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CHAPTER 1

Queen Soraya’s Portrait

In December 2001, a few days after the Afghan interim government was officially appointed, the Ministry of Information and Culture opened on its ground floor a hall for press conferences. On the large walls of the conference room, paintings of the different kings of Afghanistan—Timur Shah, Abdur Khaman, Habibullah, Amanullah, Nadir Shah, and Zahir Shah—were displayed in chronological order. Only in one painting did the king appear with his wife. The painting was a replica of a famous photograph of King Amanullah and Queen Soraya Tarzi. However, the Afghan authorities had modified the original picture of the royal couple. A very large veil had been painted over Soraya in the manner of traditional wedding veils, which hung down to the floor, a veil that did not appear on the original photograph.

The addition of such a garment to the portrait of a queen is more than a simple anecdote. By adding it the authorities had deliberately rewritten one of the most symbolically significant pages of Afghan history. In her wedding veil, Soraya’s status as the Muslim wife of the king was reemphasized while her eminent political role in the modernization effort undertaken during his rule in the 1920s became a secondary historical fact. Her solitary feminine presence in a portrait gallery dominated by men was nevertheless a powerful reminder that women had once played their part in Afghan politics.

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the ruling party has a slogan: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.” The way history is written, transmitted, and told influences the way we envision the future. Historical distortions always serve political purposes. In the aftermath of September 11 and the nation-building process that soon thereafter followed, the veiling of Soraya symbolically inscribed on her body the continuity of shared religious values and the contested position women would come to occupy in the new Islamic republic.

Figure 2. Official portrait of Queen Soraya Tarzi published in the Illustrated London News, March 17, 1928. Source: http://www.phototheca-afghanica.ch.

This constant reinvention of gender norms through the rewriting and reinterpretation of Afghan history “hints both at the precariousness of cultural homogeneity within the national community and at the centrality of gender in articulating and perpetuating a sense of national belonging. Somebody has to invoke and perform the rituals that reinforce these norms and to inculcate them into the next generation in order to ensure historical continuity. This ‘somebody’ is woman-as-mother-of-the-nation” (Peterson 1994, cited in Einhorn 2006, 197). Her body is a site of political struggle over collective identity.

In the portrait gallery of the Ministry of Information and Culture, history pays homage to the great Afghan leaders who have led soldiers to the battlefield against foreign invaders or carried out national development projects to modernize their country. However, little is said about their fellow women and the ways in which they have experienced the various social transformations initiated by the political regimes that have succeeded one another. Yet, “to speak about the ‘situation of Afghan women’ is to generalize unconstructively. Women’s roles and status in society and the division of productive activity between men and women vary according to region and ethnic group” (Centlivres-Demont 1994, 334). With 80 percent of the population living in rural areas, and limited development outside major cities, changes in gender relations initiated in Kabul have continuously been perceived with suspicion, as threats to Islam and tradition or as proof of the elite’s moral corruption.

In this chapter, I explore four key periods of Afghan history when the issue of “women” emerged in the political agenda: the modern monarchies (1920–73), the Communist regime (1979–92), the civil war (1992–96), and the Taliban regime (1996–2001). I look at these periods from the standpoint of the political category “women” in order to underline the ways in which the different political regimes have used women’s issues in order to articulate ideas about national identity and develop a vision for their respective societies. Gender politics, expressed in political discourses around the necessity of “remaking women” (Abu-Lughod 1998), were at the center of each of these respective historical moments.

I also relate the “woman question” to the geopolitical context of the wider region, to the process of nation building, and to the complex relationships between tribal, religious, and central institutions of power. I argue that political interest in the condition of women was triggered by the intensification throughout the twentieth century of Afghanistan’s relationships with the rest of the world, in particular with Turkey, Iran, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Far from creating consensus, the status of women has been (and continues to be) a highly contested issue that opposed conservatives and reformists. Hence, debates over the future of the country are never only debates about the model of economic development to follow. The model of gender relations to promote remains a core feature of such disputes because interventions in this domain always indicate a civilizational shift with changes in lifestyles, clothing habits, and ways of being in public (Göle 1996).

Since women’s emancipation has been from the outset enmeshed within unequal power relations between Afghanistan and the various powers trying to assert their dominance over the region, attempts at reforming the status of women have traditionally been perceived as alien to Afghan culture. Now as before, orthodox readings of women’s role in Islam should not be read as reflections of an essentially traditionalist culture but rather as symbolic attempts at preserving sovereignty in a context where imperial domination triggers moral panics over national identity.

Starting with the controversial portrait of Queen Soraya, the chapter builds on archive images of women collected in various official documents. These images bear witness to the centrality of “women” in promoting narratives of progress for the outside world. Their disappearance from the public domain during the civil war and the Taliban regime can be interpreted as a direct reaction to foreign-sponsored emancipation programs. It is because this “swing of the pendulum” (Zulfacar 2006) has shaped Afghan women’s memories and subjectivities in powerful ways that this history needs to be recounted. The present moment, far from representing a radical rupture with the past, is rooted in a long history of imperial interventions justified by feminist arguments anchored in the colonial tradition: what Gayatri Spivak (1988, 296) has identified as the white man’s burden of “saving brown women from brown men.”

Brief Background

The creation of a modern state in Afghanistan is largely the product of competing imperial influences in the region, providing financial subsidies and arms to the ruling elite in Kabul in an attempt at asserting their own control over the country while providing the state with the means to impose its will on the tribes (Dorronsoro 2005). It is unlikely that a centralized state governing a unified territory would have been able to impose itself without external financial and military aid. However, the state always remained rather peripheral in the political life of the country: threatened by frequent tribal uprisings and the growing influence of the ulema, its survival depended on external aid for the financing of its administration, heavy policing techniques to contain rebellions, and the co-optation of the tribes and the religious class to ensure its legitimacy.

During the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was under the influence of two imperial powers: Russia to the north and England in the Indian subcontinent. It was the threat of the expanding Russian Empire beginning to push for an advantage in the Afghan region that placed pressure on British India in what became known as the “Great Game.” The Great Game set in motion the confrontation of the British and Russian empires whose spheres of influence moved steadily closer to one another until they met in Afghanistan. It also involved Britain’s repeated attempts to impose puppet governments in Kabul. Afghanistan gradually fell under British control (1880) and was eventually used as a buffer state to prevent the expansion of Russia until the country obtained its independence in 1919. King Amanullah, whose political legitimacy was strengthened by his victory in the struggle for national liberation, engaged the country in a vast program of reforms aiming at modernizing the country.

Modern Monarchies, 1920–73

Described by historians as the “Atatürk of Afghanistan,” King Amanullah’s entourage was composed of liberal and nationalist intellectuals whose political views were influenced by modernization reforms conducted in neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey. Amanullah’s modernization program was undeniably inspired by the liberal ideas of Mahmud Beg Tarzi, father of Queen Soraya, Amanullah’s wife. Educated in Syria and Turkey, son of the famous poet Gulham Mohammad Tarzi, Mahmud Beg Tarzi is one of the most influential intellectual and nationalist figures of his time. The Tarzi family was forced into exile by Amir Abdur Khaman Khan after Gulham Mohammad broke with the amir over his strictness and brutality toward his enemies (L. Dupree 1973, 437). The Tarzi family only returned to Afghanistan in 1903. In 1911, Mahmud Tarzi began publishing a modernist-nationalist newspaper, the Siraj-ul-akhbar-i Afghan (Lamp of the News of Afghanistan). His writings, influenced by modern interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence, advocated for modern education while denouncing Western imperialism (L. Dupree 1973, 440).

Exposed to the new gender policies implemented in other Middle Eastern countries where he had traveled during his years of exile, Tarzi became a strong supporter of women’s rights in his own country. He believed in women’s ability to participate in public life, claimed that fully “educated women were an asset for future generations and concluded that Islam did not deny them equal rights” and that women should be therefore entitled to become full citizens. One section of his newspaper, entitled “Celebrating Women of the World,” was dedicated to women’s issues and was edited by his wife, Asma Tarzi (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003a, 3–4). But in spite of his liberal approach toward the position of women in society, Tarzi believed in authoritarian modernism to maintain the monarchy and the creation of a centralized state responsible for the development of the country.

The Reign of Amanullah, 1919–29

As soon as independence was achieved, Amanullah recruited Tarzi, his influential father-in-law, as his minister of foreign affairs. Soraya Tarzi was King Amanullah Khan’s only wife. The decision of the king to present himself to the world in a monogamous relationship and in the company of the queen was intensively commented on by the international press. In an article of the Illustrated London News published March 17, 1928, which displayed a photo documentary of the royal couple’s European tour, the journalist commented:

Queen Suryia [Soraya], who arrived in England with King Amanullah on March 13, is the first Consort of an Oriental monarch to visit Europe with her husband. She is a daughter of the Afghan Foreign Minister, Tarzi Khan, and is the only wife of the King, who firmly upholds the ideal of monogamy. Already she has made an immense impression in Rome, Berlin, and Paris by her personal beauty and her adaptability to Western ways. “It is difficult to realise,” writes Sir Percival Philipps [sic], who accompanied the Afghan royal party from India to Europe, “that this charming lady has, according to our standards, been virtually a prisoner all her life. She lived in the strictest seclusion at Kabul…. The Queen is deeply interested in every aspect of life in Europe, particularly the position of women.” In Paris she was hailed as a queen of fashion, and had some fifty dresses made there. “She bids fair,” it has been said, “to rival Queen Elizabeth in the number of her gowns.”

The photo documentary and the journalist’s report are classic examples of “Orientalism” (Said 1979). As in other representations of the Middle East produced in the West, the photographers’ and reporters’ interest in the foreign “other” was shaped by a number of stereotypical certainties about the Orient: its inherent backwardess, its rootedness in tradition, its treatment of women. The narrative that emerges out of the documentary is marked by a fascination for the queen’s exotic beauty and a feeling of compassion for her status as “an Oriental woman living in seclusion in her country.” Between the lines, and in spite of her presence by the side of her husband in this important diplomatic mission, Soraya’s status remains rooted in the imaginary of the “harem.” She is presented as the domesticated and subjugated “other” as opposed to the liberated, independent, and enlightened Western self (L. Ahmed 1992). The standard for measuring women’s emancipation (and the standards of “civilization” more generally) are those set by Europe, not only in the ways Oriental subjects are to dress but also in the manners they are to adopt.

However, it remains undeniable that Soraya played a central role in redefining the position of women in Afghan society at a major moment of social change and nation building. As in Iran and Turkey, the issue of women was a central concern of the ruling class who predominantly adopted a secularist, rationalist, and universalist Western model of social transformation (Göle 1996, 29). By having his wife take part in all national events, Amanullah strove to present an image of Afghanistan in the path of “catching up” with Western civilization. Hence Soraya participated with him in hunting parties, riding on horseback, and attending some cabinet meetings. She appeared in the king’s lodge during military parades. It was with her support that King Amanullah was able to campaign against the veil and polygamy. “At a public function, Amanullah said that Islam does not require women to cover their bodies or wear any special kind of veil. At the conclusion of the speech, Queen Soraya tore off her veil in public and the wives of other officials present at the meeting followed [her] example” (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003a, 4).

Figure 3. King Amanullah and Queen Soraya during their stay in England. Photograph published in the Illustrated London News, March 24, 1928. Source: http://www.phototheca-afghanica.ch.

Figure 4. Afghan ladies in European dress. Photograph published in the Illustrated London News, November 3, 1928. Source: http://www.phototheca-afghanica.ch.

That the king put so much emphasis on banning the veil is not surprising: the modernizing elite hastening to show images of women throwing off their veil is a common leitmotif of Orientalist discourses. As Meyda Yegenoglu (1998) argues, the figure of the woman who cannot be seen yet who troublingly can hold the Westerner in her own unseen gaze operates as the ultimate trope of the Orient that the West desires to penetrate. The desire to unveil her reveals “the unique articulation of the sexual within cultural difference in Orientalist discourse” (Yegenoglu 1998, 47). As the caption of a photograph published in November 1928 in the Illustrated London News (Figure 4) demonstrates, the level of progress achieved in Afghanistan was primarily measured by women’s unveiled appearance, the veil symbolizing the traditional, subservient domestic roles of Muslim women. However, in practice, women did not literally embrace European norms but creatively interpreted them by combining Western hats with face veils.

This exhibition of modern feminine fashion largely inspired by Europe became part of national rituals aiming to symbolically bolster the idea of “modernization,” especially for the rest of the world. For instance, the queen’s visit to Turkey in 1929 made the headlines of Cumburiyet, an Istanbul daily paper sympathetic to the goals of the new republic’s modernizing regime in which photographs of her wearing a sleeveless summer dress with hair, face, and shoulders uncovered were displayed (Shissler 2004, 113). The circulation of images of upper-class women dressed in European clothes and their public visibility at official ceremonies represented a radical step in a society where most women had historically been segregated from men and protected from the gaze of outsiders.

However, the introduction of women into public life was undertaken to serve other ends than the development of women’s autonomy. This public performance of European lifestyles through clothing “played a symbolic role in the determination of the definition of the regime, beyond its significance from the point of view of women” (Göle 1996, 64). These new clothing habits served to exalt a new civilization, a new way of life, and new behavior patterns. As in Turkey where Atatürk banned the Ottoman fez and replaced it by the hat, Amanullah made it compulsory for men to wear European suits when entering the capital city and for women to remove their chadari in specific areas of Kabul. These laws were significant in conveying Afghanistan’s aspiration to be part of the union of contemporary nations. Hence, Kabul was used as the shop window of reforms, which were mostly cosmetic and in reality had limited impact outside of the city. Corruption and governmental injustices practiced in rural parts of the country rendered these public ceremonials outrageous to villagers (Zulfacar 2006, 31).

In Amanullah’s view, women could only be emancipated through Westernization led by the upper class, the queen, and her sisters (Centlivres-Demont 1994, 336). Many women from Amanullah’s family publicly participated in women’s organizations and went on to become government officials later in life. For instance, the Anjuman-i Himayat-i-Niswan (Association for the Protection of Women) was established in 1928 by Seraj al-Banat and Queen Soraya to encourage women to demand the rights provided by King Amanullah’s reforms of marriage customs and restrictive social practices (L. Dupree 1973). With the support of Queen Soraya, women were encouraged to get an education and, as an initiative to that end, fifteen young women were sent to Turkey for higher education in 1928.

These societal reforms were further accelerated following a six-month trip around Europe that Soraya and Amanullah took in 1927–28. On their return the royal couple initiated a program of new reforms, including the creation of a constitutional monarchy, an elected assembly, a secular judiciary, and, most significantly, compulsory education for both sexes and plans for co-educational schools. However, the European tour of the royal couple was received with hostility in their own country (Majrooh 1989, 94). While Soraya and Amanullah were touring Europe, conservative forces at home began a campaign condemning their personal life and their modernization programs as anti-Islamic. Images of the queen unveiled and wearing Western clothes, presumably distributed by the British eager to destabilize a regime that had defeated them during the third Anglo-Afghan war, circulated in the tribal regions of Afghanistan (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003a, 5). According to Louis Dupree (1973, 452), “Amanullah struck at the roots of conservative Islam by removing the veil from the women, by opening co-educational schools, and by attempting to force all Afghans in Kabul to wear Western clothing.”

As the reform increased in momentum, resentment grew among conservative religious leaders. The revolt quickly spread and a tribal army moved on Kabul, recruiting supporters on its way. The king’s neglect for the creation of a national army to support his programs at a moment when Afghanistan was barely united as a nation left him disarmed with no choice but flight (L. Dupree 1973, 450). Despite his last minute attempts to negotiate with tribal leaders and his efforts to tackle public discontent by withdrawing some of his reforms, Amanullah was finally overthrown and replaced by a new generation of kings who avoided pushing the women’s agenda to the detriment of tribal rules.

After his eviction in 1929, his successor Habibullah Ghazi insisted upon a return to conservative customs regarding women. “He demanded that women remain behind the veil under strict male control and that girls’ schools, together with all other vestiges of the women’s movement, be suspended” (N. H. Dupree 1984, 319). Zahir Shah, his successor, introduced limited reforms that remained nonbinding in order to avoid the opposition of the mullahs. The institutional model deployed to promote women’s rights remained rooted in royal initiatives, with upper-class educated urban women gradually joining as the country started to develop its economy.

The Reign of Zahir Shah and the Decades of Daud, 1953–73

By the midcentury, massive foreign and technical assistance from the Soviet Union pushed Afghanistan forward on its journey toward modernization. Women were encouraged to participate in the economic effort in order to support the country’s development goals. The 1940s and 1950s saw the first women nurses, teachers, and doctors (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003a, 6). In 1950–51, university faculties reserved for women were created in medicine, the sciences, and the humanities—parallel to those exclusively for men—in the newly founded Kabul University (Centlivres-Demont 1994, 338).

