When my teacher refused to say that CIA was behind the Taliban

A few days ago, during my Social Movement class, as usual our teacher went through her lecture. However, this time there was a part in her lecture that struck my attention so badly.

RADICAL ISLAMIST – the title that caught my eyes.

“So here we go. Another extreme “Islam” thing that you’re going present to these American kids. Great! And I’m going to sit here quietly with my hijab on and pretend to be cool”, I said to myself.

And here we go. We went through the lecture smoothly, without any questions.

She explained to the class who are Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS and so on. She also commented on what Iran is doing and how should we perceive the royal family of Saudi and she laughed about it.

Yes. I was still sitting there quietly and pretend to be cool.

“Save the best for the last dude and pretend to be cool. Don’t ask question right now”, I told myself again.

To be honest, there are two types of lectures that I went through in this American university. The first one is a lecture that gives you the whole story of certain issues. The teacher will flipped both sides of the coin and that will be the lecture that gives you that “Aha” moment. The other one is the one that will explained all the fallacies about this world even though everyone in that classroom knows the reality!

So, after one hour explaining about radical Islamist and laughed about it, she asked whether anyone has any question.

So, I grabbed my “invisible microphone” and said my question out loud.

“Hmm. I do understand the part that you said that radical Islamist groups came from seminary education. However, I tend to see it in different angle. Well, you can’t deny the third party in this story.” I told her.

She smiled at me as she knew what was in my mind at that time.

“Alright. Tell the class about it. Let them hear you, Nur”, she said.

All the eyes were on me and here we go.

“Well, you can see the pattern of the radical groups. This groups emerge in countries that have problems in their countries. These are the countries that have weak political structure and we use the term “fail state” for that. When a country faces this state, any external intervention are easy to happen and that is the point which we can see the superpowers of the world play their role. We cannot deny that point unfortunately,” I explained to the class and all the eyes were staring at me.

“Yeah, you are right,” she grinned.

Later, she asked a question to the class and to my surprise it seems that everyone knows the fact.

“So who funded the Taliban at the first place?” she asked us.

“The CIA!” an American boy answered it.

So our class ended after that question. Everyone seems to be happy with that conclusion.

Even though our teacher refused to say that CIA was behind the Taliban, each one of us knows the fact. The fact that everything happens in this world is not what it seems to be in the media.

Hanis Noor
ISMA Activist