AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0112
M. Jamil Hanifi
{"title":"“Afghan” in Afghanistan: Idols in the Land of Idols","authors":"M. Jamil Hanifi","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0112","url":null,"abstract":"A perennial anomaly in the academic, political, and popular discourse about “Afghan” and “Afghanistan” is the chronic absence of an informed and systematic engagement with the epistemology and semantic construction of the Persian identity label “Afghan” and its derivative use in the cultural, political, social, and spatial configuration of “Afghanistan.” This article offers a brief overview of, and a corrective to, this cultural and linguistic disposition. The essay examines the widespread use, the cultural and historical roots, and linguistic seeds of the ethnonym “Afghan” and its derivative toponymal “Afghanistan.” The essay excavates the Buddhist stance and the epistemological cradle of the Persian morpheme from which the term “Afghan” is derived. This exercise in the ethnology of Afghanistan locates the country and its people in historical “deep time” and in the context of several cultural layers and processes rather than a cultural construct in isolation. It aims to serve as a springboard for a corrective etymological awareness for the production of academic and political texts and discourse dealing with Afghanistan and its people.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135849871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0103
Fatima Mojaddedi
{"title":"Notes on the Wire: Telegraphic Opening and Ideology in Modern Afghanistan","authors":"Fatima Mojaddedi","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0103","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the cultural and political force of the telegraph in early twentieth-century Afghanistan where new media technology influenced the social milieu and transformed the sense of contemporary consciousness. I consider how wired and wireless telegraphy were interwoven with Allied imperial aims in the inter-war years and specifically how they became a much-anticipated medium of global connectivity and of ideological anxiety and political sabotage. I argue that at the heart of this tension there was a much deeper ambivalence about the place of ideological and cultural difference in the modern era of technological acquisition and a concomitant anxiety about the task of interpreting that difference.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47921708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0102
Neela Hassan
{"title":"Why Parents Sent their Daughters to School: A Qualitