Professor Michael Barry by Mr. Jean-François Bouthors

(Interview with Professor Michael Barry by Mr. Jean-François Bouthors for the French publication; Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien: Hiver 2025 (“Notebooks to Christian Testimony: Winter 2025”), to appear in the week of 12-19 December 2024. Translated by Professor Barry from French, and much expanded.)                                                                       

Blurb: To American historian Michael Barry, who dedicated his life to Afghanistan, Afghan women’s fate should be a universal cause. The condition to which Afghan women have been reduced taints all humanity. It is slavery to be tirelessly denounced. And “Afghan male honor” should entail understanding and ending such slavery forthwith.

Question: You have chosen Michael Barry to speak of slavery and not only of apartheid or discrimination when addressing the fate of Afghan women.

Answer: What other word to use? Laws published last 22 August 2024 by  Taliban authorities prohibit Afghan women from stepping outside unless masked and draped from head to foot or even raising their voices from beneath their face veils – with netting across the eye slits – anywhere in the street or market. Afghan women are sentenced to silence. They cannot even utter a few words from under their veils to purchase anything in the market. The same laws deny them access to higher education or to any profession, laws enforced with threats of physical punishments abolished by the Afghan Constitution in 1923 but officially restored in Kabul in August 2024: from the lash - to stoning to death.

Now, the current condition of Afghan women under Taliban rule is sometimes labeled “gender apartheid,” but such a term falls short of stark reality. South African “apartheid” was, in fact, a political euphemism, made official in 1948, in deliberate legal imitation of the euphemism “segregation” in the United States, itself indeed strictly defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 as “separate but equal” treatment for Whites and Blacks: a hypocritical formula, to be sure, but at least implying basic rights for Blacks.

Yet here may I speak (not proudly) as an American. Slavery as defined in one of history’s most atrocious of all known forms (until imitated by Hitler) – that is, our own American slavery – to wit, from our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and ratification of our Constitution in 1787 until abolished officially in 1863 and effectively in 1865, signified defining a specific category of human beings as congenitally inferior hence with no possibility of escaping such inferiority – in this case, on account of skin color.

Slavery, by definition, also entails violence, latent or blatant. Threats of extreme punishment have always loomed over slaves to compel both gratuitous labor and the resignation of victims to their inferior lot.

Such consignment to permanent inferiority is precisely what the Taliban inflict upon Afghan women. And to keep this entire category of human beings in permanent subjugation, the threat of physical punishments, already widespread in cruel village practice, was legally and explicitly renewed nationwide in a formal announcement made unto the “herd” or ra‘iyat (the region’s medieval term for “subjects” as Afghan citizens are since 2021 once again officially called) by Mullâ Hibatullâh Âkhundzâda, the Taliban’s “Prince of Believers” or Amîr al-Mu’minîn (for life) on 22 August 2024: from blows to death.

Not that any Afghan male can today go beat or kill any Afghan female (except for rods plied by police against insufficiently masked women in the street),  only his personal female property -  any more than any White in the southern United States before 1865 could go beat or kill any Black and certainly not someone else’s property. But rural Afghan fathers do sell their daughters to the highest-bidding male suitors, and fathers, brothers, and husbands can execute their own female kin if judged wayward, unchaste, unfaithful, or disobedient. Honor killings range from a quick bullet to the temple at best to slower and agonizing stoning: a woman still wrapped in a full veil is buried to the waist and showered with sharp stones by her extended male family – as legalized again on 22 August 2024. Afghan women’s plight is now the worst on earth.

Question: So, an Afghan woman’s condition is now no better than a domestic beast’s?

Answer: A little better. Rural males recognize that females fulfill certain obvious needs, from child-bearing to domestic chores. A female, in village eyes, nevertheless belongs to an inferior rung of the human species. And according to the Taliban, only an adult male is entitled to full participation in public life, higher education, access to the professions, and political power. Female servitude is entwined with rural economics: steep bride prices after years of saving are usually paid by the groom’s family to the girl’s father not only in cash but in plots of land, in herds – and if she rejects the arrangement between two patriarchs to marry her to a husband sometimes many years her senior, she imperils the whole transaction – hence the constant threat of “honor killing” hanging over her; a girl moreover brings to her husband’s household as part of her dowry the domestic skills imparted by her mother, like weaving the famous carpets – free labor – or other textiles which the husband then sells in the market, a precious source of cash; this web of female subjugation in the Afghan South is woven as tight as slavery’s institution in the old American South – and will prove just as painful to unravel. The earlier twentieth-century Afghan élite in Kabul hoped the steady spread of education with progressive urbanization would gradually change family mores and emancipate rural women. The Taliban intends to block such evolution, invoking a Divine dispensation.

