Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 105Islami, one of the mujahidin factions, and returned to the amir of jihad of their
place of origin. The matter was considered at the tribal council (where the nar-
rator of the tale argued her case) but without reaching a fi nal consensus. She
was incarcerated pending a decision while the members of the tribal council
dispersed to return home for the period of Ramadan. In their absence, the amir
of jihad and the Hezbis who stayed behind lashed the boy (who was unmarried)
and let him go but decided to stone the woman to death as punishment for
zina (adultery). The narrator of this tale, a fellow Safi tribesman, was mortifi ed
that a mullah, who had lived in Saudi Arabia and was a total stranger to the
locality, and an illiterate amir should pass judgment and pre-empt the decision
of the tribal council. The use of religious law to contravene tribal custom and
carry out the execution of one of their own against the expressed orders of
the tribal council was particularly galling. The interference of Islamic parties,
using the circumstances of jihad, had resulted in a humiliating disregard and
subversion of tribal principles. This episode highlights the contending claims of
parties who feel authorised to exercise legitimate control over women. The Safi
woman, caught between the self-governing tribe and the self-appointed repre-
sentatives of Islamic justice, paid the ultimate price, regardless of her motive:
her avowed wish to join the jihad. The missing term of this narrative is, quite
transparently, the rule of law as a projection of state power. Although agents
of the state such as local courts or the forces of law and order are frequently
biased, subject to capture by local elites, venal, or corrupt, their existence
as relevant protagonists is frequently taken for granted. The history of their
absence or their peripheral existence in Afghanistan has a direct bearing on
the politics of gender.
The circumstances surrounding the killing of a 22-year-old woman in the
province of Badakhshan in April 2005, also on the grounds of having commit-
ted adultery, are much less clear, despite extensive press coverage of this event.
On the face of it, there were some superfi cial similarities with the case of the
Safi woman in so far as the man involved received a hundred lashes and, again,
was set free, while the woman was killed by her husband and his relatives. What
is more noteworthy than the specifi c details of this case is the set of reactions
that it triggered. Whereas the stoning of the Safi woman was a local incident
that probably went unnoticed except by its main protagonists, the killing in
Badakhshan provoked an immediate response from international human rights
organisations, the media and Afghan civil-society activists. These latter signed
a joint declaration, endorsed by twenty-six women’s NGOs, condemning the
murder as a barbaric act. The text of this declaration made an appeal to the
Afghan Constitution (ratifi ed in 2004 and which grants all citizens, male and
female, equal rights before the law), to Islamic sharia and to the obligation of the
state to protect its citizens and comply with the standards set by international
human-rights conventions. It placed the incident in Badakhshan fi rmly in the