A number of women’s associations with members recruited in the liberal upper and middle classes were created. The Muassasa-i Khayriyya-i Zanan (Women’s Welfare Association, WWA) was established by Zaynab Inayat Siraj and Bibi Jan, both members of the royal family. Although it tried to promote unveiling, the emphasis of WWA was to encourage income-generating activities and to modernize women by providing literacy, family planning, and vocational classes. In 1953 it established the journal Mirman. In 1975 WWA became institutionally independent and changed its name to the Women’s Institute (WI). The WI had branch offices in ten provincial cities and grew to eight thousand members. However, despite its attempts at reaching out to rural women by opening offices in the provinces, the organization failed to take steps outside elite social classes (Majrooh 1989, 95). Kubra Noorzai, the institute’s director, was nevertheless elected to the National Assembly under President Daud and the organization began to promote gender equality through the state’s modernization policies (Emadi 2002, 91–92).

In 1959, the government of King Zahir Shah formally announced the voluntary end of female seclusion and the removal of the veil. However, it was left to individual families to decide how to respond to these greater freedoms and, outside the major urban centers, life for most women remained largely unchanged (Zulfacar 2006, 33). Nevertheless, in the following years the government introduced girls’ schools and medical facilities for women where they could receive training in both nursing and administration. The Constitution of 1964 granted significant rights to women, including the right to vote. However, the overall participation of women in politics remained extremely low.

Figure 5. “Rural nurse from village clinic near Kabul.” From Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways (Afghanistan Ministry of Planning, 1969), 56.

As a result of the slow process of modernization initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the capital city, deeper changes began to take shape in urban areas. With new education and employment opportunities available, the urban population became more stratified. This period saw the emergence of an educated middle class in the major cities of Afghanistan. Women who found employment in the public administration began to develop new viewpoints and expectations. In the 1970s the stratum of urban elite women began to grow. These women had very different lifestyles from those of rural women, working alongside men in professional, technical, and support functions in government services and the private sector (Moghadam 1994, 863). The visibility of women in offices, in the streets, and at parties indicated a new habitus with gender mixing becoming the distinctive sign of the urban upper class.

In 1965, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a Soviet-backed socialist organization, was formed. That same year the women’s section of the party, the Democratic Organization of Afghan Women (DOAW), was created. Its main objectives were to eliminate illiteracy and ban bride-price as well as forced marriage. A few years after the republic was declared in 1973 a penal code (1976) and a civil law (1977) were introduced, “both of which followed the constitutional injunction that ‘there can be no law repugnant to the sacred religion of Islam’” (N. H. Dupree 1984, 310). These laws however maintained the ideal of patriarchal control, and women were kept in positions that did not challenge their “honor” as well as that of their family. By contrast, during the Communist regime, the more aggressive approach to women’s empowerment and the overtly secularist rhetoric that accompanied these reforms were decisive factors in the resistance that emerged all over the country.

Violent demonstrations took place in the country’s major cities, especially in universities where some unveiled women wearing short skirts became the target of acid attacks. Conservative religious reactions to women’s education and emancipation were a key feature of the antigovernment protests of the 1970s, which finally resulted in the leftist coup d’état of April 1978.

Cultural and Artistic Life

For urban upper- and middle-class women, the reign of Zahir Shah was a period of openness and freedom. Afghanistan was at peace. Located on the hippie trail, Kabul attracted tourists from Europe and North America, searching for spirituality, adventure, and cheap drugs. In Kabul, Chicken and Flower Streets had shops, cafés, guesthouses, and restaurants where Afghans and foreigners met, intermingled, and sometimes made friends.

Figure 6. Record store, Kabul. From Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways (Afghanistan Ministry of Planning, 1969), 145.

Radio Television Afghanistan broadcast foreign movies in which new lifestyles were promoted. With the creation of the first national film production company, Afghan Film, in 1965, the Afghan film industry blossomed. It produced documentaries and news films highlighting the official meetings and conferences of the government before it started to produce its first feature films in the 1970s. Radio Kabul, later on renamed Radio Afghanistan, the state-owned radio, hosted a whole generation of modern Afghan artists such as Ustad Mohammad Hussain Sarahang, Ustad Farida Mahwash,¹ and Ustad Mohammad Hashem Cheshti. These master musicians were revered not only in Afghanistan but also in India, Pakistan, and the entire Middle East. King Zahir Shah promoted dramatic art by creating the National Theatre Company and building Kabul National Theatre, and with its construction the first generation of female actresses were recruited.

Figure 7. “Radio Kabul announcer during one of the station’s many daily news programmes.” From Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways (Afghanistan Ministry of Planning, 1969), 110.

This version of “modernity” that the different governments, from Amanullah to Zahir Shah and later on Daud and the Communists, tried to impose remained largely alien to the majority of the Afghan population. Outward looking, the agenda of reforms and foreign tastes kept the poorer classes alienated from the process. This reconfiguration of Afghan identity along values and lifestyles considered as “foreign” indicated a move away from a traditional Islamic lifestyle that did not help unite the Afghan population and in fact achieved the opposite. Ideals of equality conveyed by the new media challenged patriarchal authority and created intense public distress. The visibility of women in public life disturbed the norm of private family life, turning women and sexuality into contested political matters. Modernists envisioned the veiling of women as the main obstacle to Westernization, while the Islamists saw it as the leading symbolic force against the degeneration of society (Göle 1996, 52). The absence of communication between the ruling class and the rural majority was largely caused by the secular criteria for modernization. This meant cultural alienation for those who felt threatened by these new norms, a situation that became acute when a Marxist modernizing elite started to exert its influence within the government from the mid 1960s onward.

The Communist Regime, 1979–92

In 1965 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was formed, a pro-Communist group that may have helped Mohammad Daud to seize power from his cousin King Zahir Shah and declare Afghanistan a republic in 1973. He was toppled in turn by his former PDPA allies in April 1978 during what is known as the Saur Revolution.

