A long history of repression has contributed to the current instability and crisis in Afghanistan, the country that has been under international scrutiny since Sept. 11, a Muslim law professor told an ISU crowd Tuesday night.

Maimul Khan, visiting professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law spoke to a crowd of about 150 people. The lecture, “Human Rights in Afghanistan: Ramifications for neighboring Muslim countries,” furnished historical context for the current crisis.

He has visited Afghanistan about a dozen times.

“These Afghan people are captive,” said Khan, who earned his doctorate degree in law from Tashkent State University in Bangladesh. “This is a very serious problem.”

“Many people are mistaken,” Khan said. “They think the Afghan people are rude and hostile people. In fact, they are very hospitable.”

Afghanistan showed compassion when it absorbed many Muslim Russian refugees in the past, he said.

Now, Kahn said, about 5 million Afghans are refugees in neighboring countries that are in poor condition.

“You can see Afghans really have been used,” he said.

For many years, he said, Afghanistan was a buffer zone between Russian and British interests in Central and South Asia. Khan said that the land currently known as Afghanistan never has been truly autonomous. The long history of occupation is important to serious study of the current situation, he said.

The current Taliban regime made use of an Orthodox Islamic ideology with roots in eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia, Khan said.

“This is a very complex problem,” he said.

The Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic scripture is one that is not reflective of mainstream Islam, Khan said, and Taliban destruction of Buddhist statues in 2000 was more of a political statement than a religious one.

“If they wanted to destroy the statues because of religious reasons, why did they wait three years to do so?” he said.

Khan also provided some history of Afghanistan’s history of defending itself from attackers.

“The Russians are very much reluctant to send in their army – they learned their lesson,” Khan said, referring to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. “But,” he added, “I don’t know what we’ll learn.”

Khan’s lecture threw light on the background of the country recently thrust into the international spotlight, said Praveen Umanath, junior in computer science.

“He definitely clarified what actually happened and why the Taliban came into power,” Umanath said.

Afghanistan’s interaction with other Muslim nations played a significant role in the development of the current situation, Khan said.

Sule Karaman, graduate student in agronomy from Turkey said, “I enjoyed hearing what they think in other Muslim countries about my own country.”