The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, when it controlled large parts of the north and west of that country in the 1990s, had a goal of “forced reIslamization” (Rashid’s phrase) toward the other ethnic peoples they gained control over in placed like Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif. The “correct” practice they sought to instill in local populations was – of course – Wahhabi-Salafism.
So can “forced reIslamization” work? the answer is ‘yes,’ and it’s been done before – in Saudi Arabia. But it comes with a price, and by looking at the Saudi-Wahhabi project we can estimate and make some projections.
Khalid Abou El Fadl writes about it in The Great Theft.
…the various Wahhabi rebellions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were very bloody, as the Wahhabis indiscriminately slaughtered Muslims especially those belonging to Sufi orders and the Shi’i sect. In 1802, for example, the Wahhabis executed a large number of Sunnis in Mecca and Medina, whom they considered for one reason or another heretical. The number of those executed or massacred by the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance has never been counted, but from historical accounts it is clear that it is in the tens of thousands if not more. In the course of the second conquest of the Arabian peninsula, for instance, acting under orders from Ibn Sa’ud, the Wahhabis carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations.
So what would be the comparable figures for executions and amputations today in Afghanistan? I’m going to have to make a few assumptions here, but follow along.
The population of Afghanistan today is roughly equivalent to that of Saudi Arabia – around 28 million. The Saudi population was probably around 3 million in the 1800s. Assuming Afghanstan’s population has always been close to Saudi Arabia’s, we can set up simple equations:
40,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million. And,
350,000 is to 3 million as ? is to 28 million.
Among today’s population in Afghanistan, if the Taliban executed an equivalent proportion of the population for heresy that number would be 373,333.
An equivalent proportion of amputations among the currently living Afghan population would be approximately 3.2 million.
El Fadl refers to these figures as only accounting for those slain in the “second conquest,” most likely the “heretical Sunnis.” So we should probably double these numbers (at least) to capture the slain and disfigured Sufi and Shia.
So there you have it: The price in lives would be over a half million, and the cost in amputations would be more than 6 million, following the historical Saudi model of ‘forced reIslamization.’