The Communist period was marked by a proactive approach toward the implementation of gender policies. Decrees were introduced as part of a program of social and political reforms intended to effect the rapid transformation of a patriarchal society (Moghadam 2004, 454). For instance, a decree limited the payment of bride-price and gave greater freedom of choice to women with respect to marriage. Another one raised the marriagable age for girls to sixteen years. In addition, the government launched an aggressive literacy program aimed at educating women and removing them from seclusion (Majrooh 1989, 90). However, in the city each family accommodated aspects of modernity compatible with their general lifestyle, which generally meant a certain degree of compliance with patriarchal demands and norms when it came to important decisions regarding female mobility and, above all, marriage. Such intimate family matters belonged then as now to personal space (mahrem) and still suffer no interference in urban and rural families alike.

During this period, women were present in all major government departments as well as in the police force, the army, business, and industry. Women taught, studied, and acted as judges in the Family Court, dealing with issues related to divorce, custody of children, and other family matters. They composed over 75 percent of teachers, 40 percent of medical doctors, and almost 50 percent of civil servants, all of them city based (Emadi 2002).

Women were also present in the different ranks of the party and the government with the exception of the Council of Ministers. The Loya Jirga (parliament) counted seven female members in 1989. The Central Committee of the PDPA included Jamila Palwasha and Ruhafza (alternate member), “a working-class grandmother and ‘model worker’ at the Kabul Construction Plant, where she did electrical wiring” (Moghadam 2002, 24). Women were working in security, in intelligence, and on the police force. They were employed as logisticians in the Defense Ministry. In 1989, all female members of the PDPA received military training and weapons.

The true innovation of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan was the women’s branch of the party, the Democratic Organization of Afghan Women, also founded in 1965, which set about to address specifically every aspect of women’s conditions, not only limited to issues of marriage, with the aim of turning women into citizens and partners in an egalitarian secular society (Moghadam 1994).

The program of the DOAW was very much based on strategies of public visibility, which involved women’s enrollment in grand marches organized by the party to foster ideas of women’s emancipation. Nancy Hatch Dupree writes: “Frequently, these grand marches ended in ‘volunteer clean-up’ sessions, and the people of Kabul were treated for the first time to the sight of girls wielding brooms, sweeping the streets in public in the company of men” (1984, 318).

Nevertheless, the distance between reforms on paper and actual practice was considerable. The DOAW and its supporters were generally sophisticated cosmopolitan middle- to upper-class women with a foreign education—just like the progressive circles around Kings Habibullah and Amanullah with equally limited connections to the rural majority. According to Nancy Hatch Dupree (1984, 317), women activists under the Communist regime were totally co-opted to “the purposeful manipulation of the women’s movement as an appendage to national politics.” As a result, no strong and well-organized women’s movement emerged from this period.

In the countryside, the imposition of compulsory education for both boys and girls, forced enrollment of men and women in “detachments for the Defence of the Revolution,”² and coercive secularization attempts provoked strong resentment and resistance. In general, gender policies implemented under the Soviet occupation were imposed with little sensitivity for local codes and practices, often using heavy-handed tactics to implement programs. The PDPA coup of 1978 met with violent opposition not so much because of its progressive ideology but because of its brutal implementation, which cost the lives of thousands of Afghan citizens. The reforms, instead of being presented in a pragmatic, technical manner, were given a Marxist packaging that alienated the vast majority of the population. Compulsory education, especially for women, was largely perceived as an encroachment of the state in families’ private affairs. The secular narrative that accompanied the reforms was seen as going against tradition, as antireligious, and as a challenge to male authority. This lack of regard for religious and societal sensibilities resulted in massive backlash, especially in rural areas.

Figure 8. General Khotul Mohammadzai, 1970s. Collection of Julie Billaud.

Figure 9. “Women at a demonstration in Kabul” (original caption). From The Revolution Continues, ed. Makhmud Baryalai, Abdullo Spantghar, and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 58.

The war against the Soviet occupation had a devastating impact on Afghanistan’s economy. An estimated five million people fled to Pakistan, Iran, and further afield. As a result of the war, social services provided by the government became largely limited to the urban centers. Both the human and economic costs and losses of the war were enormous.

Figure 10. “Volunteer detachments for the Defence of the Revolution include urban and rural workers, men and women, middle aged people and young patriots of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Their country has given them arms to fight the enemies of the Revolution and they are defending it without thought of their own life” (original caption). From The Revolution Continues, ed. Makhmud Baryalai, Abdullo Spantghar, and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 193.

Jihad

Armed by the United States, the different mujahideen factions organized resistance from the refugee camps in Pakistan to their villages of origin. Village women participated in the movement in various ways: by transporting weapons under their chadari, installing landmines around their village, looking after the wounded, and cooking for the combatants (N. H. Dupree 1984).

Women did not only support the jihad but they also encouraged their husbands to go to war. Of the time of resistance against the Soviets, cultural historian Nancy Dupree writes: “During the jihad one would often see men coming home from the war to rest with their families in the Pakistani camps. If they were a little slow about going back to the battlefield, the women would push and shame them into doing their duty for the jihad. The women therefore played a vital part in the war, for it was their strength that motivated men to keep fighting” (1986, 10). From their participation in the resistance movement, women developed a sense of pride and usefulness. In recognition for their participation in the war effort some of them were given political positions once the mujahideen government took over Kabul.

Pul-i-Charkhi

Conducting clandestine activities was not without risk. Repression was severe, systematic, and merciless. Political opponents were tracked by the secret services, arrested, tortured, and executed. Located just east of Kabul, the prison of Pul-i-Charkhi became one of the darkest holes in the last quarter century of Afghanistan’s war-torn history. During the years of Soviet and Communist control, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were kept behind the solid stone walls in dark concrete cells with unknown thousands never coming out alive, victims of nightly executions on the military range beyond the prison walls (Barry 2002).

