Edinburgh University Press

Chapter Title: Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender

Chapter Author(s): Deniz Kandiyoti

Book Title: Islam and Modernity

Book Subtitle: Key Issues and Debates
Book Editor(s): Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore, Martin van Bruinessen
Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2009)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2f4vqw9.7

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CHAPTER 4

Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender

Deniz Kandiyoti

Islam, gender and modernity: Genealogies of a debate

Like all historical and political debates, diverse strands of engagement with
Islam, gender and modernity have been a product of their times. It is commonly
acknowledged that the ‘woman question’ that emerged at the turn of the nine-
teenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was coloured by a persistent
preoccupation with the effects of encounters with the West, either through
direct colonial domination (as in Algeria and Egypt) or through the increas-
ing encroachment of Western powers (as in the Ottoman Empire and Iran).
Concerns with women’s rights, centring around issues of education, veiling and
polygyny, coincided with a broader agenda about ‘progress’ and advocacy for
social reform. Mainly drawn from rising middle classes, culturally and economi-
cally integrated into the Western sphere of influence, Muslim reformers were
opposed by those who felt marginalised and threatened by such encroachment.
At the heart of the debates between reformers and their more conservative
critics lay the issue of the compatibility of Islam with modernity, a concern that
became pivotal to the political articulation of competing visions of society.1
However, the routine invocation of colonial encounters as the midwife of both
modernist reformism and conservative reaction singled the area of gender rela-
tions out as a central node in a broader ideological debate where notions of
cultural authenticity (expressed through an Islamic idiom) were pitted against
‘foreign’ contamination (with modernisation being equated to Westernisation).2
These tropes have exhibited remarkable resilience and longevity and have, if
anything, experienced a revival in the wake of global Islamic resurgence and,
more recently, the polarisation occasioned by the so-called war on terror.
Yet, the actual histories of modernisation and state-led reforms in the Muslim
world have been remarkable in their diversity. After the First World War, the
demise of the Ottoman Empire and the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian
Empire gave rise to two leading idioms for women’s emancipation that were to
leave an enduring legacy throughout the twentieth century: those of nationalism
and socialism. These currents informed the early stirrings of feminism in the
Muslim world, as elsewhere.3 After the big wave of decolonisation following the
Second World War, a period of state-led development gave rise to a variety of
‘state feminisms’, underwritten by educational and legal reforms. Post-colonial

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92 Islam and Modernity

nationalisms called upon women to contribute, as educated and enlightened

‘citizens’, to the national development effort. The social sciences, dominated at
this stage by the modernisation and Marxist paradigms, offered accounts of tran-
sitions to modernity, with corresponding sociologies of gender and the family.
The combination of these influences with a growing unease with Orientalist
depictions of Muslim women and the desire to apprehend Muslim societies
through the lenses of mainstream social-scientific analysis meant that references
to Islam remained relatively muted until the 1970s (Kandiyoti 1996a).
This state of affairs was to change dramatically after the Iranian Revolution
in 1979, likened by some to a seismic event that swept away the world view and
predictions of modernisation theorists (Burke 1988). By the 1980s, the phase of
state-led development in the Middle East was superseded by processes of struc-
tural adjustment and economic liberalisation that produced profound shifts in
state–society relations with tangible implications in the realm of gender (Hatem
1992; Brand 1998). This period witnessed the rise of both Islamist oppositional
movements and new forms of grass-roots activism, some aiming to palliate
the dearth of social services to the poor and the downwardly mobile (Lubeck
2000; Bayat 2002). State elites seeking to bolster their flagging legitimacy, in
their turn, resorted to alliances with Islamist social forces and to various forms
of state-sponsored religiosity.4 The effects of cold-war policies that sought
to mobilise Islam as a bulwark against communism were most starkly felt in
front-line states such as Afghanistan, where geo-politics took a direct hand in
shaping jihadi resistance movements (Zubaida 2004). Islam was, once again, at
the forefront of analyses and polemics. The issue of women’s rights achieved
particular prominence in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States
and the ensuing military operations in Afghanistan. The plight of women under
the Taliban became a cause célèbre that was presented both as the epitome of fun-
damentalist excess and as a humanitarian crisis justifying armed intervention.
The politics of gender – which I define as a process of appropriation, contesta-
tion and reinterpretation of positions on gender relations and women’s rights
by state, non-state and global actors – acquired a new and potentially perni-
cious twist when blueprints for ‘democratic’ governance were ushered in by
armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq (Kandiyoti 2007a). The changing
scholarly agenda thus inscribes itself against the backdrop of a highly charged
geo-political context.

Diverse agendas, contending approaches

It is possible to identify several strands of scholarship on gender, Islam and
modernity that reflect a plurality of analytic perspectives and political concerns.
One strand is marked by a strong scriptural and textual focus shared by both
conservative apologists and Muslim reformers attempting progressive readings

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 93

of canonical texts and of the early history of Islam. Ziba Mir-Hosseini (1999)
makes a useful distinction in this respect between ‘sharia-based’ texts (usually
written in local languages), whose primary aim is to provide an apologia for
‘orthodox’ Islam, and ‘feminism-based’ texts penned by women of Muslim
background, written in English or French, that attempt a progressive reading of
Islamic sources and practices.5
This engagement rests on the premise that Islamic law and history are the
only legitimate terrain upon which a discourse of rights (and by extension of
women’s rights) can be based. Fatima Mernissi (1996: 92) was among the first
to articulate this point of view: ‘progressive persons of both sexes in the Muslim
world know that the only weapon they can use to fight for human rights in
general, and women’s rights in particular, in those countries where religion
is not separate from the state, is to base political claims on religious history.’
This sentiment is echoed by Asma Barlas (2002: 3): ‘Even if such readings do
not succeed in affecting radical change in Muslim societies, it is safe to say
that no meaningful change can occur in these societies that does not derive its
legitimacy from the Quran’s teachings, a lesson secular Muslims are every-
where having to learn to their own detriment.’ Reformists point to the political
urgency of exegetical reform and of renewal within the framework of Islamic
legal thought. Not surprisingly, the Iranian debate has been the most heated,
with positions concerning the potential for articulating a feminist agenda within
an Islamic framework ranging from the guardedly optimistic to the unambigu-
ously pessimistic.6 With a strong focus on Islam as a normative framework, these
contributions form the contours of a lively internal debate.
A second strand of more sociological approaches, which often draw upon
cross-national comparisons, routinely points to significant deficits in Muslim-
majority countries with respect to key indicators of development such as women’s
educational attainment, labour-force participation, political representation and
general attitudes towards gender equality.7 Accounts of these discrepancies
vary. Moghadam (2003), who works from a political-economy perspective,
refrains from presenting Islam as uniquely patriarchal but focuses, instead, on
the complex range of economic, socio-demographic and political factors that
condition these outcomes. She evaluates modernising states and state-led legal
reforms in a broadly positive light, acknowledging their role in combating social
conservatism and expanding women’s choices. She argues, furthermore, that
new constituencies of educated, professional women have mobilised in defence
of their rights to greater equality in education, employment, political represen-
tation and the family.
Critics of state-led modernisation, on the other hand, point to the fact that
reformist legislation affecting women was frequently sponsored by authoritarian
and dirigiste regimes whose ultimate aim was to harness them more effectively to
national developmental goals rather than empower them as civil society actors.

