It was the 27th day of Ramadan. After Fajr, it felt like any other day — ordinary, quiet — until the evening, when everything changed.

We hear about the passing of brothers and sisters in Islam, but losing someone close to you is different; most people aren’t prepared for it. That day replays in my mind, minute by minute. Twenty minutes before maghrib, I ran into my mother’s room, trying to wake her. My wife began CPR until help arrived, and we rushed to the hospital. I stood on the other side of the words we hear in movies: “We tried everything we could, but unfortunately, your mother has passed away.” I collapsed like a child, and in that moment, I accepted that my life would never be the same.

The Silence After the Burial

The first few days after my mother’s passing moved quickly. From the ghusl, the janazah, the burial, the steady stream of family and community who surrounded us with prayers, food, and support. In many ways, those early days carried me on autopilot. The structure of our faith and the presence of loved ones softened the initial blow. But then comes the question: what happens next?

“The stillness of a chair, the absence of a voice, the memories that return uninvited, sharp and vivid. That silence speaks volumes, but only to those who live inside it. No one else can truly feel that particular pain, because it belongs uniquely to you.” [PC: Silvestri Matteo (unsplash)]

Over the following week or two, people continued to check in: friends, relatives, colleagues, and even people we haven’t spoken to in years. They called, they visited, and they brought meals. Their kindness meant more than words could capture. Yet, slowly, life began to call them back to their routines. People moved on, and the days got colder. What they couldn’t see and what no one can truly enter into is the quietness of the home after everyone leaves. The silence that echoes through rooms once filled with laughter or simple conversation. The emptiness of a chair, the absence of a voice, the memories that return uninvited, sharp and vivid. That silence speaks volumes, but only to those who live inside it. No one else can truly feel that particular pain, because it belongs uniquely to you.

In those moments, a realization sets in: nothing can really prepare us for loss. No book, no story, no imagined scenario. Grief strips away our illusions of control and reminds us how fragile we are. We are vulnerable, we are temporary, and we are completely dependent. In that raw state, one truth becomes undeniable — Allah is in control of everything. He is Al-Ḥayy (The Ever-Living), while we are travelers destined to return to Him.

Learning the Phrase “Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn”

We grow up hearing the phrase: Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn. “Indeed, to Allah we belong, and to Him we shall return.” It is said almost automatically when we hear of someone’s passing or any kind of hardship. But what does it really mean?

The Prophet ﷺ taught us that when a calamity strikes and a believer says these words sincerely along with the duʿāʾ, “Allāhumma ajirnī fī muṣībatī, wa akhlif lī khayran minhā” — Allah promises to reward that person and to replace their loss with something better. [Sahih Muslim]

On paper, it is easy to read. But when the loss is someone so close: a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or a child, the words carry a weight that shakes your very being. This isn’t just “a calamity.” This is someone you saw every day, shared meals with, traveled with, laughed with, and someone who knew you almost as well as you know yourself. Suddenly they’re gone. The phone calls that once came so naturally now go unanswered. The little routines that felt permanent are no longer possible. And the question creeps in: Where did they go?

The truth is, they were never truly ours to begin with. They belonged to Allah . He is the One Who gave them life, sustained them, and protected them. We were simply entrusted with their presence for a time. Like a borrowed pen at school, which you use for a while, but eventually it must be returned to its rightful owner. The difference is, this “pen” was your whole world, your comfort, your love. And yet, even they must return to the One Who created them.

This realization is painful, but it is also freeing. Innā lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn becomes more than words. It becomes a lens through which we see the reality of life, loss, and our ultimate return. We have returned the loved one to their rightful owner, and Allah is the best of caretakers.

What Should We Expect?

• Time doesn’t heal all wounds. People often say, “time heals everything,” but that isn’t true. Time allows you to accept reality, but it does not erase the wound. Nothing truly heals except recognizing the essence of life — that this world is temporary and the real life is the eternal one. Your loved one is not lost; they are simply ahead of you on the journey, and you will follow when Allah wills.

• You will feel lonely. Loneliness can feel heavy, but it can also be a gift. The Prophet ﷺ himself would retreat to Mount Ḥirāʾ in solitude before revelation. Use your moments of loneliness to turn back to Allah , to speak to Him , and to find strength in His Company. Going on hikes, walks, and looking at the creation of Allah while talking to Allah will help this feeling.

