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I have been at Penn State since 2002. I am the only tenured African American professor in the history of the Penn State political science department.

How long is that? George Atherton taught political science at PSU in the 19 th century: yes, that Atherton.

Think about it: the United States has had an African American president before the political science department at Penn State has promoted an African American to full professor.

The department has never tenured a black woman.

None of this should be surprising. There has been roughly 3% African American faculty at Penn State for 30 years: this is a deplorable record.

This is often concealed by the University's continued promotion of its "diverse" faculty/students, which shows trends that are typically not reflected among its African American equivalents. For example, black student enrollment still does not reach levels achieved at PSU in the mid-1980s. Yet, the Chief Academic Officer, Provost Nick Jones, when asked about PSU targeting diverse hires, replied: "we don't discriminate one way or the other." One way or the other? What's the "other"? There has been 3% African American faculty for 30 years, and the provost is concerned with racial discrimination of "one way or the other"?

It sounds like the "good people on both sides" type of argument.

The provost's comments reflect, inform, and set the policy and tone for the university; and this is evident in the political science department, where my treatment as the only tenured black professor in its history is much different-and negatively so-than that of white professors.

For example, when I arrived in the department in 2002 there were no black PhD students in our classes. I helped recruit three black women who not only graduated, but two of whom became our best placements at Big Ten universities. I asked the Head to put their pictures on the front of our department web page as a testament to our seriousness and recent success in educating black women PhDs and as well as a recruiting tool. The Head, a senior white woman professor, refused. Seeing no reason for the refusal given that there were stock pictures of white students on our web page-and one black person who wasn't even a Penn State student, as far as I know-I repeated my requests.

The department stonewalled for several years using a range of excuses including deleting all pictures of people on the front page. Now there are a variety of pictures on the web page, which conceals the years of resistance by the department of this simple act of acknowledging black women PhD graduates in political science.

Much worse is the instance when I raised the issue to the department Head of a senior white male professor using the sexist slur, "bitch", in a departmental meeting. I immediately objected to this professor; but when I complained to the Head, a white woman senior professor, she told me that this white man's use of the slur, "bitch", was tantamount to the use of the word "dear". The white woman Head then accused me of contributing to a hostile climate because I'd used the word dear before and the white man professor was promoted. Today both of these people determine if I will even be considered for promotion, which surprisingly, I am not. This is typical for those of us who complain of the hostile climate we are compelled to work in: we are the ones who are accused of creating the hostile climate that we are subjected to: often by the very people-administrators and senior professors-who create and maintain this hostile climate.

For example, in my formal annual evaluation, a previous department Head, also a white woman, began to talk to me about black rapists and how she had been stalked by black men when she taught at another university-this was nowhere near the subject that we were discussing at the time. Taken aback, I asked her what did this have to do with me or my annual evaluation; and she replied "well, you never know where people are coming from"? When I told her that these were racist tropes and complained to the dean, also a white woman, my concerns were dismissed, and the Head was given an award by that dean.

The racism is beyond attitudinal, it is institutionalized in the evaluative criteria the department and college use as well. They rationalize using SRTEs that we know are biased by race and gender by arguing that these are not the only criteria they use-but they shouldn't be used at all if we know they are biased-and egregiously so with regard to race (and imagine how that works out for the only black professor in a department's history).

Even first year education students at Penn State have recognized this and the Collegian has published articles related to it. One of these "other criteria" is the use of peer evaluations of faculty teaching. But, again, the department and college has not devised a system to account for the racism of administrators and colleagues in the department who may conduct peer reviews. For example, a senior white male colleague in my department stormed out of a meeting in contempt of the idea of having a staff member from the Office of Educational Equity attend a faculty meeting to discuss "implicit bias"-not racism, just "implicit bias". What confidence can a black colleague have for such a white senior professor who will evaluate their teaching and research-especially that which focuses on white supremacism and patriarchy, and to vote on their promotion, who will not even tolerate a discussion of implicit bias, much less, racism?

This is not even a small sample of the toxic racist climate that I'm compelled to work in, create in, teach in, research in, do service in, and be black in...here at Penn State. If professors and administrators will treat black professors in such racist ways, then how do you think they treat black students, or student applicants? Among my many and largely ignored suggestions to the provost is that in certain situations (e.g. a major department that is still experiencing historic racial "firsts", such as having the first black tenured professor in its history), oversight and/or interventions from the provost office are necessary. But then again, when the provost spoke with faculty in our college, he opened his comments with an ethnic "joke" ...so?

