Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 113altogether as Afghanistan descended into civil war. Historically, Islam had a
central role to play as an ideology of modern state-building in Afghanistan.
However, in comparison to the pre-war years, the ideological fi eld was rendered
more homogenous by the years of jihad and the backing received by different
Islamist factions during the cold war fought by proxy on Afghan soil. Although
the day-to-day workings of patriarchal relations in Afghanistan are primarily a
refl ection of the kinship practices of diverse ethnic communities, calls for reform
in areas affecting the family and women’s rights are readily stalled with refer-
ence to Islam, even when they target customary norms that have little grounding
in Islamic law. The discursive fi eld around women’s rights is severely restricted
by the technocratic agendas of donor-led state-building, with its blueprints for
democratic participation and women’s rights, on the one hand, and internal
political constituencies that claim to speak in the name of Islam, on the other.
These interactions contribute to defensive forms of self-consciousness among
both foreign and local participants in these debates, where some opt to essen-
tialise Afghan cultural practices as immutable ‘tradition’, while others apply
missionary zeal to their transformation. What unites cultural relativists with
radical modernisers, however, is the perception that gender relations constitute
an appropriate arena for struggle over the direction of the Afghan polity.
Debating the compatibility (or incompatibility) of Islam, feminism and
modernity sets up false dilemmas to the extent that these terms remain devoid
of utility outside an understanding of the concrete social relations that lend them
substance and meaning. More productive questions – and answers – could be
sought in an understanding of how different appropriations of Islam and moder-
nity by different political actors, both local and global, shape and circumscribe
the discursive possibilities of the politics of gender.
Summary of chapter
This chapter compares the trajectories of state-led modernisation, contestations in the
realm of gender, and the role of Islam in these processes in three regional contexts
with strongly contrasting experiences. Much of the literature on Islam and gender
concerns the Middle East, where modernisation was typically promoted by nationalist
elites who considered women’s emancipation both a symbol of progress and a means
to achieve national development. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses
developments in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia and in Afghanistan. Soviet
Central Asia experienced modernisation without the market, led by socialist elites that
made efforts to break down traditional social structures and to mobilise women.
Afghanistan too had its modernising elites, but they faced several conundrums:
unresolved tensions between state-building and nation-building, the central place of
Islam with regard to the legitimacy of rule and the limited capacity of the central state
to extract resources, deliver benefi ts, and enforce law and order.
These different contexts gave rise to very different politics of gender. In all three
regions, developments since the early 1980s have led to a new salience of Islam in
public life and in the politics of gender, although the dynamic was a very different