What happened behind the stone walls of Pul-i-Charkhi reflects the dark side of the PDPA’s political agenda. Modernization projects conducted under the Communist government were meant to convey an ideology, a particular vision of social organization that tolerated no opposition. The immense enterprise of social engineering was conducted by the regime under the guise of development aimed at gaining people’s consent for the Red Army’s occupation of the country. But the remolding of the Afghan nation along secular lines triggered fierce resistance to social changes that were perceived as threats to Afghan culture and tradition. In obedience to the Islamic principle of leaving lands occupied by infidels, millions of Afghans sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan.

Life in the Refugee Camps

During this period Afghanistan became the battlefield upon which the United States conducted a proxy war against the Soviet Union. The Afghan resistance movement was organized around U.S.-sponsored conservative Islamist groups under the rubric of the mujahideen. The very first refugee camps were probably extensions of military training camps that the Pakistani government built for the opponents of the left-wing and pro-Soviet elements of the Afghan government. Since 1973 (nearly six years before the Soviet intervention) Gulbudin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masood, and Burnanuddin Rabbani—the leaders of resistance—had fled to Peshawar to build up support with the help of the Pakistani government. A number of camps, military in origin, may have been conceived as rallying points around specific military commanders with strong fundamentalist leanings, not just as neutral gathering places for refugees (Mackenzie 2001).

As in Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo, the United States supported opponents to the pro-Soviet regime, without any regard for their violations of human rights or their reactionary social goals. Warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who later became a fervent supporter of the Taliban and who received substantial financial support from the United States, were considered by the United States as “freedom fighters” and were trained in military camps in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

Unlike other liberation movements elsewhere, the Afghan mujahideen never encouraged the active participation of women in jihad. Women in Peshawar who criticized the politics of the mujahideen were threatened and sometimes killed. This is what happened to Meena Keshwar Kamal - almost universally known by just her first name - founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who denounced the gender discriminatory policies of the fundamentalist groups together with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (Moghadam 1994).

Attacks against women did not begin with the Taliban. In the mujahideen-ruled refugee camps in Pakistan, women had to face constant restrictions of movement and threats to their lives. In 1989, a fatwa (religious decree) was promulgated against women who worked for humanitarian organizations. Women were also requested to wear the hijab (head covering) and to strictly respect the rules of purdah. According to the fatwa, “women were not to wear perfume, noisy bangles or Western clothes. Veils had to cover the body at all times and clothes were not to be made of material which was soft or which rustled. Women were not to walk in the middle of the street or swing their hips, they were not to talk, laugh, or joke with strangers or foreigners” (Moghadam 2002, 25). A year later, girls were forbidden to attend school. The United States never reacted to these decrees and simply abandoned the Afghans once their proxy war with the Soviet Union was over.

Under mujahideen control, the camps provided laboratory conditions to experiment with modern forms of gendered repression. The rigorous separation of the sexes was reinforced through the mobilization of men to the cause of jihad and military operations. Separated from their male relatives, women were rooted in the camps, under the control of religious and fundamentalist leaders (Olesen 1996). Therefore, the fundamentalist attitude to women could be summarized as a vindictive application of sharia within the context of a political program aimed at the establishment of a complete Islamic state, justified by what they considered to be a literal interpretation of the Koran. Traditional appeals to modesty and self-effacement were turned into systematic interdiction of any visible form of feminine expression that was interpreted as anti-Islamic. These policies were implemented by the mujahideen when they took control of Kabul in 1992 and further reinforced when the Taliban came to power.

The Civil War, 1992–96

During the years of Soviet occupation, Kabul had been perceived as the origin of all the country’s misfortunes. For the conservative rural-based mujahideen opposition, which had been supported by the United States during the Cold War, Kabul and other cities were perceived to be the centers of “sin” and “vice” precisely because of the high visibility of educated, emancipated urban women. There was a widespread perception that the population of Kabul had collaborated with and had been therefore corrupted by the Soviet regime. Many mujahideen groups shared the idea that the people of Kabul should be punished for their “immoral values” (Kandiyoti 2005). As Tamin Ansary (2001) puts it: “When the Mujahedin finally toppled the last Communist ruler out of Afghanistan and marched into Kabul, it was not just the triumph of the Afghan people against the foreign invaders but the conquest, finally, of Kabul (and its culture) by the countryside.”

One of the first orders of the new mujahideen government was that women should be veiled in public. In August 1993, the government’s Office of Research and Decrees of the Supreme Court went a step further by issuing an order to dismiss all female civil servants from their posts. The decree stated that “women need not leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case, they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; do not wear perfume; their jewelery must not make any noise; they are not to walk gracefully or with pride and in the middle of the sidewalk” (Emadi 2002, 124).

The decrees promulgated under the Taliban regime presented the same recommendations. The Taliban did not introduce a radically new political agenda but officialized dress codes and social conduct for both men and women, which were in any case followed by the majority of the population under the different mujahideen governments for fear of repression.

The high hopes that greeted the arrival of the new mujahideen government were quickly dashed as conflict erupted between the different factions in the coalition. Most of Kabul was reduced to rubble as ceasefires were agreed to and then quickly broken. As alliances changed, the front lines of conflict shifted within the city. There were widespread reports of women being raped as different factions wrested control of opposing neighborhoods of the city. Women, who represented the majority of trained teachers and nurses, lost their employment due to the closing and destruction of most of the city’s infrastructure.

The mujahideen rule was therefore the blueprint upon which the Taliban phenomenon could rise. Instead of a breach in policies, the Taliban regime radicalized the mujahideen legacy. Their success in getting control over the country was not the result of their fundamentalist ideology, which was generally perceived as excessive and unacceptable among the majority of the population, but rather the outcome of a well-trained and properly equipped military contingent gradually gaining strength as the country grappled with war and destruction.

