112 Islam and Modernity
understanding of the politics of gender. Shifting appropriations of Islam,
feminism and modernity by state and non-state, local and global actors map out
complex and fl uid confi gurations that can be fully understood only on their own
terms. The cases of Central Asia and Afghanistan provide particularly produc-
tive illustrations of the effects of different legacies of state-building (and their
‘modern’ trajectories) on the political and discursive possibilities of debates on
gender and women’s rights.
In Central Asia, the movement of Muslim cultural reform that arose in the
latter part of the nineteenth century was aborted by Soviet policies of ‘cultural
revolution’. As modernity and ‘enlightenment’ were appropriated by communist
cadres, elements of both the Muslim clergy and the local intelligentsia that were
leaning towards progressive readings of Islam were either sidelined or actively
suppressed to forestall the dilution of communist ideology and the emergence
of an alternative leadership. Soviet policies had paradoxical effects. On the one
hand, a command economy integrating the Central Asian republics into the Soviet
Union as predominantly rural, primary commodity producers stalled certain
socio-demographic features of modernisation. On the other hand, the Soviet
state created an extensive infrastructure for the spread of universal literacy, basic
health care, social welfare and the support of women’s maternal and public roles.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, successor regimes presided over the
demise of the Soviet social contract and the retreat of the state from the provision
of public goods and social welfare. The creed of socialist modernity was renounced
in favour of the retrieval of ‘national’ traditions. Severe crises of redistribution and
legitimacy were papered over with nationalist rhetoric and an appeal to national
heritage that, in the early days of independence, made explicit references to
Islam. However, as Islam became politicised in the highly charged geo-political
context of the ‘war on terror’, governments endeavoured to draw the line between
‘national’ expressions of religion and transnational radical Islam, now seen as a
destabilising force. The mantle of ‘modernity from above’ was appropriated by
institutions of international governance promoting an agenda of market transition
and democratisation and their own blueprints of gender equality. However, local
civil-society platforms for the articulation of women’s rights remain marginal, and
the politics of gender is likely to be fought out on an ideological terrain monopo-
lised by authoritarian governments and their Islamist opponents.
In Afghanistan, attempts at modernisation were initiated by an urban state
elite whose control over the rural and tribal periphery remained precarious.
A weak rentier state failed to bring the benefi ts commonly associated with
modernisation – a national infrastructure for transport, sanitation, education
and health – to the majority of its population. Human development indicators
such as life expectancy, literacy and health status remained generally adverse,
and particularly so in the case of women. The state provided weak institutional
support for women’s public roles at the best of times, a support that disappeared