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94 Islam and Modernity

Moaddel (1998) argued, for instance, that post-colonial secular states acting as
authoritarian ideological apparatuses monopolised culture production and, by
eliminating pluralism, ultimately sowed the seeds of Islamic fundamentalisms
(see also Hatem 1994). The experience of political modernisation was itself
riddled with contradictions. One of the glaring fault lines in modern conceptions
of citizenship in most Muslim societies was evident in the denial of full juridical
status to women, who remained wards of their male kin with respect to some
of the most fundamental rights in their persons: to marry, to work, to travel, or
to be able to retain custody of their children upon divorce (Joseph 2000). Thus,
personal-status codes derived from sharia law routinely curtail and contradict
the stipulations of equality embodied in most national constitutions.8
A related line of argumentation concerns the transformations that the sharia
itself underwent when it became subject to procedures standard to Western
legislative enactment in the process of modernisation. Some suggest that the
flexibility and fluidity attributed to Islamic law before codification by modern
states were lost with the move to modern legislation (Messick 1993; Asad 2003:
227–8). The implications of this move for women’s rights have, likewise, received
mixed interpretations. Although the main thrust of family-law reform in the
twentieth century was in the direction of protecting women’s rights in the con-
jugal union (by setting minimum ages for marriage, ensuring women’s consent,
making unilateral divorce and polygyny procedurally more difficult, extending
women’s custody rights over children and strengthening conjugal ties at the
expense of male agnates), some scholars have argued that sharia law, as codified
and applied by modern states, has congealed and consolidated many aspects of
male privilege. Amira Sonbol (2003), for instance, has argued that, in the case
of Jordan, selective borrowing from Hanafi and Maliki jurisprudence resulted in
a modernised code combining the most patriarchal prescriptions of each school
of law (see also Tucker 1998; Moors 1999; Mir-Hosseini 2000). Furthermore,
far from being a narrative of steady progress towards the liberalisation of sharia,
family legislation in the twentieth century was marked by repeated (and success-
ful) attempts to roll back the modest gains women had achieved. The contempo-
rary histories of Iran, Egypt and Algeria provide ample illustration of this point
(Paidar 1995; Sonbol 1996; Hatem 2000; Lazreg 2000).
A third strand of scholarship draws its inspiration from post-structuralist and
post-colonial critiques of modernity. Without denying the fact that women may
be included in society and public life in totally novel ways, some scholars express
scepticism concerning the progressive claims of modernity with reference to
women’s emancipation (see, for example, the essays in Abu-Lughod 1998). This
writing draws attention to the politics of modernity as a regulatory discourse
creating new forms of subjection and exclusion. Thus, attempts to ‘modernise’
women may contain both emancipatory and disciplinary elements, especially in
contexts where encounters with the West single women out as the repositories of

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 95

their societies’ ‘backwardness’. Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005) takes this argument

even further by suggesting that, from the nineteenth century onwards, in the
case of Iran, there was a radical transformation of gender and sexuality through
a process of repressive ‘heteronormalisation’, whose sexual anxieties linger on.
Thus, when modernity – defined as a political project rather than an imma-
nent process of social transformation – is recast as authoritarian and monolithic,
resistance articulated in an Islamic idiom may be interpreted as an instance of
subaltern expression or the emergence of counter-publics. For those who, like
Göle, posit a Muslim habitus that is diametrically opposed to Western notions
of corporeality and public presence, women’s bodies and sexuality become a
privileged political site for the expression of difference and resistance to Western
modernity. However, the contemporary veiling movement, far from represent-
ing a retreat into tradition, is reinterpreted as part and parcel of an indigenously
defined modernity that is reflexive in character to the extent that the codes and
symbols associated with religion are critically appropriated and distanced from
traditional culture (Göle 1996, 2002). Others, like Mahmood, reject the reduc-
tion of the resurgence of Islamic forms of modesty and sociability to an expres-
sion of resistance to the West, since this simplifies the nature of the subjectivities
that are crafted through pietist movements involving Muslim women. Pietist
discourse engages in a critique of identity politics (namely, forms of Islamic
practice whose raison d’être is to signal an identity or tradition) to the extent that
it does not have the ability to contribute to the formation of an ethical disposi-
tion. The cultivation of virtue, through various forms of embodied practice
(such as veiling, praying and fasting), is at the very centre of the forms of agency
deployed by pious women and must, therefore, be understood on its own terms
(Mahmood 2004).
The detailed ethnographic work by Jenny White (2002) on grass-roots
Islamist mobilisation in Turkey, on the other hand, suggests that Muslim social
imaginaries and presentations of the self may themselves be fractured by class
and gender and that the boundaries between secular and religious identities and
sensibilities may, in fact, be far more fluid (see Navaro-Yashin 2002). Indeed,
positing the radical alterity of pious subjectivities or, for that matter, of an
assumed Muslim habitus may inadvertently freeze and reify what are continually
evolving manifestations of identity. Ismail (2006), for instance, demonstrates
that, in Cairo’s deprived new urban quarters, the boundaries between pietis-
tic and militant oppositional movements are fluid and porous and that both
inform constructions of marginalised masculinities. This male marginalisation
is set in the context of antagonistic relations with state institutions, involving
violence and changes in women’s roles both as breadwinners and as mediators
of relations with the state.
What should be amply clear from the above is that, abstracted from the
concrete historical and institutional contexts in which they are embedded and

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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 expansion9 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 defined, 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 find the
first 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