The Taliban Rule, 1996–2001

The Taliban emerged in a political vacuum created by the civil war and people’s longing for security and the end of conflict between the different mujahideen factions. The movement was created in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan where its major figures received religious and military education. Indeed in 1977, Pakistan’s dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, enforced an Islamic constitution, ostensibly to bring legal, social, economic, and political institutions of the country in conformity with the Koran. He unsurprisingly backed the Afghan militants in Peshawar and financed the building of thousands of madrassas in the vicinity of refugee camps with help from Saudi Arabia. Impoverished Afghan widows reassured by the promise of regular meals and a minimum education eagerly entrusted their sons to the care of the madrassas that became the training grounds for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda supporters. Herded in decrepit boardinghouses, cut off from contact with mothers and sisters, they were fed an extremely simplified messianic Islam, which was to become the Taliban creed. Three years after their emergence on the Afghan military scene, the Taliban had taken control of over 80 percent of Afghanistan. As they gradually consolidated their power, security improved in the cities, facilitating exchanges and circulation of goods and therefore reviving the economy.

According to Nancy Dupree (2001, 151), the Taliban’s decision to impose the strict curtailment of women together with their compulsory veiling under chadari in public was a means for the regime to “send a message of its intent to subordinate the personal autonomy of every individual, thereby strengthening the impression that it was capable of exercising control over all aspects of social behaviour, male and female.” When the international community reacted against these measures and denounced what became labeled as “gender apartheid,” the Taliban high authorities argued that their aim was to ensure their sisters’ security in a period when the priority was the establishment of law and order. Whether or not the limitations imposed on women would have progressively disappeared had the Taliban totally eliminated their opponents and had been recognized by the international community remains a difficult question to answer. However, the Taliban policies were marked by many contradictions and inconsistencies that left much room for interpretation and accommodation at the local level.

The Taliban central government was far from functioning effectively. Its base of power lay primarily in a very young militia nurtured in the isolation of ultraconservative madrassas where they imbibed ideas by rote without the encouragement of open inquiry. Most of them had never been exposed to urban living. The weakness of the central government allowed decisions to be made to a great extent at the local level. Women’s condition therefore varied from one region to another according to the degree of flexibility of the local Taliban authorities (N. H. Dupree 2001).

The management of local affairs was deeply reliant on local Taliban leaders, some of whom allowed a certain level of negotiation on their policies. It is in the cities where women had traditionally enjoyed a greater degree of personal autonomy that the rules imposed by the new regime appeared the harshest. As the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, they closed schools and Kabul University to female students and teachers. These policies had a devastating impact on both boys’ and girls’ education as women represented an important proportion of teachers and university professors. Women’s seclusion was announced on Radio Sharia on the day Kabul fell into Taliban’s hands. During the entire length of the Taliban rule, the regime would inform the population about new rules and regulations through this same station: “Women, you should not step outside of your residence. If you go outside the house you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing cosmetics and appearing in front of every man before the coming of Islam Women should not create such opportunity to attract the attention of useless people who will not look at them with a good eye. Women have the responsibility as a teacher and coordinator for her family. Husband, brother, father have the responsibility for providing the family with the necessary life requirements (food, clothes, etc.)” (Rostami-Povey 2007, 24).

But men were not protected from the regime’s hold on their lives. The length of their beard and the appropriateness of their clothes were under the constant scrutiny of the religious police. The regime focused upon punishing them for infractions committed by their female relatives, reflecting the acceptance of male responsibility for controlling women (N. H. Dupree 2001).

In a matter of a few decades, Afghanistan had moved from a regime that in the 1920s, under the reign of King Amanullah, had imposed the wearing of European clothes in Kabul to a regime that wanted to break away from any form of Western influence and return to what it perceived as “authentic tradition.” In both cases, ideas about modernity and tradition were translated in regulations targeting individuals’ physical appearance in public spaces. This disciplining of bodies and the specific emphasis on regulating and controlling women’s appearance in public are symptomatic of the broader struggle between Kabul and its peripheries, on one hand, and the irreconcilable viewpoints of the reformist elite and the Islamists, on the other hand. Women’s bodies stood at the front line of this ideological battle. The failure of the successive governments to carry out positive development projects in the peripheries together with foreign interference in internal affairs had produced a unique form of countermodernity.

As a social, ideological, and political phenomenon the Taliban are indeed utterly modern. The origin of the Taliban movement, its military development, and its political project highlight characteristic features of globalized warfare. Their emergence on the Afghan political scene is not to be interpreted as a simple return to an authentic Afghan tradition. On the contrary, the global assemblages in which the movement was enmeshed provided the fertile ground from which tradition could be imagined and reinvented. These assemblages are partially the products of the influence of external Islamic sources on their political ideology. Educated in madrassas, the Taliban were introduced to the Deobandi school of thoughts by semi-literate Pakistani mullahs associated with Pakistan’s Jami’at-e Ulema-e Islam (JUI) political party (Rashid 2002). A lack of appreciation on the part of the mullahs of the reformist Deobandi agenda brought the schools and their curricula closer to ultraconservative Wahhabism (founded in Saudi Arabia), which claims to teach strict adherence to the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and the Four “rightly guided” Caliphs (Rashid 1999, 26). This interpretation of Islam provided the ideological framework from which the Taliban formulated their opposition first to the Communist government and later on to the mujahideen in cultural terms that were relatively efficient to rally the rural masses, especially in the Pashtun southern part of the country. Deobandi Islam had no roots in Afghanistan; however, it provided a template for reinterpreting the Pashtun code of honor, codifying it through decrees and finally unevenly implementing it at the national level when they came to power. Second, the Taliban political project is quintessentially cosmopolitan. Armed by Pakistan, supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia, and trained by transnational Islamic mercenaries, the Taliban were well equipped to win on the military front. Their political agenda aimed at creating a pure Islamic state based on sharia law, a state that would protect people from the polluting West. Ironically, the ones who called themselves “Taliban” (literally, “students in religion”) were often illiterate and therefore unable to read a line of the Koran.

