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In Taliban-ruled Kabul, a jailer with a dying wife and a ruined man whose wife was a teacher are bound together after a public stoning.
A person who believes a public punishment is wrong can still join in once surrounded by an enraged crowd. Exhaustion and the frenzy of the moment numb his judgment, and he does what his own conscience condemns. Holding the right belief protects no one if they stand alone inside the mob.
Even under hunger and terror, love keeps breaking through. It may come out twisted, imagined, or close to madness, but it is still there. Its fullest form in such a world is giving oneself up for another.
Hunger and public beatings are the visible harm of rule by terror. The deeper harm is mental: boredom, constant fear, and slow despair that reach a person's inner life long after the physical blows. People can survive the deprivation and still be broken by what it does to them inside.
A regime that controls public life also wrecks marriages and friendships. Shame, silence and suppressed rage carried in from the street get turned on the people closest to home. The household stops being a refuge and becomes another place where the damage plays out.
When rules require women to be covered and forbid them to be seen, even through a window, they stop counting as persons in public. A woman forbidden to show her face, speak, or hold her husband's hand is treated as a thing to be hidden. An educated professional can end up confined to her home, with every earlier right gone.
Even someone who truly adopted a harsh ideology and enforces it daily can find his faith in it failing. His inner struggle shows up as irritability, cruelty he doesn't intend, and confusion. Belief that is sincerely held does not shield the believer from what enforcing it costs him.
Religious extremism can be understood as a sickness of religion, a "religiopathy," rather than as the faith itself. Outsiders who explain it with theories that suit their own worldview see only its surface. Understanding its causes requires a view from inside the culture it grows in.
Under total repression, people who have lost family, rights and hope may describe themselves as already dead. When dying seems the safest refuge, wanting to live becomes an act of resistance in its own right.