Omar Sadr, NUIEC Scholar Lecture Series

Country of Origin: Afghanistan
Location: Sweden

“The Politics of Poor’s Resistance Against the Taliban Totalitarian Regime”

This chapter explores the dynamics of the poor’s civil resistance within the constrained political landscape of Afghanistan’s religious, totalitarian regime. It argues that the poor people’s resistance is rooted in a moral understanding of expanding the possibilities for a dignified life not just survival calculations. Drawing on systematic analysis of social media testimony, exiled media archives and interactions with respondents in Afghanistan, this chapter claims that everyday resistance by marginalized groups represent consistent pushback against the regime’s intrusion into three domains: the spatial, where the poor contest the Taliban control of public spaces through withdrawal and public nagging; the economy, where they evade taxation; and moral space, where they expose the contradictions between its religious authority claims and its actual governance conduct. The study contributes to civil resistance literature by demonstrating that civil resistance against religious totalitarian regimes not only claims rights but also poses fundamental challenges to the regime’s religious legitimacy. It advances analysis by demonstrating resistance is not hidden but mainly informal, localized, and uninstitutionalized. Afghanistan’s poor deliberately seek visibility, and their most politically consequential acts target not what the regime extracts, but what it claims to be. This reveals a structural vulnerability specific to religious totalitarianism: a regime that grounds its legitimacy in divine mandate cannot suppress resistance that exposes the gap between its sacred claims and its mundane failures without undermining itself.

“Pluralism Against Orthodoxy: Religious Resistance to the Taliban Religious Totalitarianism”

This talk examines the ulama’s discursive acts of resistance against the Taliban’s religious totalitarian regime in the post 2021 by interrogating their speeches, sermons, interviews and social media posts and reels. It explores how the ulama, a clerical class embedded in the Taliban’s institutional apparatus, resist the regime they simultaneously legitimate. The paper claims that the clergy serves a paradoxical dual role: they function simultaneously as a key vanguard social class in the regime and a resistor against its authoritarianism. On the one hand, the Taliban regime has presented an institutional role for the clergy in their politics. The clergy has been well represented in the top echelons of the regime. Key institutions of the Taliban regime such as the judiciary, high leadership council, ulama council, Ministry of Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue and Ministry of Haj, Endowment and Guidance are led and controlled by the ulama. On the other hand, with Islam and its clergy being pluralistic, the resistance against the regime by the resister clergy takes place in a protected space, a space where the regime’s own claims to Islamic legitimacy creates an interpretive openness it cannot close without undermining its foundational authority. The multiplicity of religious scripture allows both the regime and the resisters to articulate their cause based on the same religion.

“Cultural Relativism and the Fallacy of the Taliban Totalitarian Regime’s Gender Apartheid”

This paper articulates the concept of “authoritarian cultural relativism” to analyze the Taliban gender apartheid regime. It offers two main claims: first, that cultural relativism functions both as an ideological context and an authoritarian mechanism through which the Taliban regime legitimizes gender-based persecution, constructs a totalitarian moral policing governance apparatus, and forecloses accountability; and second, that the anti-gender apartheid struggle is rooted in Afghanistan women’s shared emancipatory struggle rather than abstract moral universalism. Through legal analysis of the Taliban laws, discourse analysis of the Taliban interviews and speeches, text analysis of the Taliban ideological texts, the paper demonstrates how the Taliban regime instrumentalizes archaic and fringe interpretations of Sharia and essentialized tribal customs to undermine Afghanistan’s plurality.  

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