RASC News Agency: In a stark reflection of the Taliban’s ongoing attempts to enforce their ideological supremacy over Afghanistan’s institutions of higher learning, the group’s Ministry of Higher Education recently organized a seminar at Kabul University glorifying Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban regime. The event, held on Saturday, May 3, was attended by Taliban-appointed officials, a selected number of professors, and a limited student audience underscoring the militarized regime’s grip on the educational sphere. Neda Mohammad Nadeem, the Taliban’s acting Minister of Higher Education, delivered a speech in which he urged students to embrace Mullah Omar as their moral and intellectual exemplar. In a sweeping and revisionist portrayal, Nadeem lauded Omar as “an unparalleled figure in modern history,” and bizarrely claimed that “scholars, politicians, and kings across the world remain astonished by his insight and state-building vision.” Nadeem further referred to him as “Omar the Third,” drawing a blasphemous comparison to revered figures in Islamic history in an apparent attempt to sanctify the legacy of a warlord whose reign ushered in one of Afghanistan’s darkest eras.
The Taliban minister did not merely praise Mullah Omar’s past; he issued a directive to students to emulate his simplicity, worldview, and governing style qualities associated not with progress or modern governance, but with repression, censorship, and extremism. Students were encouraged to go beyond the seminar and incorporate Omar’s lifestyle and ideology into their daily lives, effectively transforming campuses into ideological breeding grounds for regime loyalists. This orchestrated seminar is part of a broader and deliberate Taliban campaign to reengineer Afghanistan’s education system into a tool for ideological indoctrination. Since reclaiming power in August 2021, the Taliban have launched a comprehensive effort to erase academic diversity and intellectual freedom from universities, replacing them with a monochromatic narrative that glorifies militant leadership, suppresses dissent, and isolates the nation from the global academic community.
Analysts warn that such events signal the Taliban’s broader mission: to systematically dismantle institutions of higher learning and replace them with platforms for ideological submission. Educational reform under the Taliban has not meant academic innovation, but rather the purging of female students, the dismissal of critical scholars, the erasure of modern disciplines, and the forced realignment of curricula with an extremist, ultra-conservative ideology. The glorification of Mullah Omar an internationally sanctioned figure whose regime was responsible for harboring terrorist groups, destroying cultural heritage, and perpetrating widespread human rights abuses sends a chilling message. By elevating a man associated with authoritarianism and violence into a revered national icon, the Taliban are attempting to reframe brutality as virtue and ignorance as discipline.
This cult-like campaign of personality promotion is not just academically regressive; it is politically dangerous. At a time when Afghanistan’s youth require access to scientific knowledge, critical thinking, and global perspectives to rebuild their shattered nation, the Taliban are offering a curriculum based on dogma, obedience, and historical revisionism. The long-term implications of such ideological manipulation are profound. By turning universities into echo chambers of regime propaganda, the Taliban are undermining the very foundation of intellectual development. What was once a platform for inquiry, discovery, and national progress is now being weaponized to enforce loyalty, stifle thought, and entrench autocratic rule.
If left unchallenged, this systematic distortion of education will not only suffocate Afghanistan’s academic potential but will deepen the nation’s cultural and intellectual isolation leaving a generation of youth deprived not only of opportunities, but of truth itself.
