Afghanistan

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

No, and the hon. Gentleman is wrong in every respect, including what he says about military hardware because that was decommissioned.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

The Prime Minister has said that we should judge the Taliban by their actions not their words. The Taliban in Afghanistan have said that they will confine themselves to operating within the rules of Islam. As somebody who comes from a Muslim background and whose father is an imam, and whose grandfather and uncles were imams, I am not an expert on Islam but have a good understanding of the faith. One way forward for the Prime Minister and Government might be this: the Prime Minister might use his kind offices to ask the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, with 57 member states, to request that Al-Azhar, a leading Islamic school of thought, set out what Islam means for women and religious minorities, as that might give us a way to judge what the Taliban are doing and what Islam stands for.

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting suggestion and I encourage it to be taken up. We need to ensure that the elements of the Taliban who are different, as I believe they are, from the Taliban of 1996-9 are encouraged and that we put the maximum pressure on them not to allow the more retrograde elements to have the upper hand. That is what this Government and others around the world are going to do.