Radicalised Seminaries in Afghanistan |
In August 2021, after taking over the Kabul throne in a dramatic way, the Afghan Taliban strategised the national education system by establishing more religious seminaries, and the number had swelled to 23000 in May 2025. Experts and human rights observers describe this as a systematic effort to exploit religious education for long-term ideological control and militant recruitment. Religious seminaries traditionally played a positive role across the Islamic world, with an undeniable contribution in producing scholars, philosophers, and jurists within a pluralistic intellectual tradition. However, the Taliban’s recent approach represents a sharp break from this heritage.
The education policy of the TTA regime is not about preserving Islamic learning but about transforming the so-called teaching discourse into a mechanism for ideological control with an obvious desire to seek blind obedience from the students. Historically, religious........