This paper examines two Persian-language cookbook translations published by the Afghan state in 1895 and 1919 as tools of statecraft, challenging traditional understandings of "domesticity" in early twentieth-century Afghan history and situating these culinary texts in global culinary history and transregional circuits of knowledge production. The 1895 translation of a British Indian text, Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables, was produced for Amir Abdur Rahman Khans' court, aligning the Persianate-imperial regime with hybrid British-Indian tastes and colonial circuits of knowledge. Decades later, Mahmoud Samis' 1919 translation of the Ottoman cookbook Ev Kad & imath;n & imath; (The Housewife) was commissioned for the Maktabi Harbiya (Military School), decoupling domestic science from the housewife and repurposing it to train young male bureaucrats and officers. Both translations, produced by and for men, utilized the state printing press to promote transregional blueprints for modernity-Indian and Ottoman, respectively-in the formation of an elite, modern Afghan subject. These translations reveal how modern discourses of domesticity resonated beyond strictly domestic contexts and could be used as instruments for constructing state authority and defining modern Persianate tastes beyond exclusively Eurocentric norms and circuits.
This study analyses the complex social impacts of the Arab conquests in Bactria during the early eighth century, moving beyond simple Arabicisation and Islamicisation models. Based on an analysis of Arabic historical narratives and Bactrian and Arabic documentary sources, the article demonstrates that the conquests and their effects were highly non-linear, dictated by evolving local and regional socio-political contexts. The primary catalyst for sustained social change was the Umayyad policy shift from isolated military garrisons to urban settlement among the local population in cities like Balkh. This intensive, reciprocal social contact triggered the widespread adoption of Islamic ideology, legal regulations (e.g., manumission laws), institutions, and infrastructure (mosques), even as Arabs assimilated Bactrian legal and cultural norms. Crucially, while Islamicisation advanced steadily, Arabicisation failed to gain traction. This resistance can be explained by Bactrias' deeply rooted multilingual history, demonstrating that socio-religious transformation in the Eastern Iranian regions was profoundly asynchronous.
This paper chronicles the improbable saga of the Inland Exploration Company and its abortive oil concession within Afghanistan. Led by former US diplomat Charles Calmer Hart and geologist Frederick Gardner Clapp and backed by a variety of domestic financiers, Inland managed to obtain a national concession within the Afghan kingdom in 1936. This episode represented the peak of Kabuls' interwar effort to engage the United States as a strategic counterweight to British and Soviet influence. Operating without State Department support, the ambitious Hart and Clapp contended with geopolitical rivalries and the efforts of rivalfirms, often relying on showmanship and guile. Their endeavor collapsed suddenly in spring 1938, undone by wider trends in the global oil market, local-level Afghan resistance, and the looming threat of another world war. The Inland saga illuminates interwar Afghan diplomacy, the historical role of smaller petroleum firms, and the wider importance of oil in modern Afghan history.
This article investigates how the Shughnani Ismaili diaspora from Afghanistan observes a funeral ceremony called chirāgh-i rawshan (“the luminous lamp”) in Montréal, Canada. Using qualitative research and an interdisciplinary approach, it investigates the intersection of migration and ritual to analyse changes in the performance of this ceremony and its effect on ritual experiences. Situating the Shughnani Ismailis within the global Ismaili community, it sheds light on the communal dynamics of the Ismaili community in Montréal, Canada. The findings demonstrate that migration disrupts ritual performances, prompting the Shughnani Ismailis to continually adapt and (re)interpret the ritual’s symbolic meanings, gender roles, and ritual spaces to make sense of their belonging among their Ismaili co-religionists and within the broader Canadian society.
In the 1980s the predominantly Tajik party Jamiat-i Islami led by Burhanuddin Rabbani was one of the most powerful mujahideen factions that fought against the Soviet occupation. The West saw in its military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud a charismatic figure endowed with great strategic skills and considered the Jamiat a “moderate” and inclusive force, unlike the Hezb-i Islami and other “Islamist” factions. This image would be an enduring one, lasting well into the 1990s, when many in the West viewed the Jamiat as a viable alternative to the interpretation of Islam espoused by the Taliban. And yet, little was, nor indeed is today, known about its program and vision for the future. This article analyses the content and language of the journal Mirror of Jehad and the newsletter AFGHANews with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the ideology of the Jamiat-i Islami and of the message it wanted to convey through its English-language propaganda material.
