KABUL, Afghanistan -- On a recent spring morning, thousands of Shiite Muslims streamed up a hillside cemetery to a gleaming blue and yellow shrine, where they had come to celebrate the Persian New Year. Women covered in blue veils sat outside, enjoying the warm breeze. Children in party clothes munched ice cream and rode portable merry-go-rounds.
But inside the shrine, government security guards with automatic weapons glared at the proceedings, which had been officially banned by the Taliban, the radical Sunni Muslim group that controls most of Afghanistan. And at mid-afternoon, members of the Taliban's religious police suddenly appeared and chased everyone away.
On another recent morning, in a cavernous, carpeted Sikh temple several miles away, several dozen men in brightly colored turbans recited verses in the Punjabi language from their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, while one man ceremonially swatted a whisk broom over an altar and another collected donations.
But in deference to the Taliban's rules banning idolatrous images and foreign contact with Afghan women, there were no portraits of any Sikh gurus to be seen, and the temple's male leaders politely insisted that female worshipers not speak to a visiting journalist.
In Afghanistan, where the Taliban severely enforces its conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam, practicing any other religion is a tense and tenuous proposition. To survive, Sikhs and Shiites must constantly negotiate with authorities and adapt their worship to Taliban dictates.
Other major religions scarcely have a presence here. There are only a few hundred Hindus in Afghanistan, virtually no Christians, and the only known Afghan Jew is a rabbi who is allowed to maintain Kabul's sole synagogue.
There are no practicing Buddhists, but the Taliban recently demolished two historic Buddha statues in the central province of Bamian, claiming they were un-Islamic and idolatrous. The giant statues, carved into tall cliffs, were world-famous remnants of the Buddhist civilization that flourished here centuries ago.
But among the few religious minorities that remain in significant numbers, life under the Taliban is a constant challenge. The problems are greatest for Shiites, who number several million but are regarded as infidels by the Taliban. In large cities such as Kabul and Herat, they are allowed to worship at mosques and study at Koranic schools, but in some rural areas they are openly persecuted. Periodic massacres of Shiite ethnic groups have been reported in northeastern Afghanistan.
The Sunni-Shiite schism also is largely responsible for long-standing enmity between Afghanistan and its majority-Shiite neighbor, Iran. And because most of Afghanistan's Shiites trace their ethnic roots to ancient Persia -- modern-day Iran -- holidays such as the Persian New Year, known as Naw Ruz, are an especially tense time in Kabul.
This year, although the Taliban permitted Shiites to visit the Hazrat Ali shrine for several hours on March 21, officials simultaneously announced that those who celebrated should be "branded as infidels" and that all Afghans should hate the Persian New Year. Naw Ruz, which has its origins in Persia's Zoroastrian religion, marks the spring equinox according to the solar calendar; the Taliban recognizes only the lunar calendar, and the current year is officially 1421 here.
Despite their anxiety, Shiites pouring into the shrine that morning took full if prudent advantage of the unofficial respite and warm weather. Relaxing on the surrounding hillside, people spoke of how much the holiday meant to them, and some compared its spirit of giving and festivity to Christmas.
"For us it is a new day, a new moon, a new year. If just for one day, we are happy," said an old man sitting among the graves with his family.
But another Shiite man, a carpet weaver named Najibullah, refused to talk until he was safely inside a nearby home. Even then, he spoke in whispers.
"The government wants to null and void our culture," he said. "They don't allow women to join in our celebrations, and in the past several years they didn't allow us to celebrate at all. Sometimes they caught us and put us in jail. Now things are getting better, and they mostly tolerate us. But if we were brave, we would fight them and beat them."
Ayatollah Sayad Ahmad Tawasali, a Shiite cleric who heads a small mosque and Koranic school in Kabul, said he had "no problems" with the Taliban. He pointed out that unlike in Pakistan, there is no sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite sects in Afghanistan. "Here things are peaceful, and we do not have terrorism," he said.
But Tawasali, whose mosque was nearly destroyed by rockets during factional fighting in the early 1990s and is just now being rebuilt, said local Shiite officials had to negotiate with the Taliban to allow this year's Naw Ruz celebration, and even then they refrained from their tradition of slaughtering animals for the occasion. "It was not a real Naw Ruz," he said.
For Afghanistan's tiny Sikh minority, which includes a close-knit community of perhaps 500 people in Kabul, relations with the six-year-old regime have been smoother, in part because of their small numbers and in part because they have readily adapted their worship to Taliban rules. Taliban officials, in turn, point out their tolerance of Sikh practices when asked about religious persecution and the recent destruction of the Bamian Buddhas.
After one recent early-morning service in a Sikh temple, known as a gurdwara, community leaders explained that they have much in common with Afghanistan's Islamic ethos.
Both groups are "people of the book" who revere a sacred text; both ban alcohol and follow a strict moral code. Men from both religions wear beards, and Sikh women cover their heads with scarves.
"Many of the same prohibitions are in the Koran and the Guru Granth Sahib," said Indar Singh Majbol, 42, a Sikh pharmacist and leader of a gurdwara, who was born and raised in Kabul. "We like Afghanistan," he said. "The Taliban don't bother us, and they have told us we can worship according to our religion."
But Afghanistan's Sikhs have also had to make cultural and religious adjustments to survive under Taliban rule. They refrain from displaying any images of the historic Sikh gurus whose portraits adorn all Sikh temples in India, where the religion is based. And although Muslims are welcome to visit their gurdwaras, they are not allowed to mingle with Sikh women because the Taliban prohibits unrelated women and men from associating.
One elderly Sikh shopkeeper, wearing a Muslim cap and long beard, said some Sikhs would like to leave Afghanistan for India, as thousands of Hindus did during the Afghan civil war, but that most could not afford to.
"We are in Afghanistan, not India, so we must behave according to the circumstances," he said. "In India there is democracy and a temple on every street, but here there is strong sharia [Islamic law] and we are only a few. We worship the book, we do not display images and we are treated well by the government." But economically, he said, "we are barely keeping our heads above water."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company