106 Islam and Modernity
category of ‘harmful and outdated customs’, explicitly dissociating it from Islam,
and calling upon the state to act as a guarantor of women’s human rights.
The multiplicity of actors – both local and global – reacting to this episode
points to a reconfi guration of the stakes around the politics of gender in post-
Taliban Afghanistan. Yet, it is neither entirely clear who the champions of
women’s rights are nor why Islam is routinely invoked both by those advocat-
ing the expansion and safeguard of women’s rights and those who vehemently
oppose such initiatives. It must be clearly acknowledged at the outset that
interest in the plight of women in Afghanistan was transparently laden with
geo-political concerns. One of the consequences of the furore over Taliban
policies – and of the appropriation of women’s rights advocacy by Western
powers – was that debates took on an increasingly polemical hue, drowning out
the painstakingly achieved scholarly advances in our understanding of the his-
torical and contextual complexities of gender in the Muslim world. Operation
Enduring Freedom, which led to the overthrow of the Taliban, far from inspir-
ing an unqualifi ed response of international feminist solidarity provoked a spate
of critical reactions triggered by the perceived instrumentalism behind the
invocation of the protection of abused Afghan women (e.g. Moghadam 2000a;
Abu-Lughod 2002; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002; Lindisfarne 2002; Stabile
and Kumar 2005).
Widespread scepticism was certainly fuelled by the broad consensus over
the effects of US-backed cold-war policies that channelled support to mujahidin
groups to resist the Soviet invasion of 1979. The social and political effects of
successive interventions establishing the ascendancy of Islamist parties backed by
a variety of foreign patrons were successfully obfuscated, helping to perpetuate a
‘cultural’ framing of gender relations, a point eloquently made by Abu-Lughod
(2002). Abuses of human rights, including extreme forms of gender-based vio-
lence, were strategically overlooked, until the eventual victory and mounting
abuses of the Taliban regime fi nally led to the events of 9/11 and the ensuing
‘war on terror’ (Moghadam 2002a, 2006; Niland 2004). Lindisfarne (2002:
413) noted that it was during the mujahidin period that gendered inequality and
violence became naturalised as intrinsic to ‘Afghan culture’ and ‘Afghan Islam’.
As overwhelming evidence about the wide-ranging social transformations occa-
sioned by over two generations of confl ict and the ravages of a war economy
kept mounting, the tendency to consign gender relations to an unchanging (and
under-theorised) realm of culture, which included nebulous references to Islam,
continued unabated.^12
It is against this background that I propose to subject the case of Afghanistan
to closer historical scrutiny. In particular, I single out the manner in which Islam
and its institutions were incorporated into the process of modern state-building;
the extent to which the modern state was able to penetrate and transform
diverse subnational entities and kin-based communities and the effects of the