Another requirement is that those of us who have been subjected to the prevalent and enduring white racism on this campus from colleagues, administrators, staff, and students should give voice to their experiences, at minimum, and take concerted action, even if it begins with just a letter to the student newspaper, as Gary King did recently. The racists who are hidden in plain sight use the cover of concealment to shroud their racist practices; and they use the silence of others to conceal their white racist actions; and those who remain silent are complicit in that white racism. These are unfortunate facts of being black at Penn State.

University perspective: this is what Penn State says regarding creating a culture of equity and inclusion.

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Letter to the Editor: Being Black at Penn State - The Underground

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I have been at Penn State since 2002. I am the only tenured African American professor in the history of the Penn State political science department. How long is that? George Atherton taught political science at PSU in the 19 th century: yes, that Atherton.

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How does bringing questions of empire, colonialism, and race back into the study of world politics, postcolonial and decolonial approaches present alternative accounts of many of the thematic issues such as globalization, war, sovereignty, trade, international law, weapons control, gender, security, environmental crises, development, and labour?

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How does postcolonialism relate to theories like realism, marxism and liberalism?

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They argue that the way that many people know and represent the world depends on hierarchies established by colonial attitudes, and are the perspectives of the colonially or racially privileged.

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Alternatives?

Buen vivir: it emphasizes the community rather than the individual as a subject of well-being, it argues that it must be ecologically balanced rather than growth-maximizing, and it asserts that it should be culturally sensitive rather than universalist.

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Companies like Nestlé and Unilever and their colonial legacies.

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What is it that we can't understand about our world today if we don't take the colonial past into account? 

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What is it that we can't understand about our world today if we don't take the colonial past into account? 

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What could we have been studying in IR, but we are not?

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What could we have been studying in IR, but we are not?

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Colonial Past and International Economic Institutions

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Colonial Past and International Economic Institutions

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"Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.

No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thing-ification.’

I hear the storm. They talk to me about progress, about ‘achievements,’ diseases cured, improved standards of living.

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.

They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks.

I am talking about thousands of men sacrificed to the Congo-Océan. I am talking about those who, as I write this, are digging the harbor [sic] of Abidjan by hand. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life-from life, from the dance, from wisdom.

I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys.

They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted—harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population—about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.

They pride themselves on abuses eliminated.

I too talk about abuses, but what I say is that on the old ones—very real—they have superimposed others—very detestable. They talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but I note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.

They talk to me about civilization. I talk about proletarianization and mystification."

(Césaire 2000 [1955]: 42–4)
(Baylis, Owens and Smith)

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Why does Keith Smith insist on calling it 'postcolonialism' and not 'post-colonialism'?

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Is global capitalism as fundamentally dependent on colonial structures?

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Is global capitalism as fundamentally dependent on colonial structures?

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Frantz Fanon - 'Colonialism as a system of total violence'

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Frantz Fanon - 'Colonialism as a system of total violence'

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“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”
--  Frantz Fanon

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Britain's museums need to face up to a reality. Cultural imperialism is dead. They cannot any longer coldly keep hold of artistic treasures that were acquired in dubious circumstances a long time ago.

Amal Clooney may or may not be the best ambassador for the Greek government in its long campaign to return the Parthenon marbles to Greece. The celebrity support this cause has attracted ever since Lord Byron made it part of his romantic image in the early 19th century keeps it in the limelight, but also allows the British Museum, where the best sculptures from the 5th century BC Parthenon continue to be kept, to portray its critics as self-publicists.

Yet this is not the only case of a cultural treasure whose true ownership is disputed. The Benin sculptures in the British Museum, taken from the splendid west African city by a British "punitive raid" in 1897, are never going to rest easy in Bloomsbury. Meanwhile the international mood is shifting and will inevitably continue to shift towards a consensus that many wonders of the world are wrongfully hogged by western museums.

In France, whose museums are just as treasure-laden as ours, the inviolability of the "national patrimony" is finally being questioned. We need to follow them down that modern road.

Britain has a particularly bad image when it comes to this, for two reasons: Lord Elgin, whose stripping of the Acropolis has been a stain on our international reputation since the early 19th century, and the fact that we were, before 1914, the most powerful of all imperial powers. Instead of seeking to live down these blemishes, we are hugely self-righteous about our possession of a vast haul of world art. We come across as uniquely determined to hold on to our booty and not prepared to meet critics halfway.