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 97

been content to leave alone, the Soviets intervened aggressively in the realm of
‘custom’ by criminalising and prosecuting a category of misdemeanours based
on local traditions (bytovye prestupleniia or byt: literally ‘way-of-life’ crimes). By
the 1920s the sharia court system in force among sedentary populations and
the customary law (adat) practised in nomadic areas was superseded by secular
family law. Polygyny, under-age and forced marriage were outlawed, as was the
payment of qalin (brideprice).10
Massell (1974) argued that women were enlisted as a ‘surrogate proletariat’
in a region that lacked an indigenous working class that could serve as a revo-
lutionary vanguard. The episode known as the hujum (or assault) – the attack on
veiling and the campaign of forced desegregation that started from 1927 – is the
one that has received the most sustained attention by social historians.
Differences in interpretation of this key episode are indicative of numerous
unresolved issues concerning the nature of Soviet modernisation. Working
within a post-colonial theory framework, Northrop (2004) asserts that the Soviet
Union, like its tsarist predecessor, was a colonial empire. He interprets the con-
flicts over the veil primarily as a story of colonial power and subaltern resistance.
The Soviets set up an apparently insoluble dilemma for themselves by, on the
one hand, defining the new Uzbek nation through distinctive patterns of female
seclusion and domestic relations (by their distinctive byt) and, on the other hand,
denouncing these same practices as primitive and oppressive. The impossibility
of being both ‘Uzbek’ and ‘Soviet’ created a central contradiction that led to
the ‘utter, abject failure to transform gender relations, at least in the short run’
(Northrop 2001b: 213).
However, scholars like Edgar (2004) working on Turkmenistan and Kamp
(2006) working on Uzbekistan paint a more complicated picture. Edgar finds
little evidence to support Massell’s thesis that Central Asian women were treated
as a ‘surrogate proletariat’, arguing, instead, that Soviet officials were inclined to
tread cautiously from fear of alienating the patriarchal sensibilities of the regime’s
basis of support, namely poor and landless male peasants. Turkmen cadres were
adept at utilising the language of class to counter demands for women’s emanci-
pation, forcing a choice between support for women and winning the favour of
‘class-friendly’ male elements. This text highlights both the centrality of gender
relations to the reproduction of tribal society in Turkmenistan – hence the pas-
sions aroused by any tampering with the status quo – and the agency of local
elites in shaping the institutions and discourse of nationhood in the 1920s and
1930s.
Kamp argues that the ideas that most profoundly shaped both male and
female Uzbek activists expressed continuity with Jadid ideas about women’s
place in society, although these ideas were overtaken by the Bolshevik agenda.
The massive backlash occasioned by the hujum, consequently, receives divergent
interpretations. Unlike Northrop, who evaluates these tragic events through

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98 Islam and Modernity

the prism of anti-colonial resistance against the Russians, Kamp interprets the
widespread murders, assaults and rapes perpetrated by Uzbeks against other
Uzbeks as a predominantly internal struggle fuelled by a violent reassertion of
patriarchal power (see also Massell 1974: 275–6; Keller 1998).
In a comparative evaluation of colonial policies, Edgar (2006) highlights the
fact that, unlike the Soviet regime, Western colonial powers in Muslim lands
refrained from interfering with the religious control of personal-status law
and, more generally, from mobilising subject populations. Thus, interpreting
Soviet modernisation solely through the prism of a colonial encounter between
the Bolsheviks and the Muslims of Central Asia misses out on the revolution-
ary drive that was also calling local hierarchies into question. Edgar detects,
instead, both similarities with state feminisms in the Muslim world and forms of
anti-colonial resistance in responses to Soviet modernisation.
What is striking about these debates is that, although the question of whether
Soviet modernisation could be equated with other forms of imperial domina-
tion became the subject of a heated controversy, the category of ‘modernisation’
itself was not sufficiently problematised. Martin (2001), who used Soviet nation-
ality policies as a test case for an evaluation of the claims of the modernisation
paradigm in relation to the Soviet Union, is an exception in this respect. The
manner in which the Soviet state dealt with the national question was, in his
view, what set it apart from other colonial encounters. The policy of affirmative
action vis-à-vis titular nationalities in the Union republics was intrinsic to the
Bolshevik decolonisation project, since Tsarist colonial oppression (and Great
Russian chauvinism) was assumed to be responsible for the ‘cultural backward-
ness’ of the imperial borderlands. However, from the second half of the 1930s
onwards the Soviet state began to propagate a crude form of primordialism that
locked populations into ethnic (and class) designations, thus transforming the
modern categories of class and nationality into ascribed social-status categories
(Martin 2000). These policies had the overall effect of making ethnic belonging
the single most important determinant of life options and the principal focus
of social mobilisation and conflict. This, Martin argued, was not the result
of the persistence of traditional values into the Soviet era but the unintended
consequence of extreme Soviet statism.
The coexistence of two seemingly contradictory discourses in the literature
on Central Asia betrays a subterranean unease on the question of modernisa-
tion. On the one hand, ideologically inspired celebrations of the achievements of
Soviet policies spoke of dramatic progress and rapid social change. On the other
hand, Soviet ethnographers lamented the immutability of local cultures, the
relative lack of penetrative capacity of the Soviet state and the resilience of local
social patterns. The hurdles on the way to full modernisation were described
with reference to the concept of ‘traditionalism’ or ‘survivals’ of tradition. The
domestic domain, and particularly the role of women within it, were singled out

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 99

as privileged sites for the perpetuation of tradition: a state of affairs that was seen
as clearly inimical to the goals of socialist transformation.
I argued elsewhere (Kandiyoti 1996b) that, if the concept of ‘traditional-
ism’ has had an exceptionally long and productive career in Central Asia, this
is partly because it served to hide from view some of the consequences of the
Soviet system itself. The gendered effects of Soviet economic, demographic and
anti-religious policies and their combination with socialist measures for the pro-
tection of women gave rise to what I term the ‘Soviet paradox’: women’s high
literacy and labour-force participation rates against the background of high
fertility rates, large families and relatively untransformed domestic divisions of
labour.
The Soviet command economy in the Central Asian republics gave rise to
distinctive and well-documented patterns of ethnic stratification. The Slavic/
European nationalities were mainly concentrated in urban areas and non-
agricultural occupations, whereas the indigenous nationalities continued to be
over-represented in the rural areas and in agricultural and pastoral occupations
(Lubin 1984; Khazanov 1995; Sacks 1995). The effects of ethnic stratification
were even more pronounced in the case of women of indigenous nationali-
ties (Lubin 1981; Sacks 1995). A comparative survey of women’s employment
and fertility in socialist countries undertaken by the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) inadvertently highlighted the uniqueness of Central Asian
patterns (Anker 1985). Uzbekistan turned out to be the only case among the
various socialist countries surveyed where the education–fertility connection
did not appear to hold. Women had educational attainment levels similar to the
industrialised socialist countries, with birth rates more comparable to those of
developing countries of the South.
Soviet demographic policies were clearly implicated in these outcomes. The
promotion of motherhood as a social duty, which was meant to address fertility
shortfalls in the more industrialised republics, remained an explicit and endur-
ing theme of Soviet social policy. These pro-natalist and maternalist policies sat
well with the social value attached to large families in a predominantly rural
Central Asia. Record numbers of Central Asian women qualified for the title of
Heroine Mother (awarded to those with ten children or more) and Motherhood
Glory awards (given to those with seven to nine children). The provision of
public goods such as free kindergartens, schooling, health services and gener-
ous maternity leaves served to bolster these tendencies. Central Asian women’s
Soviet identities were powerfully shaped by expectations from the state for a
range of benefits and entitlements supporting motherhood.
It was not until the debates preceding the 1981 Family Policy Law that con-
cerns about regional disparities in population growth started to be expressed
openly (Weber and Goodman 1981; Rywkin 1982; Feschbach 1986). The poli-
cies adopted did not involve any direct attempt at curbing population growth in

