Models and Realities of Afghan Womanhood:
A Retrospective and Prospects1
Carol Mann
In order to conceptualise what human rights can signify for women in the dominantly rural
society that is Afghanistan, it is necessary to understand the models and stereotypes available
to them in recent history and how these have been reworked in every day life. Theirs is not an
isolated situation occurring in a vacuum; it has to be understood in relation to the
developments in the Indian sub-continent from the British Raj onwards as well as the spread of
present-day Islamism. In the context of what may well be Asia’s most tribal and patriarchal
society, the resistance to Western modernization is unique in a country which could have been,
alongside Turkey, at the avantgarde of progressive Muslim nations as early as in the 1920s. All
efforts by reformist kings from the early 20th century onwards were doomed and when the
communist government attempted to introduce an egalitarian society and implement women’s
rights after the April revolution of 1978, acute civil strife ensued. This generated full-scale war
when their Soviet allies came to the rescue and the US, through their assistance to
fundamentalist groups, turned this into the last conflagration of the Cold War.
The defeat of positive reform in Afghanistan has produced a unique form of reactionary
modernity, not regression to some kind of archaic past. Contrary to most centralized nations
where the most enduring transformations emerge from the capital and then affect the rest of the
nation, the opposite here has taken place, because the state is as weak as the rural tribal
population is strong.
The situation experienced by Afghan women since the fall of the pro-Soviet government is the
result of the hard line Islamic radicalisation and the exacerbation of traditional patriarchal
practice in refugee camps situated in Pakistan over the past twenty-five years. This push from
the periphery to the centre is the single most difficult challenge faci