Since 2021, the Taliban has encouraged madrasa schools, raising concerns about religious indoctrination and the spread of extremism in Afghanistan. The madrasa-based education system has a long and respected history across the Islamic world, including the Persianate intellectual sphere. For more than a millennium, these institutions cultivated a rich tradition of scholars and philosophers. Historically, they reflected an intellectual culture that embraced diversity, free inquiry, and cosmopolitanism. Yet the modern politicization of the madrasa, shaped by colonial disruption, nationalism, and the rise of Islamism, has transformed a tradition of learning into a vehicle of ideology. Today, this politicization has reached its most extreme form in Afghanistan under the Taliban government. Contrary to their own mythology, the Taliban do not represent a cultural continuity with Afghan or Pashtun traditions. Their interpretation of Islam is a pseudo-ideological, totalitarian project designed not to preserve heritage but to overwrite it.
