A New Age of Islam Is Dawning in Afghanistan : Religion: The Soviets brought tidings of Marx and Lenin. But now Allah is hailed as the ‘one superpower.’

For 13 of his 16 years, Imamuddin was indoctrinated in communism. Orphaned by the war that killed his parents and nearly 2 million more, he became a child of the ideology that had started it all. And now, it seems, Imamuddin is an orphan once again.

For years, Imamuddin’s headmaster at Kabul’s Orphanage of the Homeland drummed into him the greatness of Marx, Lenin and the Soviet superpower to the north. Twice, the orphanage flew him to Russia, a land he knows better than his own. Above all, he was taught that religion is evil, as evil as the Islamic holy warriors who stormed his city April 25, suddenly replacing the authoritarian regime that had reared him since he was 3.

As Imamuddin sat recently beneath a new Persian sign praising Allah--which had replaced one in Russian quoting Marx--the teen-ager seemed just a bit lost.

To the left of the boy’s small cot sat one of the moujahedeen guerrillas who had taken Kabul, an assault rifle on his knee. To the right was Imamuddin’s old headmaster. Together, they were coaching him on the new order of the day.

“Communism is bad. Islam is good. The moujahedeen have won our freedom,” Imamuddin parroted, blushing with confusion as he took his cues--first from the Communist headmaster-turned-Muslim and then from the armed guerrilla commander who had taken over the orphanage and its 800 children at gunpoint less than a week before.

“We are all Muslims now.”

So it is throughout this “liberated” city, as the vestiges of Kabul’s failed experiment in secular socialism are all but lost in the imagery of Afghanistan’s emerging new age of Islam.

Friday was the first Islamic Sabbath since the Muslim guerrillas seized the capital from the collapsing regime of ousted dictator Najibullah. It was already clear that this key Central Asian nation, wedged between the Islamic state of Pakistan and fundamentalist Iran, is fast transforming itself into the latest and most strategic link in Asia’s belt of Islam.

For the first Friday in more than a century, the authorities sealed off Babur’s Gardens and banned the weekly cockfights that have filled the park with gamblers every Friday for as long as any Kabuli can remember.

“In Islam, there is no gambling,” said Ismatullah, one of several guerrilla sentries posted at the gate, all bristling with machine guns and grenade belts. “We are here on the express order of Commander Ahmed Shah Masoud. Maybe the cockfights can resume next week. But the gambling--that is finished.”

The changes run deeper.

Not once since the guerrillas took control has any Afghan woman been seen on the streets without a veil. Two movie theaters were stoned, their posters of scantily clad Indian film stars torn down and hauled away. Even the men who once served the regime have changed their appearances. They are growing beards, and they are also shedding their suits and ties for pajamalike Muslim outfits when they visit the new ruling council--which increasingly is turning them away.

On Thursday night, for the first time, the evening newscaster on Kabul’s state-run television--which is controlled by Masoud, leader of the moderate moujahedeen coalition that ousted Najibullah--wore a scarf over her head, narrating scene after scene of white-bearded clerics and Muslim guerrilla commanders as they formulated the nation’s new Islamic order.

Both Masoud and the Muslim scholar whom his coalition installed as president are considered moderates, and the future shape of their “Islamic interim council,” which now will try to rule over this overwhelmingly Muslim nation, is not yet known.

But the new president, Sibghatullah Mojaddidi, set the tone of the new religious order in an extraordinary speech before Friday prayers in the city’s main Pul-i-Khishti Mosque.

With the ancient structure surrounded by two dozen bearded and armed guerrillas in U.S. Army surplus jungle fatigues and bearing CIA-financed assault rifles, Mojaddidi stood in the place of the mosque’s highest priest. He waved his arms and, to the shouts of “Allahu akbar!” (“God is great!”) from the men who had come for prayer, he declared triumphantly, “There is only one superpower in the world, and that is Allah.”

Mojaddidi told the congregation that, under his new regime, women are equal but that they should not be permitted to rule. And he appealed to all Afghans to rebuild the battle-scarred capital and their war-ravaged nation strictly in accordance with the ancient laws of Islam.

He issued a thinly veiled warning to the more fundamentalist followers of guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who opposes Mojaddidi and Masoud and whose forces were driven from Kabul during three days of urban combat last week. But Mojaddidi clothed his council’s uncompromising stand in the strictest of religious terms.

