Guardians of God: Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban
Mona Kanwal Sheikh
Abstract
This book is about the new generation of Taliban in Pakistan that arose in response to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It is based on interviews with Taliban leaders and sympathizers conducted by the author. Before the invasion, the Pakistani Taliban did not exist as a noteworthy phenomenon—as a threat to local and international stability that it has now become. Yet there are no comprehensive accounts of the Pakistani Taliban. This book fills the gap that remains in spite of the increased level of global public attention and the urgent policy need to comprehend the grievances of th ... More
This book is about the new generation of Taliban in Pakistan that arose in response to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It is based on interviews with Taliban leaders and sympathizers conducted by the author. Before the invasion, the Pakistani Taliban did not exist as a noteworthy phenomenon—as a threat to local and international stability that it has now become. Yet there are no comprehensive accounts of the Pakistani Taliban. This book fills the gap that remains in spite of the increased level of global public attention and the urgent policy need to comprehend the grievances of the Taliban and their justifications for violence. The book draws from several years of research into the world views of the Pakistani Taliban. Sheikh has had hours of conversations with Taliban militants and their supporters, eaten mangoes with them, joined them in prayers, looked at pictures of their martyrs, and listened to emotional anthems about the necessity to join the ranks of militant jihad. Besides providing a first-hand account of the Pakistani Taliban, Sheikh seeks to display the way religious and secular rationales play together in the Taliban justifications for violence. The book is based on the argument that an enhanced understanding of the Taliban mindset can contribute to the development of better policy tools for dealing with the challenges of violence committed by Taliban-related groups.
Keywords:
Pakistani Taliban,
Pakistan,
violence,
religious violence,
just war,
religion,
terrorism,
security narratives,
justifications for violence,
religious and secular rationales
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199468249 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468249.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Mona Kanwal Sheikh, author
Senior Researcher, International Security, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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