Taliban fighters entering Kabul on 17 August 2021. A pickup truck with heavily armed men riding in the back.
30 May 2022
The Taliban are a politico-military governing force in Afghanistan who espouse a strict, fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law. The word Taliban is from the Farsi/Pashto Talib, meaning seeker or student, especially a student of Islamic law. The Farsi word is a borrowing of the Arabic talib, which is a clipping of talib al-ilm, or seeker of knowledge; the -an is a plural marker. (Because in Farsi and Arabic Taliban is a plural, some object to English usage labeling individuals as “a Taliban,” but the grammar rules of one language do not apply to others, and part of the process of adoption into a different language is that the word takes on the grammar of the adopted language.)
The Taliban got their start in the early 1990s as a loose confederation of radical Afghan student groups, both within Afghanistan in in exile in Pakistan, who shared a version of conservative Sunni Islam. They emerged in 1994 as an organized and powerful politico-military force and by 1996 had become the dominant faction in the country, capturing the capital, Kabul. They were overthrown in 2001 by a US military intervention, only to return to power in 2021 with the withdrawal of American troops from that country.
The name Taliban starts appearing in English-language newspapers in late 1994. From the Times of India of 19 December 1994:
Recently on November 30, some 2,000 heavily armed Afghan students seized control of Lashkargarh, capital of Helmand province where they ousted from power the Akhundzada family, reportedly the world’s biggest heroin traffickers.
This student group, Taliban, is believed to be backed by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and has the tacit support of western countries.
Sources:
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2006, s.v. Talibanization, n.
Subrahmanyam, K. “Pakistan Disputes U.N. Report on Drugs.” Times of India, 19 December 1994. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Voice of America, 2021. Public domain image.