I realised this recently on the Greek island of Aegina. It has a superb classical temple whose sculptures were removed and taken to Bavaria at about the same time Britain took the frieze and pediment sculptures of the Parthenon. Today they are in Munich, but there is no global outcry for their return. Why not? Well, if you visit the temple you can't help noticing the prominent German involvement in archaeology and conservation work there. German scholarship has kept up a constant, reciprocal relationship with Aegina. There is no equivalent British involvement in the preservation of the Parthenon.

Why not? Instead of seeing Athens as its enemy, the British Museum should have got involved years ago in a very big way in maintaining and researching the Parthenon. It should have collaborated on the new Acropolis Museum (and offered to loan some of its astonishing sculptures). The whole issue could have been diffused by a more generous cooperative attitude.

The Acropolis Museum, a wonderful gallery, reveals why cultural colonialism is doomed. It is true the whole world flocks to the British Museum and the Louvre, and surely will continue to do so. But world-class museums are not confined by some act of god to northern Europe or north America. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has been criticised for the conditions inflicted on its workforce. But in the long term, it points to a world where great art collections will be widely and evenly spread. The feeble excuses for keeping stolen or seized art treasures in former imperial capitals are becoming ever more feeble.

In the end, the defence for hanging on to contested cultural goods boils down to the deeply offensive notion that Britain looks after the Parthenon marbles or Benin heads and plaques better than Greece or Nigeria ever could. How long can our museums keep up this arrogance? Not long.

The British empire is dead. So is the age of cultural booty.

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The art world's shame: why Britain must give its colonial booty back

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Britain's museums need to face up to a reality. Cultural imperialism is dead. They cannot any longer coldly keep hold of artistic treasures that were acquired in dubious circumstances a long time ago. Amal Clooney may or may not be the best ambassador for the Greek government in its long campaign to return the Parthenon marbles to Greece.

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Why is it important to apply a postcolonial lens to IR?

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Why is it important to apply a postcolonial lens to IR?

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What is it that we see applying a postcolonial lens that we would have missed otherwise?

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What is it that we see applying a postcolonial lens that we would have missed otherwise?

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What is the criticism from postcolonial theory on realism and liberalism?

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What is the criticism from postcolonial theory on realism and liberalism?

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Khalid, “Gender, orientalism and representations of the ‘other’ in the war on terror”

What is orientalism and why can it be called an aesthetic approach (pp.6—19)?

What gendered and orientalist discourses circulate at the beginning of the war on terror (pp.21—25)?

Why are the Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England incidents important for the article (pp.25—27)?

Henderson, “Hidden in plain sight: racism in international relations theory”

Why is race important in the origins of the IR academic discipline (pp.72—79)?
What is the social contract and what is its racial basis (pp. 79—84)?

Why does the racial basis of the social contract mean for the concept of anarchy (pp.84—88)?

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/030437540102600406?casa_token=7O5lWlfUSk8AAAAA:vcub4QcY7Dfy7Tue-L2wjqk9uwPalPj9OUNzbF3oIIVLkf1DtfpaL3euq66xr8Rf0Ex0BeJBbpbL

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Do we value the lives of all people equally?

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"The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside".

"..despite independence, foreign military troops had stayed in the country, where foreign investors or corporations owned land, industries, and mining concessions, and where policies on a range of domestic and international affairs were being directed by external forces" (Baylis, Owens, Smith)

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"This meant depicting Europeans as rational, strong, enlightened, and liberal, in contrast to non-Europeans who were shown as barbaric, effeminate, weak, dangerous, and irrational Others. ... the ways in which we represent the non-Western Other is a significant factor in justifying imperial control and paternalistic practices towards them." (Baylis, Owens, Smith)

--> Any examples of where this is still happening?

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"‘Eurocentrism’ can be understood as the widespread tendency to treat Europe as the primary subject of and reference point for world history, civilization, and/or humanity. ...In Eurocentric thinking, for example in economics or history, it might involve the assumption that all societies will or should evolve along the lines of European ones, or a comparison of other societies’ failures in relation to a European ‘universal’ standard. It also generally entails the ignoring of histories, cultures, and knowledges originating from outside Europe in the discussion of world affairs." (Baylis, Owens, Smith)

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- What ideas are implicit in this concept?