• Your heart will feel uneasy. Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. There will be days that feel normal, and then suddenly the weight returns. In those moments, hold fast to the promise of Allah: “Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest” [Surah Ar-Ra’ad; 13:28]. Fill those pauses with dhikr, with prayer, with the Qur’an — and you will find the unease gently softened.

• You will cry. Tears will come — and they should. Crying is not a weakness. It is mercy. The Prophet ﷺ himself cried at the loss of his loved ones. When his son Ibrāhīm passed away, tears flowed from his eyes. When asked about it, he said: “The eyes shed tears and the heart grieves, but we do not say except that which pleases our Lord.” [Bukhārī and Muslim] Let your tears flow, and let them turn into duʿāʾ for the one you have lost.

What Shouldn’t We Expect?

• Don’t expect the pain to vanish. Grief doesn’t disappear one day. It softens, it changes shape, but it never fully leaves. The absence of someone you loved will always be felt, and that’s a sign of the bond Allah placed between you.

• Don’t expect others to fully understand. Family, friends, and community may offer comfort, but they can never truly feel your exact loss. Each grief is unique. Expecting others to “get it” in the same way you do will only deepen the hurt. Instead, lean on Allah , the One who knows what is in every heart. This is your test and may not be theirs.

• Don’t expect the world to pause. For you, life has changed forever. For others, it continues as normal. People will move on, routines will resume, and calls will slow. This is natural. It doesn’t mean your loved one is forgotten, but it means you must carry their memory in your own way. Don’t have high expectations even from your closest friends and family.

• Don’t expect faith to erase sadness. Sometimes we imagine that strong faith means we shouldn’t feel broken. “I pray so I should be strong”. Yaʿqūb wept until his eyes turned white from sorrow over Yūsuf . Our faith isn’t as strong as Yaʿqūb , but even at that level, we learn that strong faith doesn’t remove sadness; it gives you the strength to carry it with patience and hope.

How Do We Prepare for Grief?

There is no manual for grief, no checklist that makes the pain easy to manage. But there are steps we can take to prepare our hearts and our families for the reality of loss.

Here are a few reflections that may help:

• Study the stories of the Prophets and Companions. Allah tells us: “Indeed, in their stories there is a lesson for those of understanding.” [Surah Yusuf; 12:111] We spend so much energy teaching ourselves and our children how to live in comfort and “succeed” in this world, but the greatest people who ever lived, the Prophets and Companions, endured the greatest struggles. Their trials drew them closer to Allah and became timeless examples for us. While we don’t ask to be tested, when we are, their lives remind us how to respond with patience, resilience, and trust in Allah .
• Teach your children who Allah is. The Prophet ﷺ said: “Be mindful of Allah, and He will protect you. Be mindful of Allah, and you will find Him before you… If you ask, ask of Allah; and if you seek help, seek help from Allah.” [Tirmidhī] From a young age, connect your children’s hearts to Allah through love. Let them know that even if the world is against them, they are never alone if Allah is with them. When a loved one leaves, they have returned to Allah . They may no longer be here, but Allah is always with you.
• Visit the graveyard often. The Prophet ﷺ said: “I had forbidden you to visit the graves, but now you may visit them, for indeed they remind you of the Hereafter.” [Muslim] Going only after a loved one passes can feel overwhelming, almost unbearable. But making it a habit beforehand softens the heart and normalizes the reality of death. The graveyard is not an end, but a resting place until the day that truly matters.
• Speak about the Hereafter openly. Allah says: “And this worldly life is nothing but diversion and amusement. And indeed, the home of the Hereafter — that is the [eternal] life, if only they knew.” [Surah Al-‘Ankabut; 29:64] Too often, we focus only on worldly success while neglecting to talk about the akhirah. Make it normal in your home to speak about the deeds that prepare us for eternal life. Let these conversations shape your family’s mindset and priorities. In the world that we live in, these conversations only come when reality strikes.
• Leave a legacy of good deeds. The Prophet ﷺ said: “When a person dies, his deeds come to an end except for three: ongoing charity, beneficial knowledge, or a righteous child who prays for him.” [Muslim] Show your children the good you do for your parents and grandparents. When your time comes, they will continue that chain of goodness. This is a mercy from Allah that it benefits the one who has passed and comforts the loved ones left behind, knowing their duʿāʾ still reaches their family member in the grave, and will help them in their most difficult times.
• Seek support from others. Grief can feel isolating, but Islam encourages leaning on community. The Prophet ﷺ said: “The example of the believers in their mutual love, mercy, and compassion is that of one body: when any part of it suffers, the whole body responds with wakefulness and fever.” [Bukhārī and Muslim] Reach out to trusted family, friends, or teachers when the burden feels heavy. Sharing your feelings is not a weakness; it’s part of healing, and it allows others to fulfill their duty of compassion toward you.

