Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022. xiii, 239 pp. US$26.00, paper. ISBN 9781503614710.
Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan is a compelling and poignant exploration of the lives of Afghan women during the 20 years of direct US and Western intervention in Afghanistan. Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi’s study offers a unique perspective on the struggles, resilience, and most importantly the agency of Afghan women as they navigate a society in transition. The book is especially important for its contribution to our knowledge about an Afghanistan where, following this book’s publication in 2021, a regime change resulted in the return of the Taliban to power. In the author’s own words, the book attempts to unpack what it means to be a Muslim feminist in Afghanistan during this time (7):
The life stories of women who live at the khana-yi aman illuminate the anxieties and ambivalences that undergird conversations about Islam, feminism, sexuality, gender, and sexual transgression. The narrative motifs of the khana-yi aman women demonstrate that the production of gendered knowledge regarding a proper Islamic moral ethos has more to do with modern systems of power and their enactment in everyday life than it does with specific interpretations of Islamic texts. Hegemonic discourses undoubtedly shape cultural stances, but cannot completely explain the attitudes and relations manifest in everyday life.
The book consists of six chapters, each reflecting a different aspect of the life of women in khana-yi aman (safe houses or shelters), where women victims of violence were kept in Kabul, Afghanistan. The first chapter highlights an ethnographic study of Afghan women’s resistance within the existing sociocultural and religious norms held by women in the safe houses. The following chapters, while discussing the contextual power apparatuses, and how these women redefine notions such as kinship through their everyday struggles, offer an intellectual history of such concepts as chastity, piety, virtue, and promiscuity using secondary literature from Taliban publications, Islam, and feminist scholarship and newspapers, along with the initial chapters’ ethnographic observations.
This book is even more important in today’s context given that, since its publication, the country has had a regime change with the return of the Taliban to power, resulting in the almost complete dismantling of the safe-house system and mechanisms for women’s protection.
The issue of women’s rights and women’s struggles for sociopolitical roles in Afghanistan remained the most dominant rhetoric of the post-2001 US-led intervention in Afghanistan, both by the international community as well as—to some extent—Afghan politicians. However, for over two decades, the discourse on women’s rights has primarily either represented women’s rights activism as a Western norm and value that was never well received within Afghan society, or portrayed Afghan society as so traditional and conservative that it had no open space for women to emerge as leaders or to take an active role in society. Both these perspectives are well framed by Leila Abu Lughud (the feminist scholar that has inspired the author of this book) as a “feminist imperialist” perspective. However, neither perspective pays enough heed to highlighting the agency of Afghan women. Ahsan-Tirmizi’s book offers unique ethnographic evidence of the everyday experiences of “ordinary Afghan women as they inhabit and resist patriarchal discourses and innovate social manoeuvres and new vocabularies to challenge sexual (and other) injustices” (14).
The author uses an embedded ethnographic method by placing herself in a safe house for women who have run away from home or from violence (17). As one of the founding members of the safe houses for women at risk in post-2001 Afghanistan, I can confirm the complexities and sensitivities involved in allowing a researcher inside a safe house and for the researcher to feel confident enough to abide all rules and ethics of the safe house, and be stationed among the women residing there. Ahsan-Tirmizi also highlights the reputational aspect of these safe houses as “brothels” or “centres for prostitution,” not only among the strict conservative Afghan men, but even sadly among some of the “white men” residing in Kabul (19). Throughout the book, Ahsan unpacks the reasonings for such reputations and unpacks the ways that women actually live in these places. Additionally, Ahsan-Tirmizi’s book is positioned within the scholarship on Islam and feminism, and raises the question of whether the actions and practices of women running away from violence or from their homes consolidates or destabilizes the “power apparatuses that seek to subject her to conformity” (6).
The author highlights an important aspect of the women’s practices at the safe house: “The uniqueness of the khana-yi aman women is that their actions are in harmony with their principles. They are not simply taking a rhetorical position; they are enacting a socially risky, promiscuous position and endangering themselves in the process. In doing so, they are demanding equality and redefining what it means to be equal and pious. While deeply implicated within Western liberation discourses of modernity, the women at the khana-yi aman are unconcerned with debates in the West on Muslim women’s emancipation” (4).
The very nature of not being concerned with liberation-influenced discourses about modernity in the ways they are portrayed in the West, and on the contrary, preserving and maintaining their identities as Muslim and Afghan women practising their beliefs (such as frequently praying, fasting, and observing Muslim obligations), while also supposedly violating socio-religious norms, such as running away from home or committing adultery, reinforces these women’s agency and their attempts to redefine their identity as Muslim Afghan women.
In the following chapters, the author examines the concepts of justice (‘adl) and retribution (‘azab) through the poetry and symbolic gestures of violence, death, and love that women in the safe house recite and read about: “[T]he women I met at the khana-yi aman, whose devastation from witnessing death did not decrease their love for their children. Death was at the core of their humanity. Most of the poems—at least the ones I heard at the khana-yi aman—underscore how love and death are entwined in the lives of ordinary Afghan women. Love, loss, and the danger of death are ever present within these poetic lyrics. This is what renders the women human” (82). “Abandonment will not abandon me, my friend it has swallowed all my lovers” (83).
When it comes to sociocultural and political thinking, the author elaborates that women in the safe houses do represent a diverse group from rural and urban areas, educated and illiterate, holding very different political views; the safe house presents a mosaic of Afghanistan itself, with diverse people and views. Yet, what unifies these women is their common experiences of violence that brought them to one place, the safe house.
In another chapter, “Taliban’s women,” the author highlights women’s resistance to the Taliban’s consolidation of power: “The khana-yi aman demonstrates that Pashtun women do contest their situation in the world, even as they inadvertently become implicated in networks of power beyond their control. While not completely autonomous in relation to the male domains of power, they use social maneuvers to navigate their lives toward a world they want to inhabit: a world not limited by the Taliban creed” (135).
While this book is a captivating read that explores the experiences of Afghan women in safe houses, it could benefit from highlighting the political and economic factors that shape their lives. In parts, the book portrays women fleeing male relatives as fleeing from the Taliban. Ostensibly, this is how women in the safe houses have explained their cases to journalists and donors in order to gain their sympathy. In many cases, however, the women either simply ran away from a relative who was not a Taliban member, or in many cases, sought out the safe house as a shelter due to their relation to members of parliament or other senior government officials. It is also important to highlight that when it comes to the everyday struggles of women in a predominantly patriarchal society, almost all men, and even some women, view safe houses as centres for immoral practices and harbour no sympathy for the women who reside there. It is also important to note that there were many safehouses in Kabul at the time of this book’s research, and what the book portrays may not necessarily represent the conditions in all safehouses in the country at that given time. The value of this book is in diving deeper into the matter.
Ahsan-Tirmizi’s book is a valuable contribution to the literature on women’s rights, gender-based violence, Islam and feminism, and women’s agency in Afghanistan. It offers a sobering look at the challenges that Afghan women tackled during the period of the republic (2002–2021). While most of these mechanisms to protect women have been systematically shut down and deprived of their resources with the return of the Taliban to power, this book’s contribution remains very relevant to our understanding of the nature of the issue around women’s agency, and Afghan women’s resilience, and indeed resistance to the conventional norms within conflict-affected and fundamentalist-ruled contexts. Though the safe houses may no longer exist, the struggles and resistance of these women continue in other ways and forms. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding and unpacking the complex realities of women in Afghanistan and in similar contexts.
Orzala Nemat
SOAS University of London