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- Does power influence knowledge? How?

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Burna Boy - Another Story (feat. M.anifest) [Official Music Video]

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Have you experienced something that was very differently represented by the western media?

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Have you experienced something that was very differently represented by the western media?

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Any postcolonial legacies in my teaching or approach to the topic?

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Any postcolonial legacies in my teaching or approach to the topic?

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What was the western representation of the 'East' during the war on terror? 

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What was the western representation of the 'East' during the war on terror? 

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- How do depictions of the 'other' lead to material power relations?
- How have women's rights discourses been co-opted in the war on terror?

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Visual language (or indeed any language) does not reveal a pre-existing ‘truth’ about the world, but, rather, it creates meanings about the world through representing it. - Maryam Khalid

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Visual language (or indeed any language) does not reveal a pre-existing ‘truth’ about the world, but, rather, it creates meanings about the world through representing it. - Maryam Khalid

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Explain.

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CIA supported coup in Iran against Mossadeq who was nationalizing oil

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"This war [War on Terror] will take many turns we cannot predict. Yet I am certain of this: Wherever
we carry it, the American flag will stand not only for our power, but for freedom. . . . We fight, as we
always fight, for a just peace – a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against
threats from terrorists and tyrants. . . . And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open
societies on every continent. Building this just peace is America’s opportunity, and America’s
duty."

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https://www.stylist.co.uk/speak-up/muslim-woman-women-burqa-burka-boris-johnson-xenophobia-islam-islamophobia-debate-mariam-khan-speak-up/221767

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Speak Up

Posted by

Mariam Khan

Published

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Ever since Boris Johnson's boorish comments last week, the entire conversation around Muslim women and burqas has spiralled. I've watched men and women offer their expertise and opinions on the matter - almost all of them white. The implication is that their opinions or feelings should be centred and matter more than those whose identity or dress is being discussed.

Scrolling through social media, I stumbled across a tweet from Allison Pearson, a Telegraph columnist, which read: "How are we supposed to express our unease? If six European countries can ban the burka for reasons of equality and social cohesion, then so should we. But we're not allowed to have that debate because of 'cultural sensitivity'."

Doesn't a debate mean some sort of meaningful discussion? Instead, we are served with a euro-Western-centric conversation, in which white men and women mostly share their discomfort about somebody else's choice, but still expect to live their life without having any of their rights infringed upon or their own choices questioned. One rule for us and another for them.

This so-called debate currently taking place around Muslim woman and the burqa isn't one in the slightest. It's a ploy disguising Islamophobic views as insincere concern for Muslim women. Indeed, the current conversation throws doubt over a Muslim woman's agency, specifically her ability to make choices for herself in how she chooses to dress her own body. The body that, ultimately, she has to care for. This rhetoric strips away the autonomy of choice for Muslim women and suddenly allows everyone but them to collectively discuss their bodies, clothes, lives and freedoms because the word woman is preceded with "Muslim".

According to Johnson, Muslim women who wear the burqa look like "letter boxes" and "bank robbers". I wonder, would it be acceptable if I suddenly decided I wasn't comfortable with white women wearing heels or short skirts and described them in a way equal to the Islamophobic comments made by Johnson about Muslim women? If women wear burqas, they are oppressed. If they wear skirts, they are sluts. I am tired of this binary.

Johnson's remarks are not only Islamophobic and disrespectful, they also dehumanise Muslim women. He sees Muslim women as objects. To call this degrading would be an understatement. He knowingly legitimised, using his position and influence, a narrative that many from the far right will now use to physically and verbally abuse Muslim women on the streets of Britain. Only a few days ago a young Muslim mother was told to remove her face veil by a bus driver, who insinuated she could bomb the bus.

Last week, I was very briefly on The JVS Show on BBC Three Counties Radio, the presenter told me: " Many of my listeners are contacting the program and saying he (Johnson) hasn't done anything wrong because it's true, women wearing the burqa, women wearing the niqab look like bank robbers and look like letter boxes."

"If women wear burqas, they are oppressed. If they wear skirts, they are sluts. I am tired of this binary."

Later, I wondered how much these listeners knew about or cared about the burqa before Johnson decided to make a woman's choice into a national scandal, yet again to score some political points and throw the media into frenzy. The show ended up discussing not why Johnson should be reprimanded, but if the burqa was acceptable in British society at all.

