96 Islam and Modernity
vested with contested meanings, neither Islam nor modernity appears to be a
viable analytic category for an understanding of the politics of gender. This con-
tention will be illustrated, in what follows, by means of two seemingly antitheti-
cal cases with respect to state–society relations and the place of Islam: those of
Central Asia and Afghanistan.
Central Asia: Neither colonised, nor modern?
A focus on the Muslim majority republics of Central Asia helps to problematise
both the meanings we attach to modernity and its links to the West. Indeed,
colonisation and Westernisation, the two key terms of debates on gender and
modernisation in the Muslim world, had a particularly complex and contested
trajectory in Central Asia. The region was both colonised through Russian
imperial expansion^9 and subjected to new forms of control by a non-capitalist
metropolis after the victory of the Bolsheviks. The modernising encounter was
not between the West and the ‘Orient’, however defi ned, but between a declin-
ing colonial power, uncertain about its own place of insertion into the historic
West, subject to much soul-searching about its own backwardness,^ and diverse
indigenous formations. The latter ranged from the sedentary populations of the
great Islamic centres and urban settlements of Mavera an-nahr to the nomadic
and semi-nomadic peoples of the steppes whose conversion to Islam came
relatively late, merging Islamic practices with local beliefs and cosmologies (De
Weese 1994; Privatsky 2001).
The modern identities of the Muslim peoples of the Empire were partly
forged in an endeavour to respond to Russian representations of their societies
and cultures from the middle of the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
This encounter prompted a small group of Tatar intellectuals to initiate a debate
over identity that began around the middle of the nineteenth century and devel-
oped into a current of Muslim reformism known as Jadidism (Lazzerini 1994;
Brower and Lazzerini 1997). It is within this reformist current that we fi nd the
fi rst stirrings of advocacy for an expansion of women’s rights (Khalid 1998).
Critiques of the practice of polygyny, the poor treatment of women and their
lack of education were central themes in calls for reforms aimed at achieving
national renewal and progress. The Jadids clearly shared a common discursive
universe with their contemporaries elsewhere in the Muslim world, consolidated
through the circulation of people and ideas among a cosmopolitan community
of Muslim intellectuals.
After the Bolshevik victory, the discourse of women’s emancipation was
appropriated by the CPSU to further very different ends. The destruction of
traditional family structures and the refashioning of kinship systems had become
central means towards the goal of socialist transformation and cultural revolu-
tion. Extending the reach of the state into areas that the Tsarist regime had