In New Afghanistan, the Mosque Is the Message

By Marc Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, February 1, 2002; Page A14

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The former imam of the Wazir Akbar Khan mosque regularly delivered fiery sermons in front of Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda colleagues and the Taliban faithful. He declared that holy war was necessary, that good Muslims prayed at the mosque five times a day and that Afghanistan was creating the one true Islamic state.

The current imam has a very different message: Sincere Muslims need not come to the mosque to pray, the Taliban was a tool of Pakistan and the Northern Alliance -- the militia that drove the Taliban out of Kabul and now makes up the army of Afghanistan -- was ready and able to protect the country.

His views and delivery are far less extreme than his predecessor's, but his message is just as political. And that is hardly surprising, since Imam Alham Ziari is also head of public information for the interim government's Defense Ministry, and until several months ago was a front-line political officer for the Northern Alliance.

"When the Taliban was here, the imam said many wrong things during his sermons," said Ziari, who has religious training but has never been an imam before. "The new government knows who I am and thought I would only give the correct information to the people."

Since capturing Kabul in November, the Northern Alliance has been the dominant political force in the capital, with several of its leaders holding key positions in the month-old national government. Likewise, the alliance has put its own people in dozens of the larger mosques in Kabul and wherever else it can assert its authority. The Islamic Affairs Ministry reports that 65 new imams have been appointed to head mosques in Kabul.

Officials with the new administration say they have brought in new imams because many of the former leaders of Kabul's mosques were top Taliban officials who fled to southern Afghanistan and to Pakistan. But they also say they believe it is essential for religious leaders to deliver a proper political message. That, they say, is the Islamic tradition that bin Laden and the Taliban embraced but distorted murderously.

"It is very important what the religious leaders are telling the people now, because in many places they don't get any other information," said Atawol Rahman Salim, first deputy in the Islamic Affairs Ministry, who helped select some of the new imams.

"What they tell the people can have more power to defeat terrorism than the bullets of the army," he said. "That is why only the right man must be the imam."

Salim said that the interim government had no intention of dominating the mosques as the Taliban did. When the Taliban governed Afghanistan between 1996 and last fall, all the important government ministers were religious figures and all the main religious leaders were government officials.

Salim said that only some of the new imams in Kabul are currently government officials and that all of them had to be approved by the worshipers in their areas. But he made clear that the government was looking to increase its control of mosques outside Kabul and northern Afghanistan, and that it thought the issue was a crucial one.

"There are many mosques in Afghanistan where the same people are giving the sermons now as during the time of Taliban and al Qaeda, and they are giving the people ideas against the government," Salim said. "We have a plan that when the new government has full control, and our ministry has control over all of its area, we will appoint many new imams."

In Kabul, the change is not only a political and ideological one, but an ethnic one. Under the Taliban, almost all of the imams in Kabul were Pashtuns, the ethnic group that dominates southern Afghanistan, the Taliban's birthplace; most of the new imams are ethnic Tajiks or Uzbeks from the north. That reflects one of the realities of the new interim government: While Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, is its chairman, much of the real power is in the hands of the ethnic minorities that dominated the Northern Alliance.

Under the Taliban, the imam of the Wazir Akbar Khan mosque was Muslim Haqqani, a Pashtun from the family of the leader of the Taliban army, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Ziari, the new imam, is Tajik and proud of his work with the Northern Alliance. The new minister for Islamic affairs, Mohammad Hanif Balkhi, is also from the alliance. He and first deputy Salim often give Friday sermons at Kabul's major mosques.

The new imam of Kabul's largest and most celebrated mosque, the old and graceful Pul-i-Khisti, near the central bazaar, is also from the north. He led the Masjid Jama at Jabal Saraj, the northeastern town that was on the front line during the Northern Alliance's five-year fight against Taliban rule.

Unlike Ziari, Qaree Hobaibur Haman does not consider himself political, and he comes from a long line of religious leaders. But his message is similar. "The Taliban and al Qaeda hurt Islam greatly," he said. "An Islam that comes by torture and force cannot be the real Islam."

Haman said the Taliban punished people who didn't attend mosque services, but he believes that "if you have a good Islamic idea, you do not need to force people to the mosque. They will come. Now we have more people attending than during the Taliban times."

In addition to leading the Pul-i-Khisti mosque, Haman was also asked to become director of the Kabul madrassas, or religious schools for boys. He said the Taliban created many of them to train recruits and that they would all be merged into one school that would teach religion and "modern knowledge." He said the many girls' schools that had been converted to madrassas would be returned to the girls.

Unlike Pul-i-Khisti, Ziari's mosque is modern and inelegant, even though it is in one of the most privileged sections of the capital.

Ziari said he was not a soldier during his years with the Northern Alliance. But he put on a camouflage jacket to talk, and he tended to see things in military terms.

In the weeks after taking over the mosque, he said, he spoke out in his sermons against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

"The words had a strong effect on people," he said. "They were on target like a B-52. Perhaps even more effective than that."