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,