How many listeners cared about Muslim women being forced to do anything or going through Islamophobic abuse each day when it wasn't being highlighted in the national media? And yet, these same listeners, most speaking so surely about Muslim women, would never expect themselves to be equated with colonisers regardless of how they look.

I wish everyone understood that not every Muslim woman who wears the burqa wants to debate or justify her choice. It is exactly that: an individual choice. We live in a society that allows for autonomy. So, when the words "forced to wear" appear in relation to the burqa or hijab, and are contrasted with "burqa ban", I find myself wondering how the people suggesting this aren't able to understand their own hypocrisy.

A ban means the restriction of freedom - exactly what these people are rallying against. The "burqa ban" is perceived and suggested by many over and over as some sort of liberating solution for Muslim women. But no white man or woman is ever going to want my liberation as a Muslim woman more than I do. They can't give me liberation because I must take that for myself. I must be the owner of what frees me and not the product of somebody else's conditioned liberation for me.

I've often thought about what a productive conversation about the burqa would look like, and it doesn't include banning anything. It includes educating women in communities that they have a choice. That the burqa is allowed but they should only wear it if they want to. That the burqa isn't Islamically mandated clothing.

However, nobody is looking to progress or have a constructive conversation because... well, because all of this uproar is not about the burqa. Every time a Muslim woman and her body are discussed, we are used to political point score, improve white men's bids for leadership or appeal to the far right. All of these conversations are hollow. They lack sincerity, lack real want for any sort of progress or well-being of those being discussed.

And, most of the time, they lack the voice of actual Muslim women.

Mariam Khan is the editor of IT'S NOT ABOUT THE BURQA, an anthology of essays by Muslim women forthcoming in 2019 from Picador.

For one day only on Monday 13 August, Laura Whitmore has taken over stylist.co.uk and transformed it into her very own Speak Up platform - a digital initiative which aims to shine a light on the day's most important headlines, challenge the status quo, spark debate, encourage conversation and, above all else, champion women's voices.. For similarly inspiring content, check out Laura Whitmore's show on BBC Radio 5 Live, which airs on Sundays at 11am. Image: Getty

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As a Muslim woman, this is what I want you to know about the burqa debate

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Speak Up Posted by Mariam Khan Published background Layer 1 Add this article to your list of favourites Ever since Boris Johnson's boorish comments last week, the entire conversation around Muslim women and burqas has spiralled. I've watched men and women offer their expertise and opinions on the matter - almost all of them white.

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The UN agency is urging every country to vaccinate at least 40% of its population by the end of this year, and hopes to help ensure that 70% of the world's population is by the middle of next year.

At a press conference on COVID-19 and vaccine equity in Africa, which is home to more than 1.2 billion people, Mr. Ghebreyesus informed that, so far, just two countries in Africa have reached the 40% target, the lowest of any region.

"That's not because African countries don't have the capacity or experience to roll out COVID-19 vaccines. It's because they've been left behind by the rest of the world," he said.

Mr. Ghebreyesus explained that "this leaves people at high risk of disease and death, exposed to a deadly virus against which many other people around the world enjoy protection."

Risks and solutions

For him, the longer vaccine inequity persists, the more the virus will keep circulating and changing, the longer the social and economic disruption will continue, and the higher the chances that more variants will emerge that render vaccines less effective.

To avoid this situation, last year WHO partnered with UNICEF, CEPI, GAVI and others to create COVAX. So far, the initiative has shipped more than 260 million doses to 141 countries.

Mr. Ghebreyesus pointed to several challenges, with manufacturers prioritizing bilateral deals and many high-income countries tying up the global supply of shots.

He also highlighted a similar initiative, established by the African Union, the COVID-19 Vaccine Acquisition Task Team, known as AVAT.

This Monday and Tuesday, WHO representatives met with the leaders of AVAT "to agree on a way forward", Mr. Ghebreyesus said: "Vaccine inequity is a solvable problem."

Call to countries and manufacturers

He called on manufacturers to prioritize COVAX and AVAT. To countries with high coverage levels, he asked them to swap their near-term vaccines deliveries, fulfil their dose-sharing pledges immediately, and facilitate the sharing of technology.

The WHO chief also called on all countries and manufacturers to share information on bilateral deals, supply and delivery projections and to recognize all vaccines with a WHO Emergency Use Listing.

The African Union's Special Envoy for COVID-19, Strive Masiyiwa, also participated in the briefing, alongside the director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, John Nkengasong, the Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, and WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, among others.

