Passive Politics and Poetics of Spiritual Resistance in Taliban Afghanistan

Abstract

Peoples of Central Asia in general and Afghanistan specifically have been traumatized by Western colonial aggression, occupation and low intensity forever wars for more than a century. Much has been written about their armed struggles in this region, but their passive and spiritual resistances have been for the most part ignored. In this paper I discuss two significant forms of their passive resistance: the saga of the repeated century-long transnational migration of a small community of Kirghiz (Kirgiz) from the Osh Valley to the Pamirs of Afghanistan and from there to the safety of Anatolia in eastern Turkey; and the reliance of the educated Afghan youth on the spiritual resistance poetry of Rumi and other masters to cope patiently with the tyrannical environment of the Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Key words: Spiritual resistance, poetic of resistance, migration, Afghan Kighiz, Afghan youth, Taliban.