This article investigates the socio-political processes that have contributed to the ethnocultural alienation and marginalisation of Hazaras in Afghanistan, with a focus on their historical evolution and contemporary implications. It utilises Frantz Fanon’s theory of cultural alienation as its theoretical framework, critically analysing 20 interview responses from members of the Hazara community. Grounded in a critical analysis of Afghanistan's complex political history and ethnic hierarchies, the article argues that structural violence, systematic discrimination against Hazaras, and their exclusion from key socio-political structures have played a pivotal role in the adaptation of a survival strategy of denying their ethno-cultural origins. This denial is evident in the alteration of ethnic identities on Tazkeras (national identity cards), where Hazaras sometimes identify as Pashtuns, Tajiks, or Qizilbash. Such ethnic falsification highlights adaptive strategies to evade discrimination and secure socio-economic advantages.
This essay examines the views of British officials and Afghan intellectuals between 1901 and 1919, a period when the Afghan state significantly reduced corporal punishments. British agents and officers criticized these reductions, arguing that the Afghan population was trapped in an earlier stage of history that required harsh physical penalties. Believing in a linear progression of history with Britain at the forefront and Afghanistan bringing up the rear as a “semi-savage” nation, they insisted that physical punishment was essential for molding Afghans into law-abiding citizens. In contrast, Afghan intellectuals praised their government’s reductions in corporal punishment, viewing them as a return to normality after two decades (1880–1901) of unusually harsh penal laws. While Afghan intellectuals also held that their country trailed the West in education, science, and technology, they viewed history as a complex process in which all peoples, including Afghans, could rapidly develop and come to play equally dynamic roles.
This article examines the body of rules that the Taliban has enacted to institutionalize the propagation of virtue and enjoinment of vice by presenting a critique of the institution from within the Islamic tradition. In so doing, this study reveals important tensions in the way that the Taliban has tried to constitute the suggesting similar tensions in the project of Islamic state-building more generally. It illustrates the incongruities that exist in the jurisprudential constitution of this institution between a desire to constitute the ministry as the morality police of an Islamic state and the competing demands of due process, prohibition of extrajudicial punishments, protection of privacy, respect for jurisprudential plurality, and equal application of sharia to the ruler and the ruled in Islamic jurisprudence.
The Taliban capture of Kabul on August 15, 2021, was the final nail in the coffin of the failed peace process between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban. Drawing on both rationalist and ideationalist approaches to peace processes in peace and conflict resolution literature, this article highlights seven causes of the failure of these peace negotiations. These include a flawed peace design, lack of mediator and guarantor, costly concessions, indivisibility, ideology and identity, and the absence of a mutual stalemate.
This article represents a critical intervention on the monosemantic use of the terms “taliban” and “talib” in light of the rise of the militant Islamic movement in Afghanistan (and subsequently also Pakistan), which has now established its central government over Afghanistan for the second time. Employing the tools of critical discourse analysis, first the role of investigative journalists and scholars of various academic disciplines in cementing this singular meaning of “taliban” is highlighted. It then outlines the manifold historical semantics of this oftentimes quite positively evaluated term across the Pashtun Borderland are outlined. The article also contains also the implicit plea that scholars need to refrain from having their academic work tainted by their own political proclivities and the rather short-lived interests of political decision-makers and thus to keep a much more open mind.
This article focuses on the interplay between disputed elections, political legitimacy, and effective governance in fragile contexts like Afghanistan, using the case of Panjshir Province to illustrate complex center-periphery dynamics. I draw evidence from the unsuccessful police operation (conducted by security forces deployed from the capital) against the fugitive Keramuddin Keram in Panjshir, which led to a standoff with armed residents, just a year before the collapse of the central government in August 2021. The reactions to the operation were part of a larger, much longer set of grievances that had come to define the relationship between Panjshir and Kabul. Panjshiri elites who once constituted one of the main pillars of power in the early post-2001 order, had increasingly found themselves marginalized, and their four attempts to win the presidency failed. I argue that the unsuccessful police operation is reflective of the way entrenched grievances intersect with the perceived (il)legitimacy of government in consequential ways. Drawing on interviews and observations from fieldwork (2019-2020) and the existing scholarly literature, this article problematizes arguments that reduce the challenges of subnational governance to push-and-pull between the central government and local elites. It draws attention instead to how disputed elections shape, animate and entrench local perceptions about the political system. It also calls into question the externally-led state and democracybuilding trajectory, which overvalues the role of competitive elections in advancing the legitimacy of the client government.