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Only 2% of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered in Africa

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The UN agency is urging every country to vaccinate at least 40% of its population by the end of this year, and hopes to help ensure that 70% of the world's population is by the middle of next year.

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Rudyard Kipling - The White Man's Burden

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Rudyard Kipling - The White Man's Burden

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Take up the White Man's burden -
Send forth the best ye breed -
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild -
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden -
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.
Take up the White Man's burden -
The savage wars of peace -
Fill full the mouth of famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man's burden -
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper -
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead !
Take up the White Man's burden -
And reap his old reward,
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard -
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly !) towards the light:-
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night ?"
Take up the White Man's burden -
Ye dare not stoop to less -
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man's burden -
Have done with childish days -
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgement of your peers.

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It was late January when I arrived in Afghanistan. A few days later, I met Ismail Khan, a well-known mujahideen commander, in the city of Herat near the Iranian border. He handed me his rifle, a shortened version of the AK-74 designed for the crews of tanks and other military vehicles, telling me he'd taken it from the body of a Russian he'd killed in the 1980s. I asked to fire it, so we drove out of town.

Walking to our range, he pointed out a river where he and fellow mujahideen had skirmished with the Russians, and the houses where locals had fed and hidden them. Khan went on to fight the Taliban in the 1990s and served as a governor during the US-backed administration of Hamid Karzai. Jihad, he told me, is a Muslim's duty. If someone tries to take your religion, your family or your land - fight them. "We beat the Russians," he said. "And we'll beat the Taliban too." He didn't. When they rolled into Herat in August, Khan cut a deal with them and went into exile in Iran.

On the range, a farmer dipped a rag into some blue paint, which dribbled down his arm as he drew a circle on a high mud wall. Ismail shot first, then invited me to. The recoil felt satisfying as the bullets punched into our target.

Jihad had inspired a childhood friend who left Burnley in the late 1990s to fight in Afghanistan. Recruiters could be found praying with you at mosques or talking to you on the cassette tapes on sale in Islamic shops. Imams said we were in the Ummah, the global family of Muslims, waiting to welcome us wherever we went in the Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia, and if they needed us we had to answer their call. It was seductive.

As young Pakistanis, we wore keffiyehs in solidarity with the Palestinians; in the mid-1990s we welcomed fleeing Bosnian Muslims into our homes. My childhood friend was killed in a rocket attack. He is still celebrated in Burnley as a martyr. People imagined his life here in Afghanistan in idealised terms: walking in the mountains with friends, killing animals for food, no need for western comforts, praying on his shawl five times a day, talking late into long, wide nights with the brothers feeling warm and right and true.

I was in the country to make a documentary film. But as a former soldier - I'd served in the British Army from 1997 to 2007 - standing with Khan on the range, I missed the life. "How's work going?" he asked. "Not well," I replied honestly. "Well, if you give it up, you can join my private army," he said. Meals, friends, guns.

I texted an old friend, a white fellow former soldier, about the offer. He replied: "Let's join up, kebabs and sun." For westerners confused about why young men head abroad to fight, the structure and meaning that a soldiering unit provides is part of the answer.

'How's work going?' he asked. 'Not well,' I replied honestly. 'Well, if you give it up, you can join my private army'

I've benefited from the west. I had to fight, though; it has not been easy, but I hate being a victim. People kicked my head in. I kicked theirs in back. Things improved after I left my hometown of little opportunity in 1997. The Pakistani boys left back there are told to pull their socks up, get called Pakis, are accused of turning England into an Islamic state, forced into marriages, have fingers pointed at them by politicians when it's convenient, and today they're being told to change from being undereducated town-dwellers to remote coders for international tech companies. Yeah, right. A plane ticket to a war zone is much easier.

This may well be the superficial way that footsoldiers see it. But the leaders are looking for something else, a place in Islam's history. When Mullah Omar, founder of the Taliban, was in Kandahar on the way to take Kabul in 1996, he went to the Kirka Sharif shrine. Locked inside a silver box there is a cloak believed to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad during the Night Journey, travelling on the back of the winged steed from Mecca to Jerusalem in 621AD. Standing on the roof of a mosque, Mullah Omar put his hands in the sleeve of the cloak and was accepted as the leader of the faithful, of all Muslims, by the hundreds of religious leaders attending.

