A Sharia Council Scholar in the UK named Khola Hasan has said that the Taliban has 'grown up' and 'every Muslim is Celebrating' the return of this jihadi group. She also claimed that the Islamist group had a good start by posturing about women's rights.
The people of Afghanistan were ruled by foreigners for 40 years. So, the natives should be given a chance and determine their fate for a change, the scholar said while talking on BBC Radio 4.
"The Taliban have grown up, they were not exposed to the modern world, so what they were saying 20 years ago this was a myopic, insulated, small organization, living in the mountains, very illiterate, very uneducated, not just about the world but about Islam itself...They're learning. That's not an easy thing to do, to come from hundreds of years of one way practicing your faith, and then suddenly exposed to different ways to think oh maybe we got it wrong. The problem is we don't give them a chance," she said.
Regarding the violence against women and children by the Islamist groups, Hasan said they are minor incidents, and Western media should not make it big. She also said these media outlets 'love misinterpreting Muslims'.
"The kind of language that came out from Western media when the Taliban took over - civil war, monsters, they're going to slaughter people, it's going to be awful, poor women, oh blah blah blah we're going to cry our eyes out, poor women are going back into Medieval times, and all the rest of it. 'It's been misrepresented for so long that I've got used to it, I don't even blink an eyelid anymore," Hasan added.
Who is Khola Hasan?
Hasan described herself as an unfashionable woman in an article published by Critical Muslim, a project by the Muslim Institute in London. According to the article, she grew up in Wood Green, North London, with her siblings in a Wahhabi household in the late 1970s. She also stated that her family's understanding of Islam was very different from the cultural Islam that is practiced by a majority of Asian Muslims.
She completed her Masters in International and Comparative Legal Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of London. Hasan started working at the Islamic Shariah Council in January 2013.
What is British Sharia Council?
The council was established in 1982 to solve the matrimonial problems of the Muslims living in the UK. It was formed after a meeting with various scholars representing 10 mosques in the country. The council aims at guiding the muslins in the UK in issues related to religion and solve their matrimonial problems. The council consists of scholars from various Islamic institutions in the country.
