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.

In the aftermath of the Western intervention of 2001 in Afghanistan and the new politico-economic order that ensued, the unprecedented wave of returns from exile, the arrival of international development actors and the opening up of the media contributed to the burgeoning of a variety and multiplicity of foreign references, practices, and discourses generating new models of behavior. The interaction with and negotiation of Western development paradigms by Afghan women and men after 2001 has attracted much scholarly attention in recent years – particularly in urban settings. There has been less focus, however, on the ways in which the continued transformation of social relations in contemporary Afghan society is affected by forms of interaction with other sets of references, including from neighboring cultural environments, and the ways in which these references are shaped and processed. Building on 32 months of in-country field research (2015-2019) on processes of cultural transfer through return migration from Iran to Afghanistan, the paper examines how exposure to new ideas, values, elements of lifestyle and behaviors while in exile contributes to a process of re-definition of identity and, ultimately, attitudes toward social norms, particularly as they relate to gender identities and roles. Specifically, it looks into how men and women who grew up in Iran and returned to Afghanistan in the years following the change of regime in 2001 position themselves in the new socio-cultural order through processes of association, negotiation and differentiation. The analysis focuses on narratives by and about return migrants from Iran drawn from semi-directed interviews and participant observation in the urban centers of Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif, as well as textual analysis from media and social media sources. Two tropes in discourses surrounding gender in Afghanistan are explored: the notion of ‘honor’, and that of ‘freedom’, attempting to assess how these two notions are mobilized to delineate or subvert boundaries of identity. It shows the diversity of ways in which these notions are subject to interpretation and produce a wide spectrum of shifting syntheses with paradigmatic discourses on tradition, Islam, and national identity.

The Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the prospect of a peace deal, has raised many concerns - not least of all regarding women's rights. The concerns of Afghan women are, however, often expressed not by them but by others. In general, Afghan women have rarely done the speaking, interpreting, or narrating of their own stories, at least in foreign narratives on Afghanistan. This is particularly true of women living under Taliban rule. This silencing has allowed, and continues to allow, Afghan women to be used as symbols upon which foreign narratives are opportunistically superimposed. Afghan women have thus become a critical discursive battleground in the war for Afghanistan’s future. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork with women living under Taliban control, Taliban commanders and western diplomats, this paper will look at the narrative silencing of Afghan women from multiple angles. Drawing on the work of scholars including Gayarti Spivak, Cynthia Enloe, and Valentine Moghadam, it will examine the narratives around the Taliban and women constructed in 1990s through the US-led invasion to topple the Taliban government. It will then look at representations of Afghan women in contemporary western media and Taliban narratives. In conclusion, it will explore how women living under Taliban control view themselves within these representations.

In “Updating the Gendered Empire: Where Are the Women in Occupied Afghanistan and Iraq?” Cynthia Enloe draws our attention to the absence of women as agents in narratives of conflict, arguing this perpetuates notions of war zones as inherently masculine, violent spaces. To make these claims about Afghanistan today, Enloe draws on a robust body of feminist historiography around the Middle East and South Asia, writers who asked of the archive: where are the women? And found them in the reformist press, novels, poetry, legal sources, but also in the domestic sphere: the kitchen and the brothel. However, when it comes to Afghanistan’s own past this question remains largely unasked. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities and challenges of locating women in the history of Afghanistan through my own work on Islamic reform and state formation in the Aman Allah period (1919-1929). Given the scholarly attention devoted to the monarch’s reforms around marriage and female education — as well as the causal role attributed to these reforms in his overthrow — it is astonishing how silent the literature remains when it comes to women’s participation, even elite women. Where are their voices? What is the value of engaging them when we find them? When we do not find them, can we read productively into the silences? Looking for women reveals elite women in this period — including members of the royal family and the wives and daughters of bureaucrats — served not only as symbols but also agents of change through the institutions of the press, schools, and marriage. Understanding their participation allows us to better evaluate the nature of Aman Allah’s reforms and complicate the simple reading of this period as one in which the state tried and failed to institute social change.