Grief is something we do not talk about often enough. Having faith is something we should be so thankful for. We are able to completely rely upon Allah , and with Him we are able to continue to live this life. Today we grieve, and tomorrow people might grieve for us. We ask Allah to forgive us for our shortcomings and allow the pain that we go through inside as a means of preparing to meet Him. May Allah allow us to be united with our loved ones in Paradise. Ameen.

 

Related:

– Death The Greatest Teacher: Three Life-Lessons From The Child I Lost

– Sharing Grief: A 10 Point Primer On Condolence

The post Unheard, Unspoken: The Secret Side Of Grief appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Presidential contender subjected to smears for views on foreign policy.

When it’s Muslims doing it.

This past week there’s been a big brouhaha in the British media about a mosque in east London which put on a fun-run in a local park as a fundraiser, but made it men-only (girls under 12 excepted). A government minister (Steve Reed) put out a condemnation and was reported to have consulted the Equalities and Human Rights Commission to ascertain whether the event in Victoria Park, Hackney, which was the East London Mosque’s twelfth annual charity run, was legal. Matthew Goodwin, an academic whose Twitter feed and Substack are nowadays a conveyor belt of Faragist propaganda, proclaimed “this is Britain, not Afghanistan” and posted a “what is to be done” article on his paid Substack, calling for us to follow Italy’s lead and ban the ‘burqa’ and niqaab with large fines for any women caught wearing it. (He doesn’t propose criminalising Muslim men’s dress, of course; bigots always target women.) He then posted a quote of his original tweet, citing a Policy Exchange survey which found that “40% of Muslims in Britain support gender-segregated education, while 44% think schools should be able to insist on girls wearing the hijab or niqab”.

Except … single-sex sporting events are the norm, as are single-sex schools, especially secondary schools.

Almost all sports exist with men’s and women’s categories. It would not be fair to women to expect them to compete with men; indeed, there has been a vocal campaign by women to ensure trans women are excluded from the female category because they have some of the same advantages as men. (There are some exceptions; there is a mixed doubles tournament in tennis, and the wheelchair sport variously known as murderball, quad rugby and wheelchair rugby is mixed.) It is also not compulsory to even have men’s and women’s categories at major events; there are many national cycling tours for men, for example, such as the Tour de France and Giro D’Italia, which have only a shorter event for women, none of which meets the criteria for a Grand Tour at present and do not run every year. Many of the ‘classic’ cycle races also have no female event. It is common for women’s games to be paid much less than men’s, or for women’s games to be amateur or semi-professional, while male players receive anyone else’s idea of a year’s pay in a week. The only difference here is that the organisers excluded women because they believed their participation was inappropriate, not for the usual reasons that they just had never bothered to put a women’s event on or because the women’s game gets less sponsorship. But the end result was the same.

As for the preference for single-sex schools, almost every British local authority has at least one single-sex school and it is common for such schools (especially Catholic schools) to retain old-fashioned uniforms, requiring skirts of a particular design for girls for example. Many parents prefer them, arguing that during adolescence, it is a distraction to have both sexes in a school together; they particularly prefer them for girls, arguing that boys monopolise teachers’ time and attention at girls’ expense and that girls are relied on to moderate boys’ behaviour. The requirement for hijab for girls at a Muslim faith school is in keeping with the practice in other schools, which are allowed to have uniforms which are different for boys and girls. In some private schools, antiquated uniforms are retained; at state schools, there is a requirement that it not be financially burdensome, although many schools (particularly academies) do require expensive bespoke uniform items. The requirement of hijab for women and girls beyond puberty is well established in Islamic law and is thus the norm among practising Muslim women in the UK, so it is to be expected that a school run along Muslim principles, by a Muslim organisation for the betterment of the Muslim community should require Islamic dress. (None, from what I can tell, actually require niqaab; many do not even allow it.)