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100 Islam and Modernity

high-fertility areas but rather offered incentives for larger families in low-fertility
regions. The issue of population control was, nonetheless, finally put on the
political agenda. Indeed, around the time of glasnost in the late 1980s, the ques-
tion of family planning emerged as an emotionally charged and highly politicised
issue. The anti-family planning platform, articulated in the Central Asian press,
expressed nationalist sentiments presenting large families and the maternal roles
of women as items of cultural distinctiveness and integrity (Watters 1990).
In the economic sphere, the collectivisation policies of the 1930s had, accord-
ing to Poliakov (1993), the paradoxical effect of giving a longer lease of life to
traditional forms of social organisation in Central Asia by arresting the begin-
nings of agrarian capitalism stimulated by Russian colonisation. Roy (2000)
invokes a similar paradox when he notes that the Soviet project of destroying
traditional society via social engineering translated, in fact, into a recomposition
of traditional solidarity groups within the framework of new Soviet institutions.
The awlad (extended family), the mahalla (neighbourhood) and (among settled
nomads) lineage segments were, in some cases, reincarnated as subdivisions of
collective farms.
In terms of gender roles, collectivisation heralded a new focus on women
as producers and a strong drive to draw them into the socialist labour force.
Women were being called upon to be ‘shock workers’ as well as ‘heroine
mothers’. Raising women’s labour productivity depended, in principle, on limit-
ing the wasteful pursuit of time-consuming household maintenance activities – a
promise that could hardly be fulfilled in the absence of labour-saving devices,
with inadequate amenities and a rigid sexual division of labour.
Obligations to perform ‘socially useful’ labour were, therefore, experienced
as an onerous burden by the rural majority in Central Asia engaged in com-
pulsory collective agricultural work. Lubin (1981) estimated that in the 1970s
the majority of those working outside social production in Uzbekistan (around
12–15 per cent of the able-bodied population) were women and that most of the
employed were engaged in low-level jobs, even in the health sector, where they
were well represented. Iconographic depictions of women in non-traditional
occupations, driving tractors and handling heavy machinery, bore little relation
to the highly gender-segmented labour market in Central Asia, where, unlike
the rest of the Soviet Union, major untapped reserves of female labour could be
found (Lapidus 1982; Patnaik 1989).
Finally, the Soviet campaign against Islam produced its own contradictions
(Braker 1995; Roi 1995; Keller 2001; Khalid 2007), with a strongly gendered
subtext. One of the aims of successive anti-religious campaigns was to create a
clear line of demarcation between small-scale domestic rituals and folk prac-
tices, on the one hand, and any kind of observance that invoked the authority of
organised religious institutions or public expressions of religiosity, on the other.
Official Islamic learning and observance were tightly regulated by the Spiritual

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 101

Directorate for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM), estab-
lished in 1943, an institution sometimes used as a bridgehead of Soviet diplo-
macy towards the Muslim world during the cold-war period (Malashenko 1993).
This contributed to the increased ‘privatisation’ of religious practice and its
relegation to the domestic domain. Khalid (2007: 114) observes that, paradoxi-
cally, the anti-religious campaign in Central Asia served to preserve aspects of
customary Islam that came under sustained attack in other parts of the Muslim
world during the twentieth century.
Women’s close association with the domestic domain and the fact that their
activities more readily escaped the scrutiny reserved to men’s more public
pursuits positioned them as privileged custodians of local custom and ethnic/
national identity (Tett 1994; Tohidi 1998). In Uzbekistan, women ritual special-
ists, the otin, kept the transmission of Islamic knowledge alive by providing infor-
mal religious instruction to girls and officiating at women’s gatherings marking
important life events (births, marriages and funerals) and religious feasts (Fathi
1997). Ritual life, communal participation, sociality and mutual help combined
seamlessly in the everyday lives of Central Asian women and continue to do so
(Kandiyoti and Azimova 2004).
Against this background, the message of women’s emancipation was most
readily assimilated into and equated with expectations of entitlements and
benefits from the state to assist women in the performance of their maternal
and communal duties. These expectations resonate with both the more general
observations of Verdery (1996) on the gender regime of socialism – a regime
that substitutes social protection and state paternalism for civic rights – and the
characteristics of Central Asian societies discussed above. The ease with which
discourses about women’s ‘natural destiny’ and invitations to return to ‘tradi-
tional’ roles fell into place in the post-Soviet period is less surprising when we
consider the specific trajectory of Soviet ‘modernisation’.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Asian
states embarked upon ‘nationalising’ policies ranging from language policies
and revised national histories, geared to consolidating the hegemony of their
respective titular nations, to new iconographies for successor regimes (Smith et
al. 1998). The promotion of national values explicitly targeted the family and
gender relations. This was not a uniquely Central Asian phenomenon, for it
also reflected broader currents across the post-communist world, where neo-
familial ideologies, critical of Soviet-style emancipation and advocating a return
to ‘traditional families’, were plainly in evidence (e.g. Kuenhast and Nechemias
2004).
In Central Asia this reassessment of the Soviet legacy was preceded by a
period of Islamic revival that started in the late Soviet period in Uzbekistan
and achieved full-blown expression during perestroika at a point when the ideo-
logical monopoly of the Soviet state was on the wane. New openings to religion

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102 Islam and Modernity

culminated in a schism between ‘conservative’ and more ‘fundamentalist’ cur-

rents of thought among the ulama and their followers. Influenced by increased
contacts with the Muslim world, some took a more purist stance vis-à-vis local
customs (which were denounced as un-Islamic) and were insistent on establish-
ing a way of life based on a strict interpretation of the sharia. However, whatever
their doctrinal divergences, when it came to the question of women’s place in
society and the family, conservatives and fundamentalists concurred on equally
negative views about gender equality (Babadjanov 2004).
Above and beyond the pronouncements of religious authorities and their
more radical opponents, a more diffuse but persistent circulation of conservative
gender ideologies started emanating from post-independence states. The secular
rulers of successor regimes were themselves eager to display their allegiance to
the faith. Islam was celebrated as part of a glorious national heritage and leaders
demonstrated their personal piety by performing the hajj or taking oaths on the
Quran (Olcott 1995). The rapid building of mosques and madrasas served as
a sign of national rebirth. In Uzbekistan, by the time Islamic militancy had
become associated with threats from extremist groups aiming to destabilise the
regime, the government was at pains to distinguish between the local (national
and therefore benign) and the foreign (transnational and therefore perilous)
expressions of Islam. A new focus on Islamic observance as a possible signifier of
political extremism brought the issue of women’s veiling, which is now banned,
to the forefront again. The government of Uzbekistan responded by attempting
to police the boundaries between acceptable national dress (the colourful head-
scarf leaving the face bare) and ‘transnational’ veiling (or what is considered as
‘Arab’ or foreign dress) signifying an expression of extremism or ‘Wahhabism’,
a loosely utilised but politically charged expression in common use in the region
(Abramson 2004).
The bid to contain religious practice by making it conform to an emergent
‘official’ national ideology, which is itself patriarchal in form and content, renders
the boundaries between so-called secular and Islamic moralities and expecta-
tions blurred and indistinct. After the break-up of the Union, the successor elites
of Central Asian states had independence thrust upon them in the absence of
significant anti-Soviet mobilisation. These elites, nonetheless, embarked upon
a search for ideologies of national independence that centred around a denun-
ciation of their colonial legacies. The privileged locus of ‘de-sovietisation’ was
sought in the realm of culture and loss of culture (through Russification) was
singled out as one of the principal injuries of Soviet rule. Calls for the return of
women to roles more in keeping with their ‘natural destiny’ started circulating
in the local secular press, apparently eliciting little overt reaction. The distribu-
tion of welfare benefits by mahalla (neighbourhood) committees, which replaced
universal welfare provision with targeted assistance for the poor, appeared to
discriminate against divorcees and single mothers, pointing to the increasingly

