Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 111Taliban repression, attested to the power of constituencies interested in policing
and enforcing Islamic morality.
These considerations may appear relatively trivial in a country where the vast
majority of women have little contact with state organs, markets or civil-society
organisations. Indeed, even the Taliban, who had the explicitly stated aim of
transforming society, had limited impact on the lives of rural and nomadic
(kuchi) women, except when they became direct targets of violence, as was the
case during the capture of the Central Highlands. This leads us, yet again, to the
crucial issue of the limited reach of the state. Although Afghanistan was never
formally colonised, no central government could effectively survive and main-
tain political or social control throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
without foreign backing. The state remained consistently dependent on external
revenues giving it the character of a rentier state with relatively weak engage-
ment with society.^18 The benefi ts commonly associated with development – a
national infrastructure for transport, sanitation, education and health – failed to
reach to the majority of the population even during periods of relative stability,
a reality that was clearly refl ected in statistics and human development indica-
tors. Thus, if we use the term modernisation more narrowly in relation to social
and economic development, Afghanistan did not compare favourably with its
neighbours.
It was, nonetheless, the expansion of the modern state apparatus that led to
increased educational opportunities and the creation of female administrative
and professional cadres.^19 Although this was a predominantly urban phenom-
enon, the collapse of the state eroded whatever little institutional support existed
for women’s public roles and, more generally, depleted the social capital of the
country through a process of elite displacement and ‘brain drain’. After the fall
of the Taliban in 2001, Afghanistan became the target of state-building efforts
through forms of social engineering that have become increasingly standardised
by means of principles collectively endorsed by the international aid community.
A commitment to ensuring greater gender equality was folded into these pack-
ages and was reiterated in a succession of policy documents jointly endorsed by
the government and international donors. I have argued elsewhere (Kandiyoti
2007b) that the gender agenda of donor-instigated reforms and the goals and
means pursued by the international actors pushing for gender equality started
inhabiting parallel universes with the real world of politics in Afghanistan,
further politicising the debates around women’s rights.
Conclusion: Which Islam? Whose modernity?
I have attempted to show that, abstracted from the concrete historical and
social contexts in which they are embedded and vested with contested mean-
ings, neither Islam nor modernity serves as a viable analytic category for an