So, a sporting event that was men-only, and Muslims prefer single-sex secondary schools. These are all normal, or actually preferred by many people in this country, Muslims and others. It seems a “British value” ceases to be one when Muslims place emphasis on it.

Image: Muhamad Rifqi Fawzi, via Pexels.

Once close partners against the U.S. occupation, Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Taliban government now trade accusations of betrayal, revealing deeper crises of mistrust, militarism, and faith across the Muslim world’s most volatile border.

October 2025

 

Strained Relations Four Years After Taliban Takeover

Four years after a Taliban conquest of Afghanistan widely welcomed in Pakistan, relations between the two neighbors have struck a low as each accuses the other of supporting its insurgency, reaching a nadir this week with skirmishes on the border.

Taliban soldiers

Where the Taliban emirate accused Pakistan of supporting a Daesh underground, Pakistan’s military-led coalition regime has accused Afghanistan of supporting insurgents, including a namesake insurgency in northwest Pakistan’s Pashtun borderland. The more pressing insurgency in Pakistan stems neither from Afghan malfeasance, as Islamabad claims, nor is it an entirely domestic affair, as Kabul counters.

Buried among the rhetoric, blame-trading, and saber-rattling are several inconvenient truths that neither regime nor its cheerleaders seems inclined to acknowledge, but which are critical to factor into any solution.

Contrasting Claims and Misrepresentations

Pakistani accusers rightly note that insurgent leaders Nur-Wali Asim of the Mahsud clan and Gul Bahadur of the Wazir clan have received refuge in Afghanistan, and that attacks picked up pace since the Taliban return to Kabul in 2021. Afghan rejoinders rightly point out that the roots of Pakistan’s crisis are domestic and largely self-inflicted: a consistently militaristic policy in the borderland has failed for years regardless of insurgent leaders’ whereabouts, while none of Afghanistan’s other neighbors have faced such a problem despite their own insurgents’ “refuge” in the emirate.

The most extreme claims on either side resort to obfuscation. On one hand are exaggerated Taliban claims of Pakistani complicity in the American occupation of Afghanistan, which ignore the greater role of other states —especially Pakistan’s archrival India, a cheerleader of the occupation right to and beyond its end— and the respite that successive Pakistani regimes gave despite considerable American irritation. On the other hand are nationalistic claims, especially loud among supporters of the Pakistani military, that claim primordial Afghan hatred, conspiracy, and ingratitude.

Historical Ironies and Shifting Allegiances

The latter claim contributed to an atmosphere where thousands of Afghans have been callously and humiliatingly uprooted from decades-long refuge. Ironically, this claim is itself a misdirected rejoinder to longstanding claims by the preceding, American-installed government of Afghanistan, which claimed in ethnicized terms that the Taliban were merely a cat’s paw of scheming “Punjabi” Pakistanis. By painting opponents as Pakistani puppets, the Afghan regimes of 2001–21 disingenuously portrayed their own utter dependency on a foreign invasion as a sort of nationalist virtue against their neighbor’s meddling.

The claim that Pakistan’s insurgency has accelerated since 2021 misses the point that for much of the prior fifteen years, its deceleration had been assisted through Taliban mediation, which persuaded many such militants to help fight the United States in Afghanistan rather than fight the Pakistani government. This stance was particularly emphasized by the Haqqanis, who have had a decades-long policy of support for Pakistan as far afield as Kashmir.

Nor was it an exclusively Taliban stance: in 2004–05, Pakistani corps commander Safdar Hussain, who led the first campaigns in northwest Pakistan against Wazir and Mahsud insurgents, urged them to abandon revolt against Islamabad and focus on jihad against the Americans. An unamused United States repeatedly attacked deals between the military and the insurgents; for example, Sirajuddin Haqqani mediated at Miranshah between Bahadur and the military in 2006, only for American airstrikes to sabotage the agreement.

The Rise of New Militants

Qari Saifullah Akhtar

This prompted a number of Pakistani militants to disavow the Pakistani regime and take up arms. Many were longstanding fighters who felt betrayed by the state that had once backed them, and ignored the pleas of such scholars as the Usmani brothers, Muftis Taqi and Rafi, to stand down.

One such militant was Saifullah Akhtar, whom Rafi had known in the 1980s and complimented in a subsequent 1990s book that also saluted the Taliban movement; his newfound hostility to a regime within whose military he had significant contacts was particularly dangerous, yet he was eventually persuaded to leave Pakistan and fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, where he was killed.

