"Why don't you go live under the oppressive Taliban if you dislike the West so much!"

I've seen several times in the comments section as a response to your criticism of the West that the Sharia is much worse, and they usually mention the Taliban. It is one or another version of, if you want to see what application of Sharia looks like, it's the Taliban.

Right.

Or they'll say, if the West is so bad, why don't you go live in Afghanistan? Can you address that?

Okay. So first of all, I don't know much about the Taliban in 2023. I knew a little something about the Taliban twenty years ago, but the Taliban of today is an entirely different entity than it was back then. But you don't know anything about the Taliban either, let's be honest. For most westerners, the Taliban has just become a sort of cartoon villain.

It's a caricature. For them, the Taliban is whatever they say it is and what they say it is is everything bad that anyone can possibly be and no one's supposed to ever question those assumptions. So there is the Taliban that actually exists and then there's the sort of western voodoo doll of the Taliban that may or may not bear any actual resemblance to the real thing. And if you say anything if you try to say anything positive about the Taliban, then they've already set it up in such a way that it makes you it means that you're saying something positive about a villain. And if you try to point out the context of Afghanistan being a war zone for half a century and suggest that maybe this, context has some relevance to what the Taliban actually is and what they actually do, then you're portrayed as just making excuses for their villainy.

I mean, western narratives are typically incredibly hostile towards context because propaganda is hostile towards context. Context undermines simplification. It shows a subject from too many angles and narratives only want one angle to be shown. It's like that story about the blind men and the elephant, you know, each one of them holding a different part of the elephant and describing a different animal, how they thought it looked. Mainstream, discourse wants everyone to think that an elephant is the shape of a tree trunk or a snake.

They never want you to see the full picture. So what we know from their own statements is that the Taliban has closed schools for girls in most of the provinces in Afghanistan. So when you already have the villain narrative in your head, something like this just serves as a confirmation that the Taliban is, you know, oppressive and evil. Never mind that education in Afghanistan has been run under the auspices of American NGOs and American programs for the last twenty years, And and they're teaching a curriculum that many Americans themselves don't want in their schools. And because of that type of curriculum, many Americans take their kids out of schools and teach them at home instead.

So it could be argued that the Taliban is not prohibiting education for girls, but miseducation for girls. They have said that once they get the curriculum cleaned up, schools will open up again. So time will tell, but that's their business. You and I don't know what challenges a government faces when they've been in a constant state of war and famine and deprivation and misery for fifty years. It is conceivable, you know, that they might have different priorities than say Vermont or Connecticut.

They might have different needs for their very minimal budgetary resources than say California or or New Hampshire might have. I don't think that's unreasonable to assume. Now as for the statement, if America is so bad, why don't you move to Afghanistan? I mean, why would you want me to go to Afghanistan except to make me even more acutely aware of how unjust and how barbaric The US and the West have been? Afghanistan is the poster child of American brutality.

Do you really think that looking at the situation that you made in Afghanistan, the catastrophe that you unleashed on that country for twenty years is going to improve my opinion of the West? That's like telling me to drink the water in Flint, Michigan if I think that corporate corruption is bad. If I think torture is so bad, then why don't I go talk to torture victims? That doesn't make any sense. You should be telling me to go to some country, you know, that America has actually made better and more livable through their intervention, not worse.

But I guess we both know that you can't do that. Now as far as the Taliban being what the application of the sharia looks like, I already know what the application of the sharia looks like because I'm a Muslim. So it looks like my life. It looks like the life of every Muslim that I know because we all apply the sharia in our lives as best we can. So no, I don't have to look at the Taliban or at ISIS or some other so called Islamic government or so called Islamic state to know what it looks like to live under the Sharia because I live under the Sharia.

I live under it every day like a billion other Muslims in the world with or without state enforcement by choice because it is the superior way to live your life. Think about that. The way of life that you're terrified of, the way of life that you demonize, the way of life that you tell yourself is oppressive. A billion people in the world choose to follow it, but you wanna point to the Taliban as the only example of life under the Sharia. People are voluntarily living under the Sharia all over the world, self enforced.

You don't have to look at Afghanistan to see them. They're everywhere and they're hard to miss. They're the people who are not walking around in public half naked. They're the people who are not getting drunk, who are not getting high. You know?

They're the people who do their jobs conscientiously. The people who keep their word, who mind their own business and take care of their families. They're the kind of people who actually are today what you like to imagine your forefathers were like before the liberal moral relativism ran amok in your societies. They're serious people. People who actually care about being fair and just and honest and charitable.

People who think actually think about judgment day and being accountable for their actions and their behavior. There are people who live by a level of self discipline that you would think is impossible. So you can't miss them. If you wanna see people living under Sharia, we're everywhere. And us being everywhere makes the world that much more sane, that much more ethical, that much more principled, that much more moral.

Wherever there are people living under the Sharia by their own choice, it does nothing but make that a better place to live, a safer place to live, a more decent place to live. And if that scares you, if you're scared of a community of people because they are living morally, living decently, living principled lives, Only a real villain would be scared of that. Only a villain would be disturbed by that. That would disturb an immoral person. So when you point at the Taliban, it just tells me what you don't want to see all around you, what you don't want to acknowledge as the actual Islam lived everywhere in the world.

And because you've already named the Taliban as villains, you wanna say that they represent Islam exclusively, the correct Islam, instead of the billion Muslims in the world who are more moral and more disciplined and more decent than you. No. The Taliban represents a government that's trying to rule over the war torn rubble of their country with horribly limited resources and continued international hostility and interference. That's what the Taliban is. That's what you see when you look at them.

But what the Sharia is, you can see that in any good practicing Muslim anywhere in the world. But you know it'll make you look bad if you just come right out and say that you don't like Muslims, you don't like Islam, you don't like the sharia because those are people who are always praying, who are always remembering God, you know, who are always giving charity, who dress modestly, who don't go to bars and clubs and sleep around. You don't like them because there are people with conservative values, who take morality seriously, who love God. That'll make you look bad. So you have to redefine all of that as oppression to make your opposition to morality look like a moral stance.

And you have to pretend that we are against freedom because we exercise freedom responsibly and in a principled manner, and because freedom to you actually just means irresponsibility and decadence. And again, this is why kofar, because it's lying. It's changing words for other words, mischaracterizing things to obscure reality. But you wouldn't do that if you thought you were right. You wouldn't have to be dishonest if you thought you were right.

You wouldn't have to use deceitful language to make immoral things sound moral if you didn't know on some level that you're wrong. Shaitan taught you this because that's how he pitches it to you. He makes the evil seem good because human beings want to be good and they don't want to be evil in their heart of hearts. So he, Shaitan, redefines immorality as morality and then you run with it, but you know you're wrong And that's really why Muslims make you so uncomfortable and why you have to talk about the Taliban and all that. To convince yourself that Shaitan's propaganda is true.

So you can rationalize your disobedience to God as a good thing. Rationalize the moral decay of your societies as a virtuous thing. It's a breathtaking level of dishonesty and it's gonna let you down. It is letting you down and it is by far the most oppressive way to live your life because ultimately, immorality and irresponsibility and selfishness are truly tyrannical and damaging. And the moral discipline that Muslims live by, the Sharia, is liberating and empowering.

So you have to call what we follow oppressive just to keep yourself from facing the oppression that you are actually under.