counterparts, was patriarchal, and moved to con-
trol women, who were emerging as a new political
force.
Part of the nation-building project was to create
an “Iranian woman” and an “Afghan woman,”
who, as citizens, would be identified by their mem-
bership in the nation rather than any particular eth-
nic group. In both countries, violence was integral
to building the state and the nation. Like Western
experiments in civic nation-building (see, for exam-
ple, Nelson 1998), citizenship was, far from being
neutral, anchored in the dominant ethnicity. Even
in the case of Iran, where Reza Shah changed the
ethnic name Persia, “land of Persians,” to the less
marked name of Iran, “land of Iranians,” national
womanhood was defined in Persian, cultural, and
linguistic terms. Some male Iranian nationalist
intellectuals construct Iranianness in opposition to
Arabism, and seek the racial, Aryan purity of the
nation in the sexual purity of women (Saad 1996,
127–32).
Early twentieth-century attempts to build an
Afghan nation-state were “national politics with-
out nation” (Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont
1988, 235). In fact, nationalist consciousness, to
the extent that it emerged, lacked a social basis, and
the names “Afghan” and “Afghanistan,” chosen
for citizens and the homeland were used to refer to
Pashtuns and their territory. Early efforts to inte-
grate women into the nation through granting
them limited rights, especially education, brought
one monarch down in 1929. By the 1970s, how-
ever, the “Afghan woman” had emerged although
limited largely to the capital city of Kabul and the
few urban centers, which were dwarfed by the
countryside.
In Iran, consciousness of women’s rights pre-
dated the male-centered “state feminism” of the
Pahlavìperiod. Women’s rights debates began in
the Persian and Azerbaijani print media in the late
nineteenth century. As in the Ottoman Empire,
Christian and Jewish women had earlier access to
education, and played an active role in the struggle.
Today, almost every ethnic people has developed
its own nationalism, often in opposition to state
nationalism. Like state nationalisms, they invest
in women’s rights as part of the nation-building
project. Early Kurdish nationalists, for instance,
viewed rural women as the bearers of pure Kurdish
language and culture untainted by the dominant
nation’s assimilationist policies. Moreover, as
mothers, women were in the best position to instill
in the nation’s children a pure Kurdish identity.
As early as the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, many nationalists, including Kurds, Persians,572 political-social movements: ethnic and minority
and Turks blamed unequal gender relations and
especially the oppression of women on Islam and its
Arab roots. They construct their pre-Islamic history
as an era of gender equality. The evidence, to the
extent that it exists, is the old tribal or pastoral soci-
ety, in which women were the main labor force, and
associated, more or less freely, with males. Even in
the present, Kurdish nationalists argue that Kurd-
ish women enjoy more freedom than their neigh-
boring Arab, Persian, and Turkish sisters. This
claim has been challenged in so far as the cited evi-
dence – mixed dancing, free association of females
and males, absence of veiling in rural Kurdistan, as
well as the existence of female rulers – is also found
among Arabs, Persians, and Turks.
In a similar vein, some followers of pre- and post-
Islamic minority religions, for example, Zoroas-
trians and Bahà±ìs, argue that, compared with
Islam, their religions grant women more equality.
The coming to power of two Islamic theocracies in
Iran and Afghanistan has further invigorated this
discourse. The conflict between women and theoc-
racy has contributed to the formation of “Islamic
feminisms” and, in contrast, promoted a secular
politics of gender relations based on the separation
of religion and state, and religion and law. Al-
though Islamists generally argue that their faith is
opposed to any division of human beings along the
lines of race and ethnicity, and thus that Islam and
nationalism are incompatible (Khumaynì1983),
some trends in “political Islam” aim at their fusion,
and thus contribute to the ethnicization of Islam
along nationalist lines (for example, Arab, Iranian,
and Turkish Islamist movements). Another form of
nationalist appropriation of religion is the tendency
of some Kurdish nationalists to claim either Yezi-
dism (currently a minority religion in Kurdistan
and Armenia) or Zoroastrianism (not practiced in
Kurdistan) as authentic Kurdish religions, which
are said to grant women more freedom.
The ethnicization of women’s movements is not,
however, a product of Afghan or Iranian experi-
ences. In the context of ongoing transnationaliza-
tion and globalization, nationalist and religious
movements, both minority and majority, every-
where promote a politics of ethnicization, nativiza-
tion, or indigenization of feminism and women’s
movements.Bibliography
S. M. Aliyev, The problem of nationalities in contempo-
rary Persia, in Central Asian Review14:1 (1966),
62–70.
P. Centlivres and M. Centlivres-Demont, Et si on parlait
de l’Afghanistan? Terrains et textes, Paris 1988.
N. Jawad, Afghanistan. A nation of minorities, London
1992.