page_title: Islam in Afghanistan
section_title: Conquest by Abdur Rahman Khan
hierarchical_section_title: Islam in Afghanistan / History / Conquest by Abdur Rahman Khan
caption_attribution_description: English: Men praying at the Blue Mosque in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan.
context_page_description: Islam in Afghanistan began to be practiced after the Arab Islamic conquest of Afghanistan from the 7th to the 10th centuries, with the last holdouts to conversion submitting in the late 19th century. Islam is the official state religion of Afghanistan, with approximately 99.7% of the Afghan population being Muslim. Roughly 85% practice Sunni Islam, belonging to the Hanafi school of Islamic law, while around 15% are believed to be Shias. Most Shiites belong to the Twelver branch and only a smaller number follow Ismailism. According to Pew, 3% are non-denominational Muslim.
  After the Islamic conquest of Persia was completed, the Muslim Arabs then began to move towards the lands east of Persia and in 652 captured Herat. By the end of the 10th century CE Ghaznavids subdued Hindu Shahi kings of Sindh. In the 12th century, the Ghurids attacked North India.
context_section_description: The first systematic employment of Islam as an instrument of state-building was initiated by King Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901) during his drive toward centralization. He decreed that all laws must comply with Islamic law and thus elevated the Shariah over customary laws embodied in the Pashtunwali. The ulama were enlisted to legitimize and sanction his state efforts as well as his central authority. This enhanced the religious community on the one hand, but as they were increasingly inducted into the bureaucracy as servants of the state, the religious leadership was ultimately weakened. Many economic privileges enjoyed by religious personalities and institutions were restructured within the framework of the state; the propagation of learning, once the sole prerogative of the ulama, was closely supervised; and the Amir became the supreme arbiter of justice.
  Abdur Rahman Khan's successors continued and expanded his policies as they increased the momentum of secularization. Islam remained central to interactions, but the religious establishment remained essentially non-political, functioning as a moral rather than a political influence. Nevertheless, Islam asserted itself in times of national crisis. Moreover, when the religious leadership considered themselves severely threatened, charismatic religious personalities periodically employed Islam to rally disparate groups in opposition to the state. They rose up on several occasions against King Amanullah Shah (1919–1929), for example, in protest against reforms they believed to be western intrusions inimical to Islam.
  Subsequent rulers, mindful of traditional attitudes antithetical to secularization, were careful to underline the compatibility of Islam with modernization. Even so, and despite its pivotal position within the society, which continued to draw no distinction between religion and state, the role of religion in state affairs continued to decline.
  The 1931 Constitution made Hanafi Shariah the state religion, while the 1964 Constitution simply prescribed that the state should conduct its religious ritual according to the Hanafi school. The 1977 Constitution declared Islam the religion of Afghanistan, but made no mention that the state ritual should be Hanafi. The Penal Code of 1976 and the Civil Code of 1977, covering the entire field of social justice, represent major attempts to cope with elements of secular law based on, but superseded by, other systems. Courts, for instance, were enjoined to consider cases first according to secular law, resorting to Shariah in areas secular law did not cover. By 1978, the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) openly expressed its aversion to the religious establishment. This precipitated the fledgling Islamist Movement into a national revolt; Islam moved from its passive stance on the periphery to play an active role.
  Politicized Islam in Afghanistan represents a break from Afghan traditions. The Islamist Movement originated in 1958 among faculties of Kabul University, particularly in the Faculty of Islamic Law, which had been founded in 1952 with the stated purpose of raising the quality of religious teaching to accommodate modern science and technology. The founders  were largely professors influenced by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a party formed in the 1930s that was dedicated to Islamic revivalism and social, economic, and political equity. Their  objective is to come to terms with the modern world through the development of a political ideology based on Islam. The Afghan leaders, while indebted to many of these concepts, did not forge strong ties to similar movements in other countries.
  The liberalization of government attitudes following the passage of the 1964 Constitution ushered in a period of intense activism among students at Kabul University. Professors and their students set up the Muslim Youth Organization (Sazmani Jawanani Musulman) in the mid-1960s at the same time that the leftists were also forming many parties. Initially communist students outnumbered the Muslim students, but
caption: Men praying at the Blue Mosque (or Shrine of Ali) in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif
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