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 103

disciplinary roles assumed by public bodies in enforcing conventional gender

norms (Kamp 2004).
However, presenting self-conscious manipulations of markers of national
identity as a ‘revival of tradition’ is a clear misnomer. Whilst reclaiming ‘tra-
dition’, successor elites have been presiding over profound transformations
of post-Soviet society. These include new patterns of social stratification with
rapidly growing disparities in wealth between the ‘new rich’ and the ‘new poor’,
accompanied by popular perceptions of rampant corruption, the erosion of
social safety nets and increasing rates of internal and international migration
and urbanisation. The increase in polygynous unions, which are not legal but
becoming more commonplace, appear to have less to do with a return to Islamic
mores per se than with cashing in on the privileges of newly found wealth.11 It
is not without irony that it is at the point when so-called traditional values are
being talked up that the material bases of communal solidarity that were able
to survive, albeit in modified form, during the Soviet period, are being tested to
the limit.
There is little doubt that retreat of the Soviet state facilitated an official
restoration of male privilege as an item of national culture. In Kyrgyzstan, the
decriminalisation of polygamy has already gone before parliament several times.
The increase of non-consensual bride-kidnapping in Kazakhstan is explained by
Werner (2004) with reference to the withdrawal of the state from gender-sen-
sitive social issues and new social attitudes towards Kazakh national traditions
promoted by the state. Kamp (2006) also suggests that the Soviet state had the
ability to intercede in favour of women and that state paternalism replaced the
formerly untrammelled authority of individual patriarchs, while Akiner (1997)
remarks on a new lack of restraint in expressions of male supremacy that were
generally kept in check as politically incorrect under the Soviet regime.
However, the demise of the Soviet state cannot, in and of itself, explain this
apparent transformation of gender discourses. Soviet policies in Central Asia
had the paradoxical consequence of both expanding opportunities for women’s
education and public presence and stalling processes of occupational and
spatial mobility commonly associated with modernity. The rural character of
Central Asian societies was consolidated through their mode of incorporation
into the Soviet Union, collectivisation reconfigured and sometimes entrenched
traditional forms of social organisation, pro-natalist policies, that were meant
to address the demographic shortfalls of the more industrialised republics, sup-
ported high-fertility norms in Central Asia and the onslaught against Islam
tightened the association between religion and ethnic identity by binding reli-
gion more closely to the domestic sphere. In short, there was a great deal more
to the assumed ‘traditionalism’ attributed to Central Asian societies than could
be explained with reference to either anti-colonial resistance or a supposed
failure of modernisation.

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104 Islam and Modernity

A corollary of these observations is that the uncritical espousal of the notions

of ‘re-traditionalisation’ and ‘re-Islamisation’ to account for post-Soviet devel-
opments yields relatively limited insights. National traditions are being actively
reinvented and self-consciously deployed to serve new ideological purposes.
Discourses on national independence perform a dual function. They attempt to
distance new regimes from their Soviet past by casting it as a colonial encounter
that repressed a national essence that is now being revitalised. They also strive
to create new imaginaries of the nation that enhance social solidarity in increas-
ingly fractured societies. Gender plays a central role in both these processes.
The official restoration of culturally sanctioned age and gender hierarchies
signals ‘de-Sovietisation’ in a context where the language of women’s emancipa-
tion was appropriated by the Soviet state. The populist appeal of acquiescence
to hierarchy in the family is implicitly harnessed to the vision of a harmonious,
law-abiding citizenry thriving under the guidance of the father of the nation.
The Islamic revival in Central Asia, that peaked during perestroika and achieved
broader appeal after independence, introduced an arena of doctrinal and politi-
cal contestation between different actors where state actors themselves attempt
to appropriate Islam as national heritage to upstage more radical oppositional
tendencies.
The successors to Soviet-era agents of modernisation appear to be inter-
national aid agencies, with their platforms of market reform and democratic
governance, and the various international and local NGOs they support. An
analysis of ‘international assistance’ encounters and of the blueprints they bring
to issues of gender equality must remain outside the scope of this chapter.
However, it must be clear that confrontations between transnational ‘tech-
nocratic’ feminisms, government policies and local and transnational Islamic
tendencies in Central Asia are partly being played out on the terrain of gender
relations.

Afghanistan: The society without the state?

Two episodes of violence against women, separated by over two decades, point
to the changing stakes around the politics of gender in Afghanistan. The first,
sensitively related by Edwards (2002: 167–73), took place in 1980 during the
mujahidin resistance against the Soviet invasion. The second was reported from
the province of Badakhshan in April 2005.
The incident in 1980 involved a Safi woman from the Pech Valley who
pleaded with her husband, on leave from his military service, not to serve
under the Soviet-backed Khalqi government but to join the jihad against the
Soviet invaders, threatening to leave for exile without him. When her husband
opted to return to the army, she decided to flee, asking a young paternal cousin
to accompany her to Pakistan. They were captured on the way by the Hezb-i

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 105

Islami, 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 final 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 mortified
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 superficial 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 specific 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 (ratified 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 firmly in the

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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 reconfiguration 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 unqualified 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 finally 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 conflict 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

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 107

politicisation of women’s rights through transnational influences (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 influential 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 firmly established in discussions
of social conflict in Afghanistan.13 The fact that two attempts at radical reform
instigated from above first 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 officials.
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 benefits 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

