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My Stoic Meditations in our Dark Period under the Taliban Regime
The Taliban regime in Afghanistan is manifestly the worst in the world. It is also a Pashtun-nationalist Sunni extremist group cahooting with another Sunni jihadist group, the Islamic State of Khorasan (ISIS-K), who killed tens of school students of the Shiite-Hazara (the group to which I belong) on April 19, 2022. If I were a faithful Shiite, it would have been easy to accept the fate of those innocent and young souls we lost. I would have justified their fate as my deceased grandma would have done it. If she were still with us, she would have said, “we are Shia; we have always suffered in the hands of the Sunnis. Even our Imams have suffered like us. We are not better than our Imams. It will be like this until Imam Zaman [the 12th Shiite imam and Prophet Mohammad’s grandson] comes to liberate us and build his just global government. Then we all will go to heaven, and the Sunnis would rot in hell”.
Since I cannot find solace in the above rationalization of our suffering, I am trying to find my console elsewhere, in the stoic philosophy. I am reading Massimo Pigliucci’s book “Field Guide To A Happy Life: 53 Brief Lessons for Living”, where he gives straightforward advice on living our lives. There are four interrelated cardinal virtues in stoicism listed in Massimo’s book:
