The idea of time travel is an attractive one for many. The past after all is truly a different country where they did things different there. Because the past is so different and all too often reliable records of it have been lost, many people have fantasised about what it could be like to watch with their own eyes the great events of history or meet with people whose actions, although they may not have known it at the time, shaped the far off and unknowable future.

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, it is physically impossible to travel backwards through time. The laws of physics do not allow for such journeys.

However, the world is sadly cursed with a window onto the past, a window onto the seventh century to be precise and this curse has a name, it’s name is Afghanistan. This nation has always, apart from a few brief periods under Communist or Western rule always been backwards, it’s always been run by some of the worst forms of Islam on the planet and is a place where superstition and oppression rule.

Because of its mountainous and difficult to traverse and therefore govern terrain coupled with the local’s insistence on following some of the most egregious forms of an already violent faith, Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires. Not even the British Empire completely subdued it and neither could the far more technologically advanced Soviet Union drag this nation into the modern world. Afghanistan is a form of seventh century theme park ‘attraction’ but one where it’s impossible to stop the ride and get off.

To give you an idea just how utterly backward and depraved Afghanistan is then this BBC story might give you some idea. It also shows that although the ruling Taliban are bad, there are even worse forms of Islamic terrorist groups operating there. Both the Taliban and groups like ISIS have created in Afghanistan a place where even music is forbidden because of a belief that it ‘offends’ Islam.

The BBC said:

Gunmen who identified themselves as Taliban attacked a wedding in eastern Afghanistan to stop music being played, killing at least two people and injuring 10 others, officials say.

A Taliban spokesman said two of the three gunmen had been arrested but denied they had acted on behalf of the Islamist movement.

Music was banned when the Taliban ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.

The new authorities have not yet issued such a decree.

An eyewitness told the BBC that four couples were being married in a joint wedding in Surkh Rod district in the province of Nangarhar on Friday.

They had taken permission from a local Taliban leader to play recorded music in an area used only by the women.

But late at night, the gunmen forced their way inside and tried to smash the loudspeakers. When the guests protested, the armed men opened fire.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the case was under investigation.

The Islamic State group, which is opposed to the Taliban, is also active in Nangarhar and has been blamed for similar incidents in the past.

When reading this story my thoughts are with those who were killed and injured. What group did this whether it be Taliban or ISIS is something I can’t really give a toss about. They are both cheeks of the same dirty unwashed arse as they both have their roots and the bulk of their ideology supplied by radical Islam. Afghanistan and increasingly Afghanistan’s neighbour Pakistan, is what you get when you base a society on the mores of unreformed and unrestrained Islam. The sort of Islam that runs Afghanistan is not that of the more open minded sects of the Ismailis, or the reformist Ahmediyya, it is Islam red in tooth and claw. The Islam of Afghanistan is the sort of Islam that people are not irrationally ‘phobic’ about because there are damned good reasons to dislike and despise this sort of Islam. There is nothing irrational about being disgusted or even wishing to distance yourself from the sorts of ideologies that kill people for playing music.

We may not be able to travel to the past and observe at first hand things like the Enlightenment or the Napoleonic Wars or the crushing of the growing economic power of the peasantry after the Black Death. We can’t meet with the men and women who, whether saintly or sinning, laid the foundations of the world we live in today. But we can, if we want to risk death, visit Afghanistan a place where the seventh century in all its horror, bloodshed and superstition lives on today.