The Taliban are not Medieval

 

Chartres Cathedral

During the flurry of worry as we abandoned an ally to barbarism, many commentators and social media "experts" said the Taliban is Medieval.  

This is America and we are, as a country, as dumb as a sack of lug nuts when it comes to history, so I was not surprised to hear the Taliban to be labelled as Medieval, but they emphatically are not.  

The Taliban are not Medieval. They are ignorant, despicable thugs who hate civilization, freedom, light and love.  The Medieval era brought beauty to the entire world. It celebrated knowledge and learning. Eventually the Renaissance and the Reformation sprung from its problems.  

The Taliban, like all fundamentalists, look backward and express their faith in death and demolition.  

There is nothing Medieval about the Taliban.  They are Westboro Baptist Church with a national flag. 

As with every attempt to label eras of history, the period roughly between 1000 and 1500 could be called the Medieval period, though some put the start date almost at the end of the Roman Empire in 472.  Either way the term Medieval only applies to parts of Western Europe under the influence of the Catholic Church and of the Holy Roman Empire. 

In some ways, the Medieval period the zenith of culture in the west.  Chartres Cathedral was a work of centuries by people who had an eternal vision and expressed their beliefs in stone--most knowing they would never live to see the final result of their life's work.  

Chartres Cathedral inside and outside

The popular image of the Medieval Europe is dominated by The Plague, the corrupt Catholic Church, and the Inquisition, but this Monty Python view ignores the beginning of the modern university and the beginning of Romantic Love as equal to other loves. The Divine Comedy and the Arthurian Legends brought Romantic Love to the center of western culture. 

Dante's Divine Comedy, the entire universe, 

physical and spiritual, in 14,000 lines of poetry

Literature left the confines of the Latin language in the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.  They wrote in vernacular Italian. And the world followed their lead.