Cloak of the Prophet

 In Kandahar, across from the governor's compound, there is a mosque that is the Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet.  Supposedly Mohammed's cloak is stored here.  You can say a lot of things about Mullah Omar, but one thing is that you have to recognize that he had a flair for dramatic, and effective, actions that galvanized the people - at least for a while.  During the civil war in the 90s, Omar did something extraordinarily daring.  If it had backfired, he probably would have been torn to pieces in the street by a mob. But he not only showed the cloak to a crowd at the mosque - something never done - he actually put the cloak on, symbolically casting himself as the heir to Mohammed.  The Taliban roared to power through nearly all of Afghanistan soon afterwards.  We didn't have time to actually go to the mosque, and it would have been regarded as an insult, given that we rolled up to the compound in a convoy of MRAPs.  But this mosque past the wall is where the prophet's cloak, which would be almost 1400 years old now, is supposedly kept.