The Challenge to Taliban Rule Is No Longer Just Military, It’s Religious

A religious scholar has just done something the Taliban likely feared more than any battlefield defeat. He questioned their legitimacy in the language they claim as their own.

Maulvi Tariq Usman, a prominent religious scholar from Afghanistan, argued that armed resistance against the Taliban is in fact permissible under Sharia under the current circumstances. For a movement that has built its entire claim to power on religious authority, this is not a minor jab. It strikes at the foundation.

Usman’s remarks centered on the Taliban’s five years in power, and his assessment was scathing. He pointed out that the group has failed, in nearly half a decade, to establish anything resembling an inclusive political system or to earn genuine public satisfaction.

Instead of building consensus or addressing grievances, the Taliban has relied on force to impose its worldview on Afghan society, all while dressing that imposition in religious garb. This distinction matters. Usman isn’t rejecting religion or its role in governance. He’s rejecting the Taliban’s specific use of religion as a tool of control rather than a genuine framework for justice.

What’s striking is how Usman frames the roots of this growing dissent. He suggests that the Taliban’s unilateral domination, its refusal to share power or even acknowledge basic rights, has itself created the conditions under which independent scholars are beginning to voice these kinds of views.

In other words, the Taliban’s own governance style has generated its religious opposition. This wasn’t imposed from outside by foreign powers or secular critics. It emerged from within the same tradition the Taliban claims to represent, among scholars who have watched the movement fail to do the basic work of legitimizing itself.

That failure, according to Usman, is not incidental. He noted plainly that the Taliban has taken no meaningful steps over five years to secure political legitimacy or religious backing in any structured sense. Perhaps more damning, he questioned whether Taliban leadership even possesses the jurisprudential qualifications typically required to issue the kind of religious rulings and social mandates they routinely impose.

This is a serious charge coming from within religious circles. It suggests that the very scholars capable of assessing such credentials are finding them wanting.

Usman went further, describing the Taliban’s overall approach as an instrumental use of religious concepts, essentially accusing the group of treating faith as a convenient tool rather than a genuine guiding principle. He warned that this strategy carries real costs, not just politically but spiritually.

When religious language gets weaponized to justify unchecked power, ordinary people’s trust in religion itself can erode. That’s a dangerous outcome for any society, and one that scholars like Usman seem keenly aware of as they watch public frustration mount.

To support his position, Usman invoked history, pointing to past examples of independent scholars who stood against oppressive governments rather than staying silent. This isn’t a new phenomenon in Islamic scholarship.

Throughout history, there have been religious figures willing to challenge rulers who abused power under the pretense of piety, and Usman is positioning himself, and others like him, within that same lineage. His message seems to be that silence in the face of injustice has never been the tradition, and it shouldn’t become one now simply because the ruling group claims religious authority.

Taken together, these remarks suggest something significant is shifting in how opposition to the Taliban is being framed. For years, resistance to Taliban rule has largely been discussed in military and political terms, resistance fronts, foreign fighters, humanitarian collapse.

What Usman’s comments introduce is a religious dimension that could prove even more corrosive to Taliban authority than armed opposition alone. If scholars within the Islamic tradition itself begin openly questioning the group’s legitimacy and jurisprudential standing, the Taliban loses one of its central claims to power, the idea that it governs by divine mandate rather than brute force.