On becoming the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the caliph in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Iraq. Again, to lead all Muslims. Ask a Muslim stacking supermarket shelves at Asda in Burnley about it today and they will probably reply, "Baghdadi bro, who?"

Leaving Herat, I headed east to the border with Pakistan. The feeling that I was in the loving embrace of fellow Muslims was diminished after meeting a local militia funded by the Afghan government. One showed me a rocket-propelled grenade launcher around which he had wrapped silver tinsel. He asked me to follow him up a mountain track, and without ceremony he fired across a valley; the round hit a mountainside and glowed. "Do you want to have a go?" he asked. "Sure," I said.

Perhaps it was having been on ranges with soldiers before that prompted me to ask in which direction we were firing. "At Pakistan," he proudly pointed. "We hate them." It was clear that they did not get on with their Muslim neighbours: no brotherhood here. They complained that Pakistan was sending terrorists over, and showed me photos on their phones of men they'd killed. I passed back the launcher, not wanting to start a war. Soon afterwards I had to return to the UK.

This September, bored in Burnley, I received a text message asking if I could go to Afghanistan and help produce television and radio packages for international news crews. Do the logistics and medical cover. "Deffo," I replied. A few days later, after updating my will, I was flying back to a very different country. The Taliban had conquered it and the president had fled.

Instead of flying into Kabul, we came in from the north. After passing over the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan Friendship Bridge from Termez to Hairatan, we met the Taliban, finally in charge of a country they'd fought 20 years for. The call to prayer sounded and the gate stayed shut. We waited an hour for them to finish their prayers before they let the world disturb them.

My crew was hungry and thirsty. I asked in a mixture of Arabic and English if I could leave the border and cross into Afghanistan to fetch food; my passport was in an office waiting to be stamped but they allowed it. On leaving a roadside café, I paid with $20: food and water for six people, but this was Afghanistan, so things were cheap. The Taliban sentry noticed that I'd not received any change so he collected it. The next time I saw him was three days later, when he tried to return it to me.

I watched the fighter play, perhaps nervously, with the round selector switch on his M16: semi-automatic to burst, semi-automatic to burst

The fundamentalist organisation proudly proclaims it is anti-corruption. I spoke to people who told me that where the Taliban controlled checkpoints across the countryside during the previous government's reign, they set fair and low tolls; government charges, by contrast, had varied wildly. Kabul had money, but the rest of the country did not. Positions of power, for example as police chiefs in a position to extract bribes, were passed to friends and family.

The Taliban concentrate heavily on security. They stopped us one night in Mazar-i-Sharif as they looked for kidnappers. I was asked to leave the vehicle and questioned. The commander searched my belongings. "Indian?" "British," I replied. I asked in a Syrian dialect if he spoke Arabic; he did and we stayed with it. In the top pocket of my rucksack he found wooden prayer beads from Baghdad. "Muslim?" he asked. Na'am, yes. He handed back my things and told me I was welcome to go anywhere I wanted in the Islamic emirate, apologising and asking if I was upset with him. La, la, intay akhi - no, no, you're my brother - as we shook hands. He smiled. And we left.

Not everyone is comfortable with the new rulers. We heard of women who had worked for the previous government now in hiding and not daring to come out. A young Hazara student broke down describing her former life, which was all she knew; she was too young to have lived under the last period of Taliban rule. She'd heard horrific stories from elders.

The Taliban also took us to a private all-female university where women studied law, medicine and economics. There was a poster of Adam Smith on the wall. In the yard they posed for photos, wearing designer shawls and trainers, not burkas. Our Taliban guide asked that we give the new government time. "Soon we'll have a system to educate both men and women," he said. But he was adamant that we wouldn't be seeing western-style freedoms. "Your system does not work here," he said.

We left for Kabul. The main threat in the capital today is Isis, locally known as Daesh. When Zabihullah Mujahid, the lead Taliban spokesman in Kabul, announced that his mother had passed away, people were invited to pray for her at the Eid Gah Mosque. Isis took advantage. At about 3.30pm local time on October 3, I heard the explosion, gunfire, sirens. I raced to the scene. At the mosque the Taliban would not let us through for fear of secondary explosions. So we went to the emergency hospital in Shahr-e Naw where blast victims tend to go. Outside, there were Taliban fighters with bloodstained shalwar kameez.