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108 Islam and Modernity

achieved in the creation of a national state prior to the Marxist seizure of power
in 1978, others maintain that the nation-state framework was a fabrication that
sat ill with the realities of Afghan society. Kakar (1978: 202) noted that there
was a genuine period of nation-building during the constitutional period. ‘No
longer was national politics pursued effectively in terms of region, religion, tribe
or kinship affinity. The various modern types of political ideologies and align-
ments transcended these traditional lines.’ Before the dislocation occasioned by
years of protracted conflict, the bonds of citizenship were arguably strength-
ened through education, inter-marriage and service in the national army at the
expense of ethnic/tribal affiliation (Wardak 2004). Edwards (1996: 4), on the
other hand, draws our attention to ‘the absence of a moral discourse of state-
hood shared by the majority of its citizens’, which, alongside external influences,
accounts for the incoherence and fragmentation of the polity. Saikal (2004),
likewise, interprets the various modern ideologies espoused by consecutive state
elites (such as constitutionalism and socialism) as a thin veneer over an untrans-
formed political culture constituted by implicit beliefs, kinship norms, codes of
accepted behaviour and hierarchies of identity. The weakness of the national
bond outside the capital and urban centres was noted by several scholars, who
suggested that the supranational umma (the community of believers) and the
subnational qawm (tribe) constituted more salient registers of identity (various
contributions in R. Tapper (ed.) 1983).
The genealogies of the modern state are clearly crucial. Barfield (2004)
reminds us that, under Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901), considered the
founder of the modern Afghan state, the subjugation of all autonomous groups
took place by means of a British-subsidised army that centralised power in
Kabul and made the government Pashtun rather than merely dynastic. The
Pashtunisation policies that were intrinsic to state-building are held responsible
by some for sowing the seeds of social fragmentation (Shahrani 1988, 1998).
Furthermore, the penetration of the central government into rural peripheries
arguably created an even greater gulf between the representatives of the state,
operating through a range of local intermediaries (such as maliks, khans and arbabs),
and the masses, since the former were generally seen as predatory and corrupt.
Roy (1986: 10) even argued that the uprisings against the communist regime,
which broke out from 1978 and led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, were
directed ‘as much against the state itself as against the Marxist government’. It is
easy to concede, without having to take the argument that far, that the multiple
fault lines of the Afghan polity finally imploded during the war years. It is not
my intention to rehearse the various phases of conflict in the period following
the Soviet withdrawal and leading to the ascendancy of the Taliban. Suffice it to
say that the state was finally fragmented and bases of social power transformed
as the economy changed from a subsistence and local trade economy into a
warlord economy dominated by commercial agriculture (opium poppies) and

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 109

long-distance contraband (Rubin 2000). Afghanistan also experienced one of

the largest recorded flows of refugees and internally displaced people. I shall not
speculate, here, on the possible consequences of these transformations for the
realm of gender relations (see Kandiyoti 2007b) but focus more narrowly on the
changing political stakes around women’s rights.
The mujahidin factions of the Northern Alliance, which had received the bulk
of US assistance in the operations leading to the eventual overthrow of the
Taliban, emerged as the strongest players on the eve of the Bonn Agreement in
2001, which laid the groundwork for the new Afghan state. This had a number
of significant implications. These players, based on constituencies among north-
ern and central ethnic groups – namely, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras – repre-
sented a mixture of ethnic claims mingled with those of politicised Islam. They
were intent on resisting the reinstatement of Pashtun dominance, not only in the
form of the Taliban, but also in the shape of a centralised governance apparatus
based on a strong presidential system. That was an issue that was bitterly fought
over in the process leading to the Constitution adopted in 2004 (Rubin 2008).
Debates over the constitutional role of Islam – and the extent to which equal
rights for men and women could be enshrined in legislation – became deeply
entangled in the compromises between mujahidin factions and the new tech-
nocrats of an aid-dependent government: a dependence that brought with it,
among other things, a request for compliance with legal international standard
– setting instruments and their provisions for gender equality.14 This led to
a constitution with several potentially contradictory clauses, with the ulama
retaining substantial powers of arbitration through their representation in the
Supreme Court. The mujahidin parties, pressing their nationalistic credentials as
the liberators of the country both from Soviet rule and from the Taliban, were
able to accuse their detractors (including some women MPs, taking them to task
over their human-rights record) with nothing short of treason. The constituen-
cies pushing for an expansion of women’s rights had an extremely weak hand
to play, since they had little traction with the emerging power blocks and little
legitimacy. They generally tried carefully to balance their demands either with
reference to Islam (hence the dual invocation of the Constitution and the sharia
in the protests against killings referred to earlier) or, in more technocratic texts,
with reference to the benefits of an educated, healthy and economically active
female citizenry to national development.
The entanglements of Islam and state-building have been deep and complex
in Afghanistan. Prior to Abdur Rahman Khan’s centralising drive, the loose
structure of the state meant that local religious leaders achieved considerable
power and autonomy, especially in the tribal areas, albeit under the patronage
of temporal rulers (Haroon 2007). Abdur Rahman Khan’s role was paradoxical
in that he undercut the autonomous power of the ulama, by organisationally
subordinating them to the state and keeping their moral influence in check,

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110 Islam and Modernity

and simultaneously established Islam as a vehicle of legitimacy for temporal

rule (Ghani 1978). The Amir also made use of the ulama to codify and propa-
gate a form of Islamic knowledge that legitimated him as absolute ruler and
commander of the faithful. This interpretation of Islam served as an ideology
of state-building that transcended the parochial identities of tribe, ethnicity
and community and served, in Olesen’s view (1995), as a precondition for the
secularisation of state and society. The suppression of local mechanisms for the
settlement of disputes under the Amir and their replacement by sharia courts
was noted as a step that not only curtailed the power of tribal customary law but
enhanced women’s recourse to justice (Ghani 1983).
Clerical influence waxed and waned as successive rulers chose to confront
the ulama (with disastrous consequences in the case of King Amanullah in
the 1920s) or reached compromises with them (Gregorian 1969). The ulama
retained the ability to mobilise in successive waves of protest against govern-
ments encroaching on their territory.15 Legal reforms in Afghanistan had led to
separate legal elites (Islamic law specialists trained in madrasas as well as experts
in statutory law trained at the Kabul Law School) and a dual court system
dealing with statutory and sharia law (Kamali 1985). The Taliban represented
a violent swing of the pendulum in favour of Islamic clerical rule, when all
national legal codes were rescinded in favour of a restrictive application of the
sharia (Barfield 2003). It is important to note, however, that even at the height of
state secularism under the PDPA, who in 1978 removed all religious references
from government, it was not long before the government had to resort to the
language and symbolism of Islamic legitimacy. Indeed, all the successive consti-
tutions of Afghanistan (including the 1987 constitution framed by the commu-
nist government under Najibullah) endorsed the tenets of ‘the sacred religion of
Islam’ and the principle that no law can contravene these tenets. Dorronsoro
(2005) further remarks that, in comparison to the pre-war period, the ideologi-
cal field was rendered homogenous by the jihad years, when Islamic ideologies
achieved total hegemony and the differences between tendencies became
harder to discern on some issues such as the status of women.16 It would be erro-
neous, nonetheless, to evaluate the rule of the Taliban as a mere culmination of
these trends. If, for the first time, the ulama dominated the political and military
life of Afghanistan, this was, as Rubin (2000: 1796) cogently argued, the direct
result of geo-politics and the resources made available by global flows. Many
have suggested that both the social origins of the Taliban and their application
of a puritanical Deobandi Islam constituted a significant break with patterns of
everyday belief and rule in Afghanistan (e.g. Barfield 2005). This does not imply,
however, that their successors would be prepared to countenance a regime sanc-
tioning women’s greater public presence and visibility, as many women parlia-
mentarians and rights advocates would soon discover.17 The reinstatement in
2006 of the notorious Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which had acted as a tool of