A Balancing Act Between Foes and Allies

The modus vivendi that the Taliban adopted was to maintain ties with both sides of the Pakistan war, the army and the insurgency, in a manner similar to how the Pakistani military kept links with both sides of the Afghan war, the United States and the Taliban. Rejecting insurgency against Pakistan, on numerous occasions, Taliban mediation redirected Pakistani insurgents against the United States.

A number of secondary Taliban commanders did sympathize with the Pakistani insurgency against a state they saw as having betrayed them: a sentiment that no doubt retains currency in the rank-and-file. But this was always an informal minority: Sirajuddin, whose uncles Khalilur-Rahman Ahmad and Ibrahim Umari played a key role in coordination with Pakistani officers, also urged such Pakistani counterparts as Bahadur to focus their attention on the Americans in Afghanistan.

This preceded a major turning point in 2014, during a major campaign by the Pakistani army, yet this success relied in part on also internecine disputes among the insurgents after the elimination of a series of leaders.

A major factor was the emergence of Daesh, to which large parts of the insurgency defected. Although it opposed both rival governments in Islamabad and Kabul, Daesh’s principal target was the Taliban, whom it accused of inauthenticity and—ironically given today’s circumstances—servitude to Pakistan. The conflict with Daesh forced the Taliban to draw closer to Pakistani insurgents, such as Bahadur and Mahsud preacher Nur-Wali Asim, as a counterweight.

Reform Efforts Under Imran Khan

Imran Khan

A major factor in draining the insurgency was the major attempts at reform made by Imran Khan’s Insaf Party, which assumed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial government. Khan had drawn support in large part from his opposition to the American “war on terror” and Pakistani acquiescence therein: by all accounts, the Insaf government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa was a major improvement, and retains major support in the province to this day.

It also tried to incorporate the historically autonomous, but increasingly militarized, Waziristan borderland under its control, which Nur-Wali opposed as this approach promised to solve many of the grievances on which he drew.

Nur-Wali’s Hardline Stance

Though Nur-Wali reorganized the insurgency and, to an extent, its conduct, he refused to negotiate, painting his fight as part of a historical Mahsud resistance against British colonialism and a Pakistani state seen as its American-backed heir. In fact, the Mahsuds who fiercely fought Britain had largely supported Pakistan right up to the 2004 incursion in Waziristan—a product not of primordial Pakistani illegitimacy but rather involvement in the much more recent American war on terror. This stance was far harsher than that of the Taliban and even affiliated insurgents like Bahadur, and has precluded meaningful negotiations.

Insurgencies and Unneighborly Behavior

The Pakistani claim that the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 coincided with a sharp uptick in attacks within Pakistan ignores the fact that the previous decade’s decline owed in part to repeated Taliban mediation on Islamabad’s behalf. On the other hand, as I pointed out at the time, Taliban wariness of Daesh meant that they cultivated ties with Pakistani insurgents: famously, upon capturing Kabul, they executed Daesh leader Ziaul-Haq Zia but released the Pakistani insurgent leader Faqir Mohammad.

Yet this was not an inherently anti-Pakistan move: Faqir had been imprisoned by the previous Afghan regime precisely because he was seen as more amenable to negotiations with Islamabad, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, now Taliban interior minister, immediately held negotiations between Imran’s Pakistani government, including the military represented by spymaster Faiz Hameed, and militants like Bahadur.

Post-Imran Escalation and Missteps

Whether this would have succeeded is unknown—certainly some militants continued to snipe away at Pakistan regardless and might have never reconciled—but the 2022 coup that ousted Imran, and quickly courted relations with an anti-Taliban United States, escalating not through targeting insurgent units in Pakistan but bombing across the Afghan border—the sort of unilateral action that was bound to raise Taliban hackles. The Pakistani military, led by Asim Munir, has made a point of theatrical escalation with Kabul—yet its initial focus was not the Pakistani insurgency, which gained ground over 2023, but crushing Imran’s still-influential party through major, occasionally bloody, suppression and electoral manipulation.

Deportations and Counterproductive Policy

The response toward the insurgency has similarly been unimpressive and counterproductive to its stated aims, particularly the mass deportation of Afghans that began in autumn 2023. This was a political decision that aimed to give the impression of vigilance by whipping up anti-Afghan sentiments; in its rivalry with the Insaf party, the military establishment and its many hangers-on have portrayed both Taliban and Afghans broadly as scheming confederates of Imran in a sort of fifth column. This provoked widespread hostility among affected communities in the borderland.