Question: Didn’t then all these conditions exist in Afghanistan – especially in rural areas - before the Taliban?

Answer: True. Afghanistan, like so many other lands, has certainly pursued traditions that often perpetuate jarring social inequalities to sometimes appalling degrees. But in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, movements also arise to push hard against such traditions, even trying to erase them. In 1923, that is, a full one hundred and one years ago today, a completely sovereign, absolutely independent Afghan government, without one single foreign soldier then stationed on Afghan soil, promulgated Afghanistan’s first Constitution, drafted by Afghan jurists, implemented by Afghan courts, affirming full equality for all Afghan citizens under Afghan law regardless of sect, ethnicity or gender, and endorsing full access to education tor all Afghan boys and girls.

The reform-minded Afghan monarchy had just won complete independence from the British Indian Empire in 1919 – after nearly a century of struggles. But King Amânullâh and his chief adviser Mahmûd Tarzî recognized in 1923 that their country could hardly hope to preserve independence in the new century without empowering the entire female half of their population - notably through education. And with the Queen setting the example in Parliament in 1928, Afghan women were allowed to doff the full face veil. Thoroughgoing judicial reforms in the 1923 Constitution also explicitly outlawed slavery and torture – meaning flogging, severing hands, or stoning. This century-old Afghan Constitution thus represents another Afghan tradition than the one today’s Taliban claim to defend.

Part of the Afghan élite – Mahmûd Tarzî himself - had been educated abroad in a waning Ottoman Empire, then increasingly challenged by reform-minded intellectuals. Afghan intellectuals also closely followed social trends in neighboring Iran’s monarchy, where ever since the dawn of the 20th century, nationalist-minded political movements sought constitutional representation and secular reform. King Amânullâh and Mahmûd Tarzî thereby belonged to the same generation as Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or Iran’s Rezâ Shâh. But where Turkish and Iranian leaders enjoyed deep-rooted State institutions and powerful militaries to drive reform, the new Afghan monarchy was still brittle, the country’s institutions raw, the central government’s military weak, tribal power yet strong enough for tribal insurgencies in the East and South abetted by fervently conservative clerics to topple King Amânullâh and send him and his court fleeing into exile by early 1929.

The insurgent emir Habîbullâh II’s brief reign of terror restored full religious law in Kabul until Amânullâh’s cousin, General Nâder, seized the capital and ended nation-wide anarchy at the close of 1929. To be sure, as new King, Nâder Shâh resumed some of Amânullâh’s reforms, but very slowly and cautiously. Schools for girls in the capital reopened, for instance, but women were only allowed to remove their face masks in public under the secular, firmly authoritarian régime of Prince Daoud, then all-powerful Prime Minister to Nâder’s son and successor, Zâher Shâh, in 1959.

What the turmoil of 1929 revealed was that Afghanistan had already entered a state of now seemingly permanent civil war between secular reformists and devout conservatives: latent for five decades, since 1978 exploding into blatancy with both sides slipping into ever more political extremes. Soviet-leaning Marxist-Leninist officers seized power in April 1978 and imposed their own reign of secularist terror, “we will only leave one million Afghans alive; that is all we need to build a People’s régime” (in Afghan Persian: sirf yak mîliyûn nafar kâfî-st kih dar Afghânistân zinda bâshand, mâ yak mîliyûn Khalqî kâr dârîm, dîgar hêch kas kâr na-dârîm w-az bayn mîbarîm), as used to bark Commander Sayyid ‘Abdullâh every day to inmates in Pul-i Charkhî concentration camp outside Kabul where twenty-seven thousand people were confirmed executed between April 1978 and December 1979.

Opposition became increasingly dominated by the most radical Islamists empowered by neighboring Pakistan to the exclusion of more moderate nationalist forces like those led by Commander Massoud (later murdered by al-Qâ‘ida goons on 9 September 2001 in the first suicide attack in Afghan history, preceding by only two days the suicide attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and the Washington Pentagon).

A rule verified in most civil wars is that contending forces loathe their domestic foes to such a seething extent as to invite foreign powers to assist them against their own fellow countrymen. Brutal Soviet military intervention tried to save the tottering Afghan Communist régime between 1979 and 1989. But Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate or ISI insisted on channeling decisive US, British, and Chinese military supplies to the most reactionary “Islamist” Afghan anti-Soviet guerrillas, enabling these, under the new name Taliban or “Qur’ânic Seminary Students,” to capture Kabul on 27 September 1996 after seven years of post-Soviet civil war.

