Taliban After five years: Religious Law Struggles to Govern the Modern State

 Anachronism of theocracy ·

The Anachronism of Theocracy: Why Religious Law Struggles to Govern the Modern State

Today, August 15, 2026, marks the fifth anniversary of the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan. Five years ago, the world watched in real time as Kabul fell and a Western-backed government collapsed. In the chaotic days that followed, Taliban leadership promised to build an "Islamic Emirate" modeled loosely on the early Caliphate — a society anchored in divine law, absolute obedience, and the Quran as supreme legal authority. Five years on, Afghanistan is mired in a severe humanitarian crisis, economic stagnation, and near-total international isolation.

This anniversary invites an obvious question: can a state governed primarily by religious law function in the modern world? The honest answer is: rarely, and not without adaptation. Religion has historically governed the internal, metaphysical relationship between a person and God; the modern state exists to manage an external, material set of problems — currency, trade, infrastructure, security — that religious texts were never written to address in technical detail. When a government substitutes theology for administrative pragmatism wholesale, the results tend to be brittle. But this is a claim about degree and adaptation, not an iron law, and it deserves to be argued as one.

To see why, it helps to look at what history actually shows. Successful governance has usually been built on institutional mechanics and administrative adaptation, more than on theology. Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy, argues that Rome's greatness — its law, roads, and institutions — was forged through administrative pragmatism largely independent of its religious life. Centuries later, Constantine folded Christianity into the imperial apparatus, and most historians agree the move served the political goal of unifying a fractured empire, even if scholars still debate how much personal conviction accompanied it. Either way, the empire's core administrative machinery predated and outlasted its religious identity.

A similar pattern appears, with real nuance, in early Islamic history. The Prophet Muhammad's move to Medina transformed a religious community into a political one, but the administrative rules that followed were often built out of immediate necessity rather than a fixed blueprint. Under the Umayyads and Abbasids, day-to-day governance leaned heavily on existing Byzantine and Persian bureaucratic systems — tax collection, provincial administration, coinage — rather than reinventing them from scripture. Historians disagree about how much of early Islamic expansion was primarily religious versus geopolitical and economic in character; that debate isn't settled, and I won't pretend otherwise. What does seem clear is that even avowedly religious empires relied on borrowed, secular administrative machinery to actually run.

Even granting that history, though, the harder problem is one of scale. This is where the Islamist-revivalist framing — the romanticized "Virtuous City" of Caliph Umar as a template for modern governance — runs into real trouble. Seventh-century Medina was an oasis settlement of a few thousand people in a tribal, largely non-monetized economy. A modern state must run a central bank, participate in global trade regimes, maintain digital infrastructure, and answer to international accounting and legal standards that didn't exist, and couldn't have been anticipated, in any pre-modern legal code. That doesn't make religious law irrelevant to modern governance — plenty of states incorporate it successfully into hybrid systems — but it does mean that treating a 1,400-year-old legal-political framework as a complete, self-sufficient blueprint for a 21st-century economy is a mismatch of scale that has to be reckoned with, not waved away.

With that mismatch in mind, Afghanistan is the hard case, though not a clean one. Its economic reality over the past five years is genuinely severe: a dysfunctional banking sector, frozen foreign reserves, and a workforce hobbled by the ban on women's employment, which by most economic estimates has cost the country meaningful GDP on its own. Tens of millions of Afghans have fallen into poverty, and food insecurity remains widespread. But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that this isn't a clean experiment. Afghanistan's collapse is heavily confounded: decades of war, the sudden withdrawal of foreign aid that had propped up a large share of the pre-2021 economy, international sanctions, and asset freezes all hit simultaneously with the Taliban's own policy choices. A fair critic would ask whether any government — religious or secular — inheriting that exact starting position would have avoided catastrophe. Some of it wouldn't have. Some of it — specifically the decisions to exclude women from the workforce, reject international banking norms, and govern largely through prohibition rather than institution-building — are choices, not inevitabilities of theocratic rule as such.

That distinction matters, because it changes what the Afghan case can actually prove. It's less a demonstration that religion cannot govern a modern state and more a demonstration that a specific, maximalist, and prohibition-oriented style of religious governance, combined with self-imposed isolation from the international financial system, produces economic catastrophe. Those are related claims, but not the same claim.

Any honest version of this argument also has to sit with the cases that cut the other way. Iran has run a theocratic government for over four decades — troubled, repressive, and economically strained under sanctions, but not collapsed in the way Afghanistan has, and it does maintain a functioning, if constrained, central bank and trade relationships. Saudi Arabia governs with Sharia as its formal legal foundation while operating a modern, globally integrated economy. The Vatican, admittedly a much smaller and different kind of case, runs a functioning religious state. These examples don't refute the idea that scale and modern administration create real friction for religious governance — they arguably still show real strain, from Iran's sanctions-battered economy to ongoing debates in Saudi Arabia about reform — but they do show that religious legal foundations and modern statecraft aren't strictly incompatible. What seems to matter more is whether a government builds functioning institutions and stays connected to the global economic system, not whether its legal source is religious or secular.

Seen against that backdrop, the Taliban's own trajectory looks less like an indictment of theocracy in general and more like a case study in institutional absence. Rather than a sophisticated ideological movement with a governance program, the Taliban's leadership emerged largely from decades of civil war — a generation educated in frontier madrasas and shaped more by wartime survival than by statecraft. In office, the movement has governed mostly through negation: bans, restrictions, and control over the human body and public space, especially women's. That pattern reflects an absence of institutional capacity and a deliberate rejection of international integration, more than it reflects some inherent incompatibility between religion and governance in the abstract.

So the lesson of Afghanistan's last five years isn't that theology and statehood can never coexist — Iran and Saudi Arabia complicate that claim too much to make it cleanly. The more defensible lesson is narrower: governance built primarily on prohibition, isolated from global financial and administrative systems, and unwilling to adapt ancient legal frameworks to modern economic realities, tends toward collapse, whatever ideology drives it. Religion can offer moral and social cohesion. It has rarely, on its own, provided the administrative machinery a modern economy requires. States that have managed to combine religious legal identity with functioning modern governance have done so by building institutions and staying connected to the world, not by rejecting both.