It was also practically counterproductive: the mass deportations of Afghans across the border logistically confounded the task that Pakistan demanded of the Taliban, to intercept Pakistani insurgents. This was further complicated by the fact that Daesh remained an underground threat, assassinating many Taliban officials, fighters, and leaders, including Sirajuddin’s uncle Khalilur-Rahman, governor-general Daud Muzamil, and corps commander Hamdullah Mukhlis. With their own challenges, the Taliban are hardly in a position to solve Pakistan’s largely self-inflicted woes.

Half-Hearted Cooperation and Growing Misgivings

This does not, however, remove the fact that Taliban cooperation has been at best half-hearted. In part, this stems from its reluctance to alienate non-Daesh militants, who have, in fact, flared up in indignation whenever the emirate has tried to relocate them away from the Pakistani border. In part, it stems from misgivings toward a confrontational Pakistani military bent on scapegoating Afghanistan for all internal challenges. It also stems from an insistence that the Pakistani insurgency is a primarily internal issue: after all, the Taliban also hosts opposition militants from other countries, none of which have caused anywhere near the amount of trouble as the Pakistani insurgents. To this extent, the argument made by both Khan and the Taliban that the Pakistani insurgency stems from internal Pakistani grievances holds truth.

Parallel Rejections and Border Tensions

Yet if the Pakistani military has been aggressive, Taliban denials ring irrelevant if not hollow. The indignation the emirate evinced when Islamabad flirted with exiled critics is hardly more than that in Pakistan when it sees the likes of Nur-Wali given deferential treatment in Afghanistan. The rejectionism that Nur-Wali directs toward Islamabad is similar to that which Daesh directs toward Kabul. No state, Pakistan or others, tolerates repeated cross-border raids of the type the Taliban are unwilling to interdict for reasons more of political expediency than principle.

Structural Causes and Continuing Violence

On the other hand, the emirate’s ability to control the border has been severely circumscribed by such clumsy and destructive policies as the mass deportations of Afghans. The Taliban spent over a decade, even while fighting a guerrilla war against the United States, mediating with the Pakistani insurgency on behalf of the same military that now scapegoats it.

The Pakistani war is not a product of Taliban inaction: even if the Taliban surrendered every Pakistani insurgent leader from Afghan territory, the twenty-year militarization, social upheaval, and political disputes that exacerbated the war remain. Some twenty senior insurgent leaders have been killed, almost on a yearly basis, since the Waziristan conflict broke out in the mid-2000s, and there is little reason to suppose that the capture or killing of Nur-Wali or Bahadur would make a long-term difference without addressing issues in an approach that the military of late has flatly shunned. Bombing Kabul in pursuit of Nur-Wali might give some short-term catharsis and a few bragging rights, but it only threatens to exacerbate mistrust without addressing these underlying issues.

When these obvious points are raised, however, a military increasingly intolerant of contradiction lashes out.

Forward Steps and Barriers

The solution is not as complicated as it might seem. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan’s insurgents stem from the same geographic stretch, the border highlands, which both states have long struggled to control. The simplest task is, in military terms, joint security collaboration against both Afghan and Pakistani insurgents, and in sociopolitical terms, an improved and more accountable governance. A sensible policy would see Afghanistan and Pakistan cooperate on this region rather than trade mostly spurious accusations and recriminations.

The barrier to such commonsense is the exponential mutual mistrust, related to the two neighbors’ addiction to alliances that have only ever escalated the problem—for Taliban with Pakistani insurgents who are airily whitewashed as “good Muslims” regardless of the number of Muslims their war victimizes; and for Pakistan’s military with a United States that it has shamelessly courted since 2022, partly pursuant to its feud with Imran, regardless of the sociopolitical costs it brings to the country.

It is easier to scapegoat a neighbor through selectively remembered or distorted history rather than introspect and apply to them the same standards sought in one’s own country: so much for Muslim neighbors in the “Islamic emirate” and the “Islamic nuclear power.”

Related:

On the Pakistan-India Dangerous Escalation

Afghanistan’s Experiment: Progress and Peril Under Taliban Rule

 

 

The post Allies In War, Enemies In Peace: The Unraveling Of Pakistan–Taliban Relations appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.