One had been thrown by the blast, visibly shocked, staring and shaking his head, saying he'd lost a friend. Blood was on his trainers and forearm as he dug into a black bin liner, removing the bloody and torn camouflage shirt of a comrade. He said the Taliban knew their enemies - the US and Daesh. A common theory across Afghanistan goes that the US is funding and supporting Daesh to fight the Taliban because it lost to them. How else, people ask, do you explain Muslims bombing mosques and killing other Muslims?

Hospital staff asked if anyone was of a blood group matching that of the victims. Two Taliban fighters came forward and handed over their weapons before entering. In shock, the fighter outside cried out, "Do they not think we are proud of our dead?" I watched and heard him play, perhaps nervously, with the round selector switch on his M16: semi-automatic to burst, semi-automatic to burst.

Another night, when I was having tea in a café, the vendor played a ballad to the Taliban, a tarana, on his phone. When I asked about it, he sent me a link to a Facebook video in which two Talibs in shalwar kameez danced in circles, vests carrying bullets, rifles strapped across their bodies and sandals. The lyrics go: " We defeated the world/ They cut the people in half/ We defeated the world/ My dusty village, I sacrifice your dusty houses,/ I throw my plague to the palaces of Paris/We defeated the world/ Taliban are created by people/ Although Nemat is mad he is proud for Afghan's name. " Mentioning the poet Nemat in the final line is typical of Afghan poetry.

This image of the Taliban as mountain men with AK-47s belongs partly in the past. Walk around Kabul today and you do see it; but you also see soldiers with modern uniforms, weapons, tactics and discipline - plus the experience of at least two decades of fighting the best militaries in the world. Under the video are congratulations from people across the world. Some people on my street back home in Burnley don't hide their happiness that the Taliban won either.

One evening I was watching some Taliban soldiers play volleyball, their guns laid to the side, laughing as they scored against each other. Some are bored now. With the First Kalima (Declaration of Faith) on their headbands and uniform patches reading "there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger", they are used to fighting for Allah. Now that the prize of an Islamic emirate has landed in their laps, what next?

They're trying to stop educated people leaving; they want them to stay and help build a country; they're trying to get the US to release funds. Qatar, which organised and continues to host negotiations between the Taliban and the international community, is arguing that they can serve Allah and be more modern. China and Pakistan are flying in aid. There are queues outside the banks for Afghans to withdraw their weekly limit of $200 and a long line outside the Iranian embassy as Afghans head west for work.

Nation-building? It won't be easy. Isis wants to keep fighting. Recently it bombed another mosque in Kunduz, killing dozens. Where the Taliban were seen as the extremists for the past 20 years, Isis have taken that stage.

Joe Biden was right about one thing: western forces did not invade Afghanistan to nation-build, it was to remove al-Qaeda. After that was achieved, they should have left. Instead, they stayed and showed Kabul a different way to live. It wasn't all Coca-Cola and high fives. Western drone attacks killed innocent people. Some in Kabul lived western lifestyles, but the majority in the countryside did not. And here we are now trying to make the best of the mess.

There are many Afghanistans. This was mine. I may have benefited from my brown male privilege, speaking bits of several Asian languages, my prayer beads and my beard. I met women too scared to leave their rooms, saying they felt imprisoned, while others walk the streets not wearing burkas, buy wedding dresses and meet in cafés. I met internally displaced people scared that winter is coming, who were then transported back to their homes by the Taliban.

I've seen a Taliban soldier whip a market trader and I've seen a kebab shop owner whip a begging boy with a skewer. I've seen both the white flag patch and the Afghan flag on uniforms. I've seen women march through the streets and men laying rugs on roundabouts to pray. I've seen the blood and the shock of an attack on a mosque by an organisation that calls itself Islamic. I've seen the children of Afghanistan, girls and boys, smile and struggle through it all.

I need to go, but want to stay.
Adnan Sarwar won the 2013 Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize for 'British Muslim Soldier The article has been amended since original publication to reflect the fact that the shortened AK-74 variant that the author fired on a range was an AKS-74U Follow on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first '

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Among the Taliban: a soldier-turned-writer's journey through Afghanistan

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It was late January when I arrived in Afghanistan. A few days later, I met Ismail Khan, a well-known mujahideen commander, in the city of Herat near the Iranian border. He handed me his rifle, a shortened version of the AK-74 designed for the crews of tanks and other military vehicles, telling me he'd taken it from the body of a Russian he'd killed in the 1980s.