“Anyone who disturbs the present situation in Kabul, God Almighty will punish him,” he declared.

“God Almighty has fulfilled his promise and brought Islam to this land,” the president concluded. And he closed with an appeal to all Afghan refugees--5 million in all--to come home and rebuild.

It was not clear that his appeal would be heeded. In fact, many of the 1.5 million people who took refuge in Kabul, the regime’s last urban stronghold to fall to the holy warriors, were considering adding to the numbers of this nation’s citizens living in exile abroad.

“My God, the mullahs (Islamic clergymen) are taking over,” one taxi driver whispered sadly after Friday’s afternoon prayers. “Even the president was mullah today. Next week, I will go. Maybe to old Soviet Union.”

Fawzia, an office clerk who was comforting her wounded son at one of the city’s rotting hospitals, added in an angry whisper: “These moujahedeen are uneducated people. They make me wear this scarf. They tell me, ‘Stay in house.’ They are good fighters but bad fixers, and our country is now all broken.”

Yet the forces behind Masoud and Mojaddidi have proved in the past to be far more moderate than those of Hekmatyar and other fundamentalist leaders in the region. Masoud and his coalition consider Hekmatyar--who was armed in a CIA-financed campaign against the old Soviet Union’s 9-year military intervention--to be a religious and ethnic extremist. And the battle for Kabul by Masoud’s coalition was largely a calculated effort to neutralize Hekmatyar and the fundamentalists.

But fundamentalists abound even within Masoud’s coalition. Armed, pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim groups control key entrances to the capital, as well as such strategic military facilities as Kabul’s Scud missile base, which includes a stockpile of at least 50 of the Soviet-built ballistic missiles.

Those who seek clues to the future of Islamic rule in the Afghan capital can look elsewhere in the country, where similar Muslim coalitions have taken power in the past.

Most vivid is the example of the northern city of Taloqan, where a combined force of Masoud and Hekmatyar factions took control in 1990. Initially, the two groups divided the city in half. Within weeks, local residents had nicknamed Masoud’s half “Islamabad” after the capital of Pakistan, whose government backed the rebels during their long crusade. Hekmatyar’s half they nicknamed “Zulmadada,” or “land of the oppressed.”

In advance of the battle for Kabul, Masoud drove Hekmatyar’s forces out of Taloqan after learning that the fundamentalists’ local commander had captured and killed about 30 of Masoud’s men. And foreign journalists and aid workers who visited Taloqan after the battle said the movie theater in Hekmatyar’s half of the city had been shuttered and turned into a public latrine. Masoud’s men repaired it, reopened it and permitted it to show Indian films again.

But there were limits to Masoud’s moderation: He banned drinking, dancing and gambling in Taloqan and forbade women to wear Western dress. The message was not lost on secular Kabul, where such activities flourished during the years of corrupt, Soviet-style regimes.

“Life will be so boring now,” one Kabul intellectual standing outside the sealed gate to Babur’s Garden said Friday, a day he had set aside for the cockfights since his youth. “What will we do?”

There was no such doubt, however, at the Orphanage of the Homeland. There, children were being led in prayers as they were once led in Marxist teachings.

The Muslim guerrilla commander who now runs the orphanage had worked there as a schoolteacher 13 years ago. When he entered a dormitory room for young children, the youngsters lined up just as rigidly as they had during the years when the orphanage was a stop on a government-sponsored tour of socialist and secular Kabul. But instead of singing the patriotic songs of a modern army battling the medieval forces of Islam, they sang the praises of Allah, recited Islamic poetry and finally leaped on the commander with gleeful hugs and started playing with his assault rifle.

In Imamuddin’s dorm room, Headmaster Mohammed Ismael first presented to visitors 15-year-old Amanuddin, an 8-year veteran of the orphanage.

“Communism changed, and the Muslims came here, and we became very happy,” Amanuddin said, as if he were reading from an invisible cue card. “The moujahedeen are very kind. We are very glad they are here.”

“What about freedom?” he was asked. “Free from anyone’s control?”

Amanuddin looked around the room for an answer that never came. Finally, Headmaster Mohammed nodded sternly at him, and the boy suddenly responded, “The Islamic rule is freedom.”

But then he paused in a moment of further confusion and finally added: “I don’t know. Maybe in the future we will be free.”