The coupling of 'gender' narratives with state (and international actors') projects of development and modernity proscribes a narrow discursive space that leaves out women who do not neatly fit into these categories with their interests and aspirations. While in previous decades this had meant that women were a prime target for development attempts by the Afghan state, in the post-2001 environment, in which the agenda is primarily set by international development actors, the concerns of officials and NGOs to foster civil society without offending religious sensibilities meant that religion received surprisingly little attention. Not only have religious actors and religious civil society been neglected in research, but so have the alternative visions of women who would describe themselves as religious or as Sufi affiliated. Based on 23 months of in-country ethnographic field research (2016-2019) among all three major Sufi associational communities (tariqas/turuq) active in Afghanistan, the paper explores a specific Qadirriyah Sufi group in which women lead dhikr rituals, teach Sufi thought and actively participate in events that their Sufi order runs through the extension of a religious civil society organization. The paper draws both on original field work based on qualitative interviews and participant observation as well as on archival material and analysis of the group's own writing and literature. The analysis focuses on the narratives by and about Sufi women and their positioning within the Sufi group as well as within the wider Afghan society. The paper attends to the social navigation that takes place in claims of un-marking categories and de-gendering claims about women's spiritual equality to men, and the tension in which it stands to other gendered Islamic conceptualization, gendered norms and misleading western conceptions of both Afghan gender norms and Islamic spirituality.