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opinion

John Sainsbury is a professor emeritus in the department of history, faculty of humanities, Brock University.

In New Zealand last week, Afghanistan beat Scotland in a one-day match in cricket's world cup. As a game, it was hardly memorable, contested between two cricketing minnows. Yet, as the great Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James once pointed out, cricket is much more than a game. And Afghanistan's participation is more than just a footnote.

For centuries, cricket has been intimately connected with large global shifts, in particular with the rise and decline of the British Empire. Cricket has been credited not only with reflecting social and political hierarchies, but with the agency to shape them.

Faith in this alleged efficacy can reach absurd proportions. In 1789, the British ambassador in Paris, the Duke of Dorset, was a cricket fan. As he witnessed with horror the crumbling of France's ancien régime, he conceived the idea that Introducing cricket might stop the lurch toward liberty, equality and fraternity. A team was duly summoned but it was too late; the chateaux were already burning.

The duke's quixotic scheme derived from a widespread conviction that cricket reinforced the traditional social order. When the local squire joined his tenants and the village blacksmith on the cricket field in England, he didn't do so in a spirit of egalitarianism. The British upper class controlled cricket's rules, conventions and governance from its beginnings as an organized sport until well into the 20th century.

With the Empire's spread, cricket followed nearly everywhere the Union Jack was planted, including India and its practically ungovernable border state, Afghanistan.

At first, the local inhabitants were denied the benefits of cricket. The game was part of the moral armoury that fortified colonial sahibs as they shouldered what Rudyard Kipling called "the White Man's burden." By the 1860s, cricket had become an essential part of the English public-school curriculum, supposedly imparting team spirit, stoicism and a stiff upper lip.

There was little point in teaching Asians cricket, declared Lord Harris, who was the captain of England's team before becoming governor of Bombay in 1890. They were too "excitable" – cricket required "the doggedness of the English temperament."

History has proven him emphatically wrong. From being a marker for imperial superiority, cricket now offers an opportunity for the exuberant expression of national pride in Britain's former Asian colonies. India is favoured to win the world cup again, while Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have all had their moments of glory. Can Afghanistan be far behind?

But what's baffling is that the Afghan cricketing renaissance has taken place with the full support of the Taliban, first when it ran the country and now in violent opposition.

Why would a murderously fundamentalist faction – the Taliban has banned kite-flying and chess, and aimed bullets at schoolgirls – be so indulgent to cricket, despite its imperial origins and cosmopolitan culture? I can offer a couple of suggestions.

Firstly, cricketing garb does not offend the Taliban dress code. Secondly, the Taliban appear to have identified it as a particularly masculine sport, suitable for Pashtuns. The leading cricketer of his generation, Imran Khan, is the descendant of Pashtun warriors. Now an opposition politician in Pakistan, Mr. Khan acknowledges a filial connection with the Taliban even as he denounces their atrocities.

Historically, cricket has been a forum for some wildly disparate political and cultural forces. Taliban enthusiasm for the game is just one bizarre example.

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