Communities in northern Afghanistan, predominantly Persian-speaking and identifying as ethnically Tajik, remember past wars in everyday practice, material culture, and memorialization processes. Their conception of history connects them to a collective memory that intersects with wars and conflicts in present-day Afghanistan. It also informs how they have contested past governments and the present political climate at the local, national, and international levels. Their collective memory acts as a counterweight to dominant understandings of the past and a critique of a long history of exclusionary politics. Since the fall of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in 2021, they have brought their collective memory with them in exile. This article attempts to understand the current crisis in Afghanistan by centering visual culture as a guide to the social and political history and memory that inform the sentiments of these communities and one of the anti-Taliban opposition groups, the National Resistance Front.
This article brings into conversation the dialectic of religious reform in Afghanistan by engaging with three key scholars and their approaches to the utilization of religion as the source for activating the public toward political participation without armed violence. The shifts and trajectories within their pragmatic political philosophy offers an untapped category of possibilities and counter-movement to the violence and vectors of the Taliban that has employed religion toward terrorism and domination. I argue that religious reform is an intentional cosmology rooted in and referencing the familiar tradition void of dogmatic drama or a return to a utopian past. Reform involves the utilization of the grammar and gnostics of the tradition to align and agitate the population toward change and is most viable by the participation of individuals with mastery of the tradition. Such a path is both a socialization that is rooted in an ethical conduct toward the immediate/self but also the other/outside(r) world.
Gender-related research during the US-led NATO occupation and war in Afghanistan (2001-2021) was embedded in structures of counterinsurgency warfare. Drawing on anti-colonial and feminist and queer theory and based on empirical research in Afghanistan, I introduce the analytic jender bazi (Dari: the gender game) to theorize the configuration of racializing and gendering processes in which gender roles and relations and intimacy were studied in Afghanistan. I argue that the analytic offers new ways to examine how the temporality of knowledge production in neoliberal institutions and organizations reconstructed knowing the labor of Afghans and affective relations in the military-civil infrastructure and time of the occupation. The political and theoretical premises of concepts and frames of analysis in research and writing on cis women and gender politics and the psychology of cis men and masculinities in Afghanistan, I contend, produced a genre thatI refer to as occupation/al writing. The coloniality of Afghanistan studies requires that scholars account for how the affect of institutional affiliations and geopolitics in the age of the neoliberal university contain intellectual discussion and critique in the fi eld.
This article focuses on the description and analysis of postage stamps printed in Afghanistan to commemorate the anniversary of Independence Day. The study covers a period of one hundred years, from 1920 to 2019. Presented chronologically, the analysis identifies various symbols that are connected to the idea of independence and examines the relationships between these symbols and the dynamics of changes on the domestic political scene. The findings suggest a deliberate decision-making process in the selection of symbols, driven by specific ideological and political objectives, although the question regarding the factual influence of the stamp-oriented policy still needs to be researched. The article concludes with statistical data on the frequency of use of individual symbols and provides several examples of the postage stamps analyzed here.
A crown or headwear was considered one of the most important parts of clothing in the past. More than any other article of clothing, it expressed one’s social position and status. As a symbol of royalty in Iran, the design of crowns evolved over different historical periods. At times, it was used as a symbol to show power and authority. At others, it was as a symbol of the tyranny of mighty kings, and sometimes a symbol of luxury and aristocratic life. The Timurid period, with all of its political and social turbulence, is considered one of the most brilliant periods of painting, where new details and subjects appeared. This article investigates the role of crowns and headdresses with a historical descriptive method based on the existing library sources. It shows how the design of the crown in the paintings of the Timurid period was mostly influenced by cultural and religious factors. Timurid artists of the Herat school did not stick to the historical facts. Instead they sought to present an ideal image of the king, following the standards of the era, displaying slight differences in each period and reign.