Most of them had had little contact with women prior to entering the capital city. Like the young mujahideen who came to Kabul in 1992, they shared “similar ideas about upright female behaviour: ‘good’ women stay home, ‘bad’ women expose their faces” (N. H. Dupree 2001, 150). However, the policies that they implemented regarding women provoked adaptations that were far from their initial intent. As Nancy Dupree points out (2001, 160), women creatively adjusted to this political change by making their own fashion statements. Reporting on the forced veiling of women under chadari, she writes: “Burnt orange and forest green are fashionable in Jalalabad; various clear shades of blue accented by occasional canary yellow flit about Kabul; black was never usual, except among some groups in Herat. Made mostly of soft artificial silk, the veils shimmer and billow with a certain mysterious seductiveness.”

The Taliban enforced the total curtailment of women’s freedom to move, to work, and to be educated. Discrimination was officially sanctioned and pervaded every aspect of women’s lives. Girls were forbidden to attend school, even when provided at home. Women faced draconian punishment for adultery. Women were denied the freedom to work and were forbidden to leave their homes unless completely veiled under chadari and accompanied by a male relative (mahram). Such restrictions were particularly alien to women in Kabul and many were slow to comply. Confrontations between women and the religious police supervised by the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, the most powerful arm of the regime, occurred daily until, paralyzed by fear, women finally complied. Women were beaten up in the streets for wearing nail polish, white socks (the color of the Taliban flag), shiny shoes, or a chadari that was not long enough (N. H. Dupree 2001, 152).

These recent and traumatic events are strongly engrained in the psyche of urban women. In spite of their fear, many women, often with the support of male family members, started to organize underground activities and support networks. These activities helped them cope with the stress of their secluded life. By morally supporting each other and providing services for their community, women regained a sense of worth and usefulness.

Most women who conducted such activities did not view their involvement as a political act but as a survival strategy, deeply embedded in the material conditions of their everyday lives. To be able to run such activities and keep a minimum of mobility, women had to develop creative strategies. Some of them recruited and employed fake mahrams when male relatives were not available. Others mobilized other women from public spaces where women’s presence was not suspicious such as mosques and ziharat (sites of pilgrimage). During this period, the chadari became a protective device, a “mobile home” that allowed women to circulate in public spaces without being questioned or threatened. Women used their chadari to smuggle books and stationery for their schools, the same way they had smuggled weapons during the jihad.

Thanks to these informal courses secretly attended, many young women managed to continue their education and to escape from total isolation. Women demonstrated a real sense of creativity and ingenuity in the face of particularly difficult economic and social conditions. For most women, belonging to a network was a means to escape from boredom and to find moral support. By attending or running courses, women opened for themselves spaces where they could share their sorrows and exchange small services. If these everyday small acts of resistance empowered women and enhanced their self-confidence, they led them to sternly challenge broader gender hierarchies, especially in a context where maintaining social relations was and is still perceived as vital.

The Taliban regime affected different women in different ways. The relative peace the Taliban brought in rural areas provided women with a sense of safety they had not been able to enjoy during the civil war. The stability they recovered during this period allowed them to participate in the local economy. In cities, however, the brutality with which the Taliban implemented their policies remains a traumatic experience for most women.

Conclusion

The addition of a veil over Queen Soraya in the portrait gallery of the Ministry of Information and Culture just after the collapse of the Taliban while at the same moment images of women lifting their veils in the streets of Kabul were broadcast on Western TV channels as symbols of “women’s liberation” underlines the complex and contested position of women in the reconstruction period. Their bodies, at times veiled and hidden, at others displayed and unveiled, are sites of political struggles over national identity. From the 1920s onward, the “woman question” has been manipulated to serve political purposes and to assert opposite views of civilization. The archive pictures that illustrate this chapter should not be taken at face value: their purpose was less to document everyday life in Afghanistan than to promote an image of progress and development for external audiences. The display of images of women taking part in public life, wearing Western clothes, and working side by side with men was meant to portray Afghanistan as contemporary to “modern and civilized” nations.

A closer look at the history of women in Afghanistan demonstrates how, in addition to gender, other sets of variables such as class and the urban/rural divide have to be taken into account in order to understand the variety of women’s experiences. Women in the countryside benefited neither from the expanding public services nor from the dynamic cultural and intellectual movements and events that made the period prior to the Soviet occupation exhilarating for urban women. The revolutionary changes and relatively liberal social values and norms experienced by educated middle- and upper class women in the 1960s and 1970s stood in stark contrast to the tribal and traditional values shaping the life of the majority of Afghan women at the time.

The plight of Afghan women under the Taliban rule was widely publicized in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States as one of the humanitarian issues justifying intervention. However, the political context in which the Taliban movement emerged was hardly mentioned. Their gender discriminatory policies, which resulted in the social exclusion of women, were mostly explained by misidentified expressions of local “culture.” But the Taliban did not arise out of thin air. The emergence of religious fundamentalism in the region has been the result of broader geopolitical developments that involved the interference of foreign countries such as the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia during the Cold War period.

Finally, the history of Afghanistan shows that reforms aimed at changing the status of women raised hopes and fears, expectations and resistance in the social arena. From the reign of Amanullah to the Taliban regime, the contested rights of women became a primary symbol of the new order. All efforts by reformist kings from the early twentieth century onward were doomed due to their incapacity to incorporate the rural peripheries into their programs and to envision indigenous paths for social transformation. When the Communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women’s rights under a secular framework and through coercion, acute civil strife ensued.

The Islamist movements that have regained power in the region since the 1980s have focused on the disciplining of women’s bodies because they represent a political site of difference and resistance to the homogenizing and egalitarian forces of Western modernity (Göle 1996). By promoting the return to strict Islamic clothing, these movements attempt to reassert a collective identity. Far from being a return to greater religiosity and ritual practice, these movements have focused, like the modernists before them, on lifestyles and attitudes in public because they signal shared societal values and moral norms.