Critical Thoughts

This is probably one of the few times you will see me appear in a tuxedo in public. After all, how many times have you seen a Muslim blogger and self-confessed Islamist in a western suit?

Now if anyone thinks he (or she) can get away with calling me a “Taliban”, “towel-head”, “sand-nigger” or any derogative remarks that one is bound to hear from a bigoted, regressive and backwards-looking Islamophobe, all I have to do is sit back and laugh while I swagger in my new tuxedo outfit. By the way, the full suit costs RM950 in total, so what was that again I hear about yours truly being “unemployed”?

The Taliban were an Afghan student movement (from Arabic “at-taalibun“, plural for”students”) who rode on populist support and overthrew the mujahideen government at the time who were fighting among themselves and causing divisions in the country. Once the Taliban came to power, they implemented the Shariah and united the various provinces in the country, except for the northern regions. Because of their policies of upholding Islamic laws and their defiance against the “norm”, such as destroying the Bamiyan Buddha statues, they were regarded as “fanatics” and “lunatics”. Such is the stigma associated with the Taliban that even the Islamic movement is not spared from being labelled “another Taliban”, which is rather ironic since such movements mostly stem from the Ikhwaan al-Muslimun in Egypt and are closer to them ideologically, not the Taliban’s. This blogger was himself branded a “Taliban” several times around 2002 - 2003, when the issue was still hot, and even more recently in 2008.

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