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 111

Taliban 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 benefits 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 reflected 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

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112 Islam and Modernity

understanding of the politics of gender. Shifting appropriations of Islam,

feminism and modernity by state and non-state, local and global actors map out
complex and fluid configurations that can be fully understood only on their own
terms. The cases of Central Asia and Afghanistan provide particularly produc-
tive illustrations of the effects of different legacies of state-building (and their
‘modern’ trajectories) on the political and discursive possibilities of debates on
gender and women’s rights.
In Central Asia, the movement of Muslim cultural reform that arose in the
latter part of the nineteenth century was aborted by Soviet policies of ‘cultural
revolution’. As modernity and ‘enlightenment’ were appropriated by communist
cadres, elements of both the Muslim clergy and the local intelligentsia that were
leaning towards progressive readings of Islam were either sidelined or actively
suppressed to forestall the dilution of communist ideology and the emergence
of an alternative leadership. Soviet policies had paradoxical effects. On the one
hand, a command economy integrating the Central Asian republics into the Soviet
Union as predominantly rural, primary commodity producers stalled certain
socio-demographic features of modernisation. On the other hand, the Soviet
state created an extensive infrastructure for the spread of universal literacy, basic
health care, social welfare and the support of women’s maternal and public roles.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, successor regimes presided over the
demise of the Soviet social contract and the retreat of the state from the provision
of public goods and social welfare. The creed of socialist modernity was renounced
in favour of the retrieval of ‘national’ traditions. Severe crises of redistribution and
legitimacy were papered over with nationalist rhetoric and an appeal to national
heritage that, in the early days of independence, made explicit references to
Islam. However, as Islam became politicised in the highly charged geo-political
context of the ‘war on terror’, governments endeavoured to draw the line between
‘national’ expressions of religion and transnational radical Islam, now seen as a
destabilising force. The mantle of ‘modernity from above’ was appropriated by
institutions of international governance promoting an agenda of market transition
and democratisation and their own blueprints of gender equality. However, local
civil-society platforms for the articulation of women’s rights remain marginal, and
the politics of gender is likely to be fought out on an ideological terrain monopo-
lised by authoritarian governments and their Islamist opponents.
In Afghanistan, attempts at modernisation were initiated by an urban state
elite whose control over the rural and tribal periphery remained precarious.
A weak rentier state failed to bring the benefits commonly associated with
modernisation – a national infrastructure for transport, sanitation, education
and health – to the majority of its population. Human development indicators
such as life expectancy, literacy and health status remained generally adverse,
and particularly so in the case of women. The state provided weak institutional
support for women’s public roles at the best of times, a support that disappeared

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 113

altogether as Afghanistan descended into civil war. Historically, Islam had a

central role to play as an ideology of modern state-building in Afghanistan.
However, in comparison to the pre-war years, the ideological field was rendered
more homogenous by the years of jihad and the backing received by different
Islamist factions during the cold war fought by proxy on Afghan soil. Although
the day-to-day workings of patriarchal relations in Afghanistan are primarily a
reflection of the kinship practices of diverse ethnic communities, calls for reform
in areas affecting the family and women’s rights are readily stalled with refer-
ence to Islam, even when they target customary norms that have little grounding
in Islamic law. The discursive field around women’s rights is severely restricted
by the technocratic agendas of donor-led state-building, with its blueprints for
democratic participation and women’s rights, on the one hand, and internal
political constituencies that claim to speak in the name of Islam, on the other.
These interactions contribute to defensive forms of self-consciousness among
both foreign and local participants in these debates, where some opt to essen-
tialise Afghan cultural practices as immutable ‘tradition’, while others apply
missionary zeal to their transformation. What unites cultural relativists with
radical modernisers, however, is the perception that gender relations constitute
an appropriate arena for struggle over the direction of the Afghan polity.
Debating the compatibility (or incompatibility) of Islam, feminism and
modernity sets up false dilemmas to the extent that these terms remain devoid
of utility outside an understanding of the concrete social relations that lend them
substance and meaning. More productive questions – and answers – could be
sought in an understanding of how different appropriations of Islam and moder-
nity by different political actors, both local and global, shape and circumscribe
the discursive possibilities of the politics of gender.

Summary of chapter
This chapter compares the trajectories of state-led modernisation, contestations in the
realm of gender, and the role of Islam in these processes in three regional contexts
with strongly contrasting experiences. Much of the literature on Islam and gender
concerns the Middle East, where modernisation was typically promoted by nationalist
elites who considered women’s emancipation both a symbol of progress and a means
to achieve national development. Against this backdrop, the chapter discusses
developments in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia and in Afghanistan. Soviet
Central Asia experienced modernisation without the market, led by socialist elites that
made efforts to break down traditional social structures and to mobilise women.
Afghanistan too had its modernising elites, but they faced several conundrums:
unresolved tensions between state-building and nation-building, the central place of
Islam with regard to the legitimacy of rule and the limited capacity of the central state
to extract resources, deliver benefits, and enforce law and order.
These different contexts gave rise to very different politics of gender. In all three
regions, developments since the early 1980s have led to a new salience of Islam in
public life and in the politics of gender, although the dynamic was a very different

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114 Islam and Modernity

one in each region. Neo-liberal economic reforms dramatically weakened the role of
the state as a provider of welfare in many Middle Eastern countries, and saw the
emergence of various Islamic associations taking over social and economic roles
previously played by the state. The Iranian Revolution and the jihad against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan were powerful catalysts of political movements
throughout the regions. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the new regimes of Central Asian states had recourse
to ethno-national ‘traditions’ as tools in nation-building and adopted an ambivalent
attitude towards Islam, endorsing some of its local expressions and severely
suppressing its political manifestations. The combination of a loss of women’s
entitlements and benefits from the state (the essence of the paternalist Soviet
social contract) and the emergence of ‘official’ national ideologies endorsing male
privilege led to an invitation to women to return to ‘traditional’ roles, blurring the
boundaries between secular and Islamic sources of morality. In post-Taliban
Afghanistan, the reach of the state continues to be limited, in the absence of a
sustainable political settlement. The constituencies pressing for an expansion of
women’s rights – with the prompting of the international donor community – have
an extremely weak hand to play in an ideological field rendered homogenous by the
years of jihad.

