of Islam and kinship in legitimizing claims for rights, especially in the highly sensitive arena of family law.
Chapter 4 is an ethnographic account of young women’s responses to moral panics that have emerged in the national and local press as a result of the appearance of some commodities and cultural products such as cosmetics, fashion, and Indian soap operas on the local market. These panics flagged the threat of moral dilution and cultural pollution and urged policy makers to react in order to reestablish social order. While unpacking the multiple meanings of these moral anxieties, I explore how female students boarding at the National Women’s Dormitory in Kabul struggled to position themselves in a new life environment away from their families. I argue that these young women’s bodily practices revealed a constant tension between the necessary fulfilment of different roles as dutiful and modest daughters and as young urban educated women aspiring to present themselves as “modern” and Muslim. The fact that Islam remained a central element of their self-justification should not be understood as a reflection of the conservative nature of Afghan society but rather as a form of resistance to foreign domination.
Chapter 5 aims to characterize new meanings attached to women’s veiling in the new Islamic republic. While the chadari (burka) has become the ultimate symbol of women’s oppression for Western audiences, it is necessary to take a closer look at its multiple and often contradictory uses and to contextualize the reasons for its maintenance, despite the downfall of the Taliban regime. The ethnographic data I collected among women’s rights activists and women MPs demonstrate that women who are attempting to access public spaces have developed creative strategies of dissimulation to get public recognition. They have become visible under the veil and have sometimes been able to challenge gender hierarchies behind the appearance of compliance and conformity. These findings challenge liberal ideas according to which women’s visibility in public spaces is a necessary guarantee for their emancipation and their agency.
Chapter 6 investigates women’s emotional performances and discourses of suffering, jihad, and martyrdom. I show how these ambiguous communicative tools serve to make commentaries on social relations and gender hierarchies without totally disrupting the honor code and the ideal of female modesty. I also analyze more dramatic gestures, such as suicides, and suggest conceiving of them not as mere signs of despair but rather as nondiscursive communicative acts that are part of women’s broad repertoire of emotional performances. I highlight the ambiguous symbolic power of suicide and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women’s poetic expression.
PART I
Phantom State Building
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,
