gandist appropriation and violence, described in
personal experience narratives and oral histories,
became a rallying theme for the Afghan Islamic
resistance after the Soviet occupation in 1979. Pro-
tection of women’s sexual honor as an icon of
national sovereignty was interwoven with ideas
of Islamic duty (Dupree 1984). Neither ideology
idealized women’s self-determination, but rather
women’s actions and treatment as national (and for
Islamists, religious) duty. While Marxists invoked
more distant Afghan historical figures, such as
Malalay, the Pashtun heroine who fought the
British in the battle of Maiwand in 1880, a major
anti-Soviet female icon was the Kabul high school
student Nahidah, first to call out nationalist slo-
gans against Soviet troops at an Independence Day
parade in July, 1980, and shot to death in the ensu-
ing riot. Schoolgirls featured in reports of subse-
quent anti-government street demonstrations threw
their headscarves at Afghan soldiers and police
and demanded that they should go home and leave
the girls to “defend the motherland” (Dupree
1984, 333). With diffuse resistance coalescing into
regional and ideological parties, this fits a larger
pattern: female heroes emerge in moments of
default of male leadership, thus provoking men to
action, but not establishing autonomous female
agency.
The anti-Soviet Mujàhidìn resistance (1979–89)
and the Taliban movement displacing the warring
Mujàhidìn factions after 1995 both removed
women from the public sphere, yet explicitly femi-
nist legendry formed, for example around the
controversial person of Meena, the assassinated
founder of the secular-feminist Revolutionary
Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA),
in RAWA’s assiduously maintained oral history
(Brodsky 2003). Later, clandestine girls’ schools
were the least-kept secret of Taliban Afghanistan,
widely publicized in the Western media. After the
Taliban defeat in 2001, many urban women
described participating in this “untold” history of
resistance, acting out of nationalist or Islamic com-
mitment to help Afghan women (rejecting the
Taliban’s gender policies as “un-Afghan” and/or un-
Islamic oppression) or from simple need for family
income. Time will tell whether the general histori-
cal memory of female heroism in Afghanistan will
develop from a discourse of sacrifice and devotion
and eulogize action for rights and empowerment.
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20022.Margaret A. MillsThe Caucasus and Central AsiaSeven decades of state mandated atheism have
not eradicated Muslim identity in Central Asia and
the Caucasus because women, who transmit cul-
tural norms and collective identity, are less in-
fluenced by cultural diffusion than men. Women,
particularly those living outside large urban cen-
ters, have been historically less likely than men to
have access to secondary education or prolonged
exposure to alternative lifestyles than men who are
free from social restraints to leave their community
in search of work, education, or to fulfill their
military obligations. Traditionally, women are not
permitted to marry non-Muslims, and commonly
remain practicing members of their confession,
even if their men are not.
Many girls receive formal religious instruction
from female religious specialists – referred to as
otin orbibiotun. Young girls follow the same cur-
riculum as boys attending amaktab, and those who
wish to become religious specialists will remain
with the otinfor a few additional years for more in-
depth study of normative Islam. Their education
and the title of otin, conferred upon them upon
graduation, make them pivotal figures in their com-
munities where they will provide women with