Questions
1. What are the main strands of debate on Islam, gender and women’s rights?
Compare and contrast approaches that privilege Islamic history and textual
sources (and justifications for resorting to these) with other critical perspectives of
a sociological orientation.
2. Various strands of scholarship have developed critiques of the authoritarian
modernisation of Muslim societies and its (allegedly positive) impact on women’s
rights and gender relations. What are the main arguments put forward by these
intellectual trends?
3. What was meant by the claim that Central Asian women were made to play the
role of a ‘surrogate proletariat’? On what grounds was this claim contested by
other scholars?
4. Explain the processes through which Soviet modernisation efforts could
paradoxically lead to a strengthening or revival of ‘traditional’ social structures and
practices.
5. Is the common observation correct that the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a
return to more conservative (‘traditional’) gender ideologies and practices? Was
this due to a revival of Islam, or were other factors involved?
6. Why were modernising reforms less successful in Afghanistan than in
neighbouring Central Asian states?
7. In both the Central Asian and Afghan contexts, the place of Islam in politics was
powerfully conditioned by the interventions of external actors. What consequences
did these have for women’s rights?
8. If the modernisation process is seen as a struggle between different elites, how
would you define the relevant elites in the three regions discussed? And how
would you explain the resurgence of Islam in these different regions?
9. What have been women’s gains and losses in these regions since the middle of
the twentieth century?

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 115

Notes
1. For an excellent discussion of Egypt, see Cole (1981); for an account of the
Ottoman/Turkish debates, see Kandiyoti (1991b).
2. The extent to which contemporary debates on women’s modesty are reliant upon
these dualities is illustrated by Hoffman-Ladd (1987). See also Kandiyoti (1993).
Themes of cultural invasion still remain central to Islamist constructions of female
modesty.
3. Some illustrations of these influences may be found in Jayawardena (1986),
Chatterjee (1990), Kandiyoti (1991a), Baron (1994, 2007), Badran (1995), and
Paidar (1995).
4. On state-sponsored religious conservatism in Egypt, see Ismail (1998). The
intense competition in the 1990s between various contenders, including
government agencies and the official ulama, is also discussed in Bayat (1998). In
Turkey, ironically – given its posture as the purported guarantor of state
secularism – it was the military who, with the support of the Özal government in
the 1980s, encouraged the building of mosques and the expansion of religious
education.
5. Some examples of the latter genre may be found in al-Hibri (1982), Mernissi
(1991), Ahmed (1992), Hassan (1996), Wadud (1999), Ezzat (2001) and Barlas
(2002).
6. Moghadam (2002b) presents an overview of the debates. Major contributions
include Paidar (1995), Afshar (1998), Najmabadi (1998), Mir-Hosseini (1999) and
Moghissi (1999).
7. The 2005 Arab Human Development Report (UNDP 2006) analyses some of these
deficits by situating them in the context of complex global and local influences
without implicating Islam. Authors who attempt to put Huntington’s ‘clash of
civilisations’ thesis to empirical test using various aggregate data sets, on the
other hand, argue that, if there is a cultural fault line between the Muslim world
and the West, it lies not in the realm of democratic ideals but in the areas of
gender and sexuality (Donno and Russett 2004).
8. Turkey and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union constitute
exceptions with the full secularisation of their legal codes, while Tunisia also
stands out with one of the most liberal codes in the Arab world.
9. This encounter demarcated different categories of colonial subjects. The Tatars,
who had been part of the Russian empire since the sixteenth century, were more
thoroughly integrated into its administrative structures. They fulfilled a special
role, as the tsars spread their rule into extensive Muslim areas in the mid-
nineteenth century. The Kazakh Hordes of the northern tier came under Russian
domination in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and were subject to
openly interventionist colonial policies, including missionary activity and a
massive influx of Slav settlers. The southern tier, conquered in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, experienced more accommodationist policies, with tsarist
officialdom working within the framework of Islamic institutions and according the
Khanates of Bukhara and Khiva nominal independence under a Protectorate
status.
10. In practice, the record was replete with instances of evasion of new rules by
means of supplying false witnesses on the age of marriage partners, presenting
false grooms and brides, or substituting a child-bride with an older sister. Criminal

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116 Islam and Modernity

prosecution for qalin cases evidently took place mainly when the parties failed to
honour their promises, so that, ironically, Soviet courts were used to enforce the
proper practice of qalin. See Northrop (2001a).
11. It is quite significant that in a survey carried out in Tashkent in 2001 less than 2%
of respondents mentioned that the institution of polygamy is justified by the laws
of Islam. Most identified polygamy as the prerogative of new wealth, although the
majority disapproved of its effects on the health of the family unit. See Pogrebov
(2006).
12. Most ethnographic accounts of gender relations are based on pre-war research or
refugee contexts. Some of the main sources are Nancy Tapper (1991), Grima
(1992) and Shalinsky (1994). There is, currently, a significant dearth of scholarly
work on changing social relations except in relation to strategic topics such as
the production and trade of narcotics and the dynamics of armed insurgency.
13. Barakat and Wardell (2002), for instance, refer to these dualities to develop their
argument, while Dupree (1998a) draws our attention to the role of an insulated
Westernised elite that was effectively cut off from the rural majority. Moghadam
(1993: 248), whilst acknowledging the characteristics of Afghanistan as a ‘weak’
state ruling over a patriarchal, tribal society, also invokes ‘the very real conflicts
between modernisers and traditionalists and between women’s emancipation and
patriarchy’.
14. Afghanistan became a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), signed without reservations in March
2003 under circumstances that are still unclear. Signatory governments are
normally bound to produce progress reports. As of 2008, no such report had
been forthcoming.
15. This was the case in the 1924 and 1929 rebellions and again, but without the
same success, in 1959, when Daoud introduced legislation lifting the compulsory
wearing of the veil and turned on the ulama for opposing him.
16. The fact that foreign aid to the resistance was distributed through the Pakistani
government, which singled out seven Sunni Islamist parties as ‘official’ recipients
of assistance, had a decisive impact on the shape of the political field. It is worth
noting that these parties had little influence inside Afghanistan before the Soviet
invasion. See Hyman ([1984] 1992).
17. The parliament – where women benefit from a quota of 25% reserved seats – has
been the scene of tense face-offs between women MPs and male members of
mujahidin parties.
18. Domestically generated revenue as a percentage of GNP was a mere 6%, even in
the period of stability that preceded the fall of the monarchy (Rubin 1995: 63–4).
In 1972, the two greatest resources that formed the backbone of the economy –
agriculture and livestock – yielded a mere 1% of state revenue. See Hyman
([1984]1992: 32).
19. These reached their apex under the PDPA, when women were hired in
unprecedented numbers, especially during the war years. In the state apparatus as
a whole by the summer of 1988 women accounted for 18.6% of the staff, with the
highest proportion in the Ministry of Education, where they formed 43% of
personnel. Overall in 1986, 270,000 women held jobs compared to only 5,000 in
1978, and there were 5,000 women among the police and militia. See Giustozzi
(2000).

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 Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 117

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