Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 107politicisation of women’s rights through transnational infl uences (see Kandiyoti
1991a).
Women’s movements and ‘state feminisms’ in Muslim majority countries
have historically been part of processes of national consolidation in the context
of post-dynastic or post-colonial state-building. State-led modernisation has,
likewise, been the prism through which many scholars have evaluated attempts
to expand women’s rights in Afghanistan. At the turn of the twentieth century,
the currents of pan-Islamism, anti-colonialism and nationalism were imported
by ‘Young Afghan’ intellectuals such as Mahmud Tarzi, who returned from exile
in Ottoman Turkey and went on to introduce a new press (the infl uential news-
paper Siraj al-Akhbar, between 1911 and 1919). Like his contemporary Muslim
reformers and modernists, Tarzi supported the cause of women’s advancement
and education and favoured progressive interpretations of religious texts, setting
up a tension between the new intelligentsia and the clergy (much in the way of
the Jadids of Central Asia referred to earlier).
The idiom of ‘modernisers’ (centralising state elites) versus ‘traditionalists’
(ulama and a rural and tribal periphery) became fi rmly established in discussions
of social confl ict in Afghanistan.^13 The fact that two attempts at radical reform
instigated from above fi rst during the reign of King Amanullah between 1924
and 1928 and under the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)
between 1978 and 1979 were followed by bloody uprisings and a violent back-
lash that swiftly targeted women’s attire and mobility lent substance to the
notion that the status of women acted as a symbolic node for articulations of
modernist intentions or traditionalist reaction (Zulfacar 2006; Suhrke 2007).
Yet, it is also widely acknowledged that both the Islamist and communist
movements that were locked in struggle from the constitutional period onwards
(1963–73) were themselves the product of a process of modernisation that fea-
tured the expansion of secular education and the advent of new urban strata.
Radical Islamist and communist movements mainly drew their cadres from a
new middle-class stratum of Kabul university graduates, self-educated members
of the lower middle class, and senior and lower-rank government offi cials.
It is, therefore, necessary to achieve greater clarity on the precise meanings
attributed to modernisation in the Afghan context. I would like to unpack this
concept further by focusing on three central conundrums of state-building in
Afghanistan that have a profound bearing on both the discursive possibilities
and the latitudes for policy action on questions of women’s rights. These are, in
turn, the unresolved tensions between state-building and nation-building, the
constantly shifting but consistently central place of Islam with regard to the legit-
imacy of rule and the limited capacity of the central state to extract resources,
deliver benefi ts and enforce law and order.
The concepts of nation and citizenships are highly contested and elusive in
the Afghan context. While some argue that considerable progress had been