The Taliban were expelled by heavy-handed but finally bungled American intervention on 12 November 2001. Still, despite the U.S. Army’s blunders - from neglect of Kabul’s most basic infrastructure (with failure even to clean the capital’s open cesspool of a river) to extensive “collateral damage” in villages under bombs to the torture of suspected insurgents in our detention centers at Bagrâm airbase -, our twenty-year-long American occupation with pressure on the Karzai and Ghanî presidencies honestly did try to promote women’s rights, women’s education, women’s representation in Government, multiplying promises of a better life heard and believed by hundreds of thousands of new schoolgirls and tens of thousands of new female University students.

Yet Afghan women’s fate, bluntly to state it, could not be permitted to outweigh American Realpolitik’s balance when America’s perceived national priorities – China! The border! Our domestic economy! – morphed under the first Republican Administration in 2020 into a scramble for Kabul’s exits, a headlong flight from the country stubbornly pursued in 2021 - despite all warnings of dire consequences - by the succeeding Democratic Administration. Afghan women’s rights, whether under the unhinged and explicitly xenophobic Trump Administration (of course) or under the far saner and more humane Biden Administration, evidently, and in either case, did not matter enough (admittedly, the plight of so many war victims elsewhere on the globe): a painful even ignoble issue for American liberals to face - or ignore.

To face: like our broken promises of Reconstruction between 1865 and 1877, the United States, in effect, reneged on solemn moral commitments made in 2001 to Afghan women – whence crushing despair for today’s Afghan women – by surrendering Afghanistan, in hard fact, to the Taliban, in lopsided 2020 negotiations in Qatar. Why should your Taliban foes compromise when you signal your own haste to withdraw in any case? Thus, Washington in 1877 handed our own South straight back to our worst racists.

Throughout the American-Afghan War of 2001-2021, the Taliban, for their part, enjoyed secure Pakistani sanctuaries and unlimited Pakistani military supplies (Islâmâbad successfully sheltered under Chinese protection from any serious American wrath despite odd US night raids like the US helicopter commando that famously gunned down Bin Lâden in his villa right next to Pakistan’s Military Academy on 2 May 2011), ending in rout for the demoralized pro-American Government on 15 August 2021 with full return to power of the Taliban.

Question: Can you elaborate on Pakistan’s support for the Taliban?

Answer: This support was decisive. The Afghan Taliban movement was deliberately created in 1994 with Pakistani funding by then Prime Minister Bênazîr Bhuttô’s minister of the interior, General Nasîrullâh Bâbar. Pakistan’s responsibility has been heaviest in the ongoing tragedy, although Islâmâbâd rues blowback consequences now with the rise and increasingly murderous homegrown insurgency - since 2007 - of the so-called Tahrîk-i Taliban-i Pâkistân or “Movement of the Taliban of Pakistan (TTP).”

But this historical crisis really began long ago:  with neutralist royal Afghanistan’s territorial demands – buttressed by Indian and Soviet diplomatic support - against the newly independent state of Pakistan in 1947, when Kabul even became the only government on earth to vote against Pakistani membership in the newly created United Nations.

Pakistan’s retort ever since has consisted in trying to cripple any secular Kabul government’s control over Afghanistan’s own soil by clandestinely supporting Islamist insurgencies in hopes that such Islamist movements might capture the Afghan capital, end Afghan territorial demands, and align Afghan foreign policy on Pakistan’s – notably against India. Pakistan’s hopes indeed seemed realized with Taliban takeovers in Kabul between 1996 and 2001 and again since 2021.

Pakistan has essentially sought and now managed to turn Afghanistan into a savage “Tiger Park”:  to borrow the old British quip for the Pashtûn Tribal Territories, so demarcated on Imperial India’s Northwest Frontier, where the tribes were left fully autonomous to murder each other in traditional feuds if they so desired, so long as these wild beasts did not kill in civilized or “settled districts.” The Pakistanis, since 1947 and most especially since the Soviet retreat in 1989, have striven to stoke hatred between Afghan ethnicities – Pashtûns (ca. 40 %) against Tâjîks (ca. 35 %), Hazâras (ca. 15 %), and others; between sects, majority Sunnis against minority Shiites (ca. 15 % to 20 %); and even on specious religious grounds between sexes: dominant males against females to subjugate; how better to destroy a neighboring country?

But between the fall of the Soviet-installed government in 1992, which for all its decade and a half of atrocities had pressed for female emancipation, and the first Taliban victory in Kabul in 1996, the mujâhidîn régime – essentially run by Massoud, who happened to be Tâjîk and a few moderates among the Pashtûns – still permitted more than half the secretariat personnel in the capital’s ministries to be female, while an educated Afghan feminine workforce in 1992-1996 remained absolutely vital to run the country’s health and education sectors, with sometimes as many as 70 % of teachers, doctors, nurses in a given school or hospital (in the wake of so many men killed in war): allowing Afghanistan still to function as a relatively viable nation-state.

Yet when the rigidly Sunni ethnic Pashtûn-based Taliban, hurling imprecations against all Tâjiks (“we will treat Massoud like we dealt with the Bacha-Saqao, the miserable son of the water-carrier”– i.e., the Tâjîk usurper Habîbullâh II in 1929 who was hanged out of hand by the Pashtûn General Nâder), took power in 1996-2001 and again in 2021, they not only split the country into sectarian and ethnic grounds, but dismissed this same entire educated female workforce, and so, in effect, provoked the collapse of the country’s civil administration while its social cohesion disintegrated.

But dismantling the Afghan State is precisely the reason why Pakistan’s ISI pushed the Taliban to power in the first place, permanently to reduce their Afghan neighbor to the status of an endlessly barbarized Pakistani protectorate or wild “tiger park” but now camouflaged as “Islamic”: especially in the eyes of the wider Western public, Islamically illiterate, hence always easy intellectually to bully “because you former imperialists don’t understand Islam.”

But whatever Islâmâbâd’s political games, one must repeat that to deny the full humanity of Afghan women is tantamount to denying the full humanity of every single woman in the world. It is important for us as concerned males in the outside world to urge upon our Afghan male friends, those truly determined to recover their country’s freedom, that a rejuvenated Afghan identity will remain forever impossible to forge without vigorous defense of women’s rights.

True men, we must repeat, are not afraid of women. Males in endless terror of their women and who hence enslave, imprison, beat, and kill them are not true males; they are unworthy to be called men.

Question: Afghans certainly did not invent enslavement. How do you further justify the term “slave”?

Answer: With historical precision and no mental arrogance.

We recall that slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and in the French Empire in 1848. Russia ended legal serfdom only in 1861. The United States only legally terminated slavery in 1863, in practice in 1865.

Slavery for war captives or indebted persons – cowed by threats as ghastly as crucifixion - was, as we all know, widespread in the Ancient Mediterranean. But slaves in Rome could be manumitted and even adopted into their owners’ families – with no color bar. Roman theatre mirrors these ambiguities. Comedies by Plautus performed in the second century BC made their public laugh with terrifying lines uttered by owners trying to silence impertinent slaves with threats of lashing or the cross – yet Plautus’ honored fellow playwright, whom we now know as Terentius or “Terence,” a former North African slave, was freed and adopted and cherished by his noble patrons the Terentii.

The triumphant monotheistic religions prohibited the enslavement of individuals of one’s own creed. Medieval Christendom’s villeins, churls, or serfs, while bound to the soil and farming for their lords, were no longer slaves in the former Roman sense because they were entitled as Christian souls under the protection of the law and of the Church to the sanctity of their families, to own their own plot of land, to bequeath such property to their kin.

This is why the Christian Franks in the 9th and 10th centuries AD undertook massive slave raids into then still “pagan” Central and Eastern Europe to herd thousands of captive Slavs or Esclavi into huge slave pens at Verdun, which is why the Latin term servus became grimly replaced to designate a bondman by derivatives of Esclavus or “Slav” – whence English slave - in every budding European vernacular: esclave, esclavo, escravo, schiavo, Sklave, slaaf. From Verdun, these Slav captives were marched to Cordova, then the capital of the Spanish Islamic realm and the busiest European slave market of the age.

To be fair, while the fate of some of these Slavs converted willy-nilly to Islam proved bleak – women sold into harems, boys castrated to guard them – others were trained and pampered as trusted palace guards. Nor did ethnic barriers intervene: Cordovan children born to captive Slavs were free because of native Muslims. Scions of these “Slavs” or Saqâliba (the Arabic plural of Saqlab for the ethnicity) even ended by forming a privileged military caste; when the Cordovan caliphate disintegrated in AD 1031, such Saqâliba even founded their own kingdom in the Spanish Southeast. Former military slaves – often also bought from Slav stock in what is now Ukraine, captured by Genoese slavers and sold to Egypt – ended too by establishing their own Mamlûk or “slave kingdom” in Cairo in 1250. The famed “Janissaries” or Yeni Çeri, or corps of “new troops” in the 14th- to 18th-century Ottoman State, were likewise formed of Slav bondmen netted in the conquered Balkans.

In Central Europe, however, the Christianization of all Slav populations around the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries dried this source of Frankish profit in bonded labor. North African Islamic kingdoms, therefore, turned increasingly to still kâfir or “pagan” West Africa to raid and kidnap - although here again, no color bar endured: sons of Moroccan princes born to Black bond women were regarded as just as fully noble as their other kin, might succeed to the throne, the current Moroccan royal family bears traits.

The utter perversion of the slave trade, known as the world’s most massive and by far vilest, began with the Christian Portuguese and Spanish Empires to exploit their new sugar plantations. Portuguese slavers raided or bought captives along the Gulf of Guinea, with the first shipment of chained human beings dispatched to the Azores in 1448 – well before the discovery of the New World, which, to be sure, further multiplied colonial voracity for slave labor. The Portuguese chronicler Azurara, in 1448, witnessed the first African captives to disembark under blows with crying families pitilessly separated among bidders. Azurara was moved, but in vain. Portuguese and Spanish perversion consisted in designating Blacks as a servile workforce in perpetuity, even if baptized, because their blood carried from one generation to another a peculiar transmitted inferiority or “taint” called raça in Portuguese, Raza in Castilian - whence “race” and its sinister variants in other European languages. From this inferior “taint” of their race, Blacks in the colonial Americas, even when sometimes formally manumitted, could never be regarded wholly free.

Imperial French, Dutch, and English slavers in the 17th and 18th centuries pitilessly followed the Spanish and Portuguese slave ships and mimicked Imperial Spanish and Portuguese wording, behavior - and thinking.

Ending such an abomination proved wrenchingly slow. While we now deal with the current Taliban scandal masquerading behind Islam, some comfort might be afforded us by recording an enduring Christian strain – earnest Christians tapping the deepest wellsprings of their Christian faith to denounce a horror inflicted by soulless men claiming to be Christian – going back to such fearless priests as Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas in the 16th-century Spanish Caribbean, Father António Vieira in 17th-century Portuguese Brazil, the struggle for universal human dignity in the light of Christ’s teachings pursued in the 20th century by Pastor Martin Luther King in the United States, Bishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa. Their thin but steady thread of dignity is what connects our modern Churches to Christ.

Nor is this noble streak absent in Islam. The Zanj slaves captured from East Africa to work in dreadful conditions in the salt marshes of southern Iraq revolted in the name of equality as fellow believers in Islam against the 9th-century caliphate of Baghdâd. They shook the ‘Abbâsid régime with fear – like the slave revolt of Spartacus once made Rome tremble – until ruthlessly repressed.

William Wilberforce in Great Britain and his fellow abolitionists in the northern United States in the first half of the 19th century were all deeply motivated by their Christian faith. Still, there is no doubt that passivity among most northern Whites, their comfort with the peculiar institution so deeply rooted in the southern half of our country, allowed American slavery to endure as long as it did. Abraham Lincoln’s thinking on slavery only gradually evolved - his priority lay in preserving the Union -but neither did the Civil War truly put the monster to rest.

Under pressure from conservatives in Congress, U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 irresponsibly withdrew all Federal troops from the soil of the former Confederate States vanquished in 1865 in the name of States’ rights. Now, these Federal troops were there protecting “Reconstruction,” the social and political emancipation of newly freed Blacks. But to the U.S. Congress in 1877, Black Americans didn’t matter enough.

Just like Afghan women in 2021, to our President and Congress, it didn’t matter enough.

The total withdrawal in 1877 - one again can only think of Kabul in 2021 - allowed White reactionaries in the southern States to restore racial segregation for the next eighty-seven years, until 1964 and the passing of the law of  Civil Rights - and even to resurrect slavery under just another name: by jailing thousands of young male Blacks under the most frivolous pretexts, to be farmed out by the prisons to agricultural or industrial concerns as gratuitous bonded labor or “chain gangs.”

What really began to shake White complacency in the United States, I think, was African decolonization, beginning in the 1950s: because of slavery, America and Africa are profoundly, intimately connected. When we White students on our college campuses started seeing Black African students among us, the children of African ambassadors or statesmen or other high officials, then the sheer reality of human equality began truly dawning upon us.

But so much patience and grit are required. This is why I address my urgent call to the son of Massoud and all other Afghan democrats to abolish Afghan female servitude forthwith in their brains.

Question: Until such dawning of consciousness occurs, should we just feel hopeless?

Answer: No. Those of us opposed to South African apartheid in the 1980s might have felt such hopelessness until Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990. Then, 1992 happened; geopolitical conditions shifted, and the South African White minority at last fully grasped how truly isolated they had become in an international context. They themselves, with Frederik De Klerk and Nelson Mandela at the helm, finally found the courage to abolish apartheid themselves.

In like manner, we should never allow ourselves to forget the outrage to humanity presented by the Taliban régime. We must stay alert to the authoritarian ploy of holding one’s own starving population hostage wherever an authoritarian régime demands international assistance in such ways that such assistance flows through and reinforces the régime itself. Despite all the woes suffered by the world today, we must maintain moral pressure on Kabul’s reactionary régime and surround it with international anger, even scorn.

We might borrow a leaf from our own predecessors in the United States, those brave abolitionists of the 1840s and 1850s who clandestinely dared educate slaves – forbidden by slave owners – and operated the “underground railroad” to convey escaped slaves to freedom in the northern States.   Modern technology allows us to operate our own “underground railroad” to ferry Afghan women to freedom and to teach online a rising generation of girls still trapped in Kabul – which is what I do.

We live in a dark moment. As I write, I see a paper in the Washington Post dated 18 October 2024 by Jonathan Weisman on swelling voices in the United States denouncing the apparent return of fascism thus defined by historian Peter Hayes, a specialist on Nazism, as cited in the article, to consist of “commonalities in régimes and movements typically described as “fascist” – a militarization of politics through violent militias, misogyny, hyper-masculinity, intense nationalism, calls for economic self-sufficiency, and a scapegoating of groups separate from an aggrieved core of followers.”

While I believe that today’s so-called “Islamist” movements like the Taliban or their bitter rivals in Dâ‘ish share many traits with history’s millenarian or apocalyptic death cults – the magic wish to replicate the reign of heaven-dwelling holy ancestors upon this earth by purging this lower earth from all perceived sinners in order to hasten the Second Coming – yet I concede that Hayes’ definition almost fits Kabul’s current régime like the proverbial glove – down to every clawed finger.

Afghan women’s slavery is even ethnically worsened – if further degradation were here even possible – by Taliban pressure upon non-Pashtûn ethnic groups to surrender their nubile girls, to wed these girls by force unto the movement’s young Taliban warriors: many cases were attested under the first Taliban régime in the 1990s in the central ethnic Hazâra districts, or in the ethnic Tâjîk-populated Shamâlî Plain north of Kabul, and they occur again under Taliban rule since 2021 (see in my following despatch a July 2021 document in my possession issued by Taliban authorities themselves to Tâjîk village headmen, requisitioning girls to be enslaved in the northeastern province of Badakhshân, already a full month before the clinching Taliban victory in Kabul in the following August: the text will be reproduced in the original Afghan Persian with translation by me.)

Ironically, the Nazis, too, sought to restore slavery – for subjugated Slavs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Russians, in occupied Central and Eastern Europe – as if history’s line were bending back into a vicious circle now capped by Kabul.

Do Kabul’s Taliban, by enslaving their women, really wish to keep company with erstwhile Gauleiters in Prague or Warsaw or the négriers in our American sugar and cotton colonies?

Professor Michael Barry was born in New York City in 1948 but raised in France and partly in Afghanistan. He is currently Distinguished University Professor at the American University of Afghanistan (now in Qatar) and holds higher degrees in Islamic languages, medieval European literatures and social anthropology from the Universities of Princeton, Cambridge, McGill and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He taught for many years at Princeton and conceived the present layout of the galleries of Islamic Art in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, further winning eighteen prizes for his teaching and writing from the United States, France, Iran and Afghanistan. He was knighted by the French Government in 2021 for outstanding humanitarian service in the Afghan field where his work over five decades has ranged from anthropological research to coordinating famine relief and defending human rights.

Jean-François Bouthors; Journalist, editor, and writer, covered Eastern European countries for the international section of La Croix before becoming head of the Culture department. As a literary director at Buchet/Chastel, he was the editor of Anna Politkovskaya and later created the "Black Sheep" collection at Éditions François Bourin, dedicated to the defense of freedoms. He has been an editorialist for Ouest-France since 2003 and co-hosts the Bible reading workshop at the Centre Sèvres in Paris

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