Lucky the armed half-wits did not look behind the shelves, Sultan thought on his way to detention. The most prohibited books he had stashed away ingeniously. He only brought them out if someone asked specially for them and if he thought he could trust the person who asked.

Sultan had expected this. He had been selling illegal books, pictures and writings for many years. The soldiers had often menaced him, seized a few books and then left. Threats had been issued from the Taliban’s highest authority and he had even been called in to the Minister for Culture, in the Government’s attempts to try and convert the enterprising bookseller and recruit him to the Taliban cause.

Sultan Khan willingly sold some Taliban publications. He was a freethinker and of the opinion that everyone had the right to be heard. But along with their gloomy doctrines he also wanted to sell history books, scientific publications, ideological works on Islam, and not least, novels and poetry. The Taliban regarded debate as heresy and doubt as sin. Anything other than Koran-swotting was unnecessary, even dangerous. When the Taliban came to power in Kabul in the autumn of 1996 the ministries were emptied of professionals and replaced by mullahs. From the central bank to the university – the mullahs controlled everything. Their goal was to re-create a society like the one the Prophet Muhammad had lived in on the Arab peninsula in the seventh century. Even when the Taliban negotiated with foreign oil companies, ignorant mullahs sat around the negotiating table, lacking any technical expertise.

Sultan was convinced that under the Taliban the country grew increasingly poor, dismal and insular. The authorities resisted all modernisation; they had no wish to either understand or adopt ideas of progress or economic development. They shunned scientific debate, whether conducted in the West or in the Muslim world. Their manifesto was above all a few pathetic arguments about how people should dress or cover themselves, how men should respect the hour of prayer, and women be separated from the rest of society. They were not conversant with the history of Islam or of Afghanistan, and had no interest in either.