helped it grow into a thriving school for 1,300 students, including 160 girls.
This month, the Taliban planted a bomb that killed him as he conducted a discussion about the Prophet Mohammed’s traditions, and his grave, at a corner of the seminary grounds, has become a gathering place for prayer and grief.
“When I come to work, the first thing I do is recite a verse of the Koran at his grave,” seminary headmaster Jan Agha said in Parwan Province. “Then I weep and then I go to my office.”
Hanafi joined a rapidly growing list of Muslim religious academics who have become casualties of the Afghan war.
The academics have long been targets, of one kind or another, in Afghanistan. Their words carry weight across many parts of society and they are assiduously courted for their support — and frequently killed for their criticism.
Hundreds are believed to have been killed during the past 16 years of war, and not always by the Taliban.
However, there has been a definite uptick in the targeted killing of academics — widely known as ulema — as the Taliban has intensified its offensives in the past two years, officials said.
It is being taken as a clear reminder of the weight the insurgents give not just to military victories, but also to religious influence in their campaign to disrupt the Afghan government and seize territory.
“The reason the Taliban resort to such acts is that they want to make sure their legitimacy is not questioned by the sermons of these ulema,” said Mohammad Moheq, a noted Afghan religious academic who also serves as an adviser to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.
“The only thing that undermines their legitimacy is the ability and power of these ulema if they preach and argue against them,” Moheq said. “Only they can challenge the Taliban’s ideology, not the liberal academics or others, and the Taliban understand that.”
“The reason these ulema are getting targeted is because they tell the truth — and the truth is that the ongoing fighting is just for power,” said Mawlawi Khudai Nazar Mohammedi, head of the Ulema Council of Helmand.
One member of the Taliban’s leadership council suggested that part of the reason for the intensified targeting of religious academics was the influence of the insurgency’s new leader, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada.
He is an ulema and madrasah leader and is considered more of a religious ideologue than his predecessor, who was killed by a US drone in 2015.
The senior Taliban figure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering other members of the leadership, said that under Haibatullah’s orders, sermons were more closely watched than ever — and that straying from Taliban interpretations of Shariah was punished “as harshly as possible.”
The Taliban’s statement this month after they gunned down Abdul Ghafoor Pairoz, 32, a prominent academic in Kandahar who had written or translated more than 50 books, made the stakes clear.
They said he had been killed for considering “the current holy war in Afghanistan as illegitimate.”
The Taliban said that “removing such a vicious element” was a signal to others that they were being watched and that “insolence toward religious orders” would not be tolerated.
During the Taliban’s rule in the 1990s, Pairoz was a young student in a Taliban madrasah in Kabul.
When their government fell, he stuck to the path and moved to Quetta, Pakistan, where he completed seven years of higher religious education to earn the title of mawlana.
He remained active in Taliban circles in Quetta, where the Taliban’s leadership council operates in exile.
However, as Pairoz read more and the war dragged on, he started questioning the religious foundation upon which the Taliban were fighting. He decided the only way to fight back was through an active religious discourse.
His last book, a collection of essays titled The Calling, dealt with themes like religious pluralism and the need for tolerance.
Just like Abdul Ghafoor Pairoz, Hanafi was critical of the Taliban’s path and often spoke of politics passionately in his sermons.
In one of his final speeches, he called on the Taliban to “join hands with the people of Afghanistan, instead of joining hands with Pakistan and Russia,” a nation increasingly accused of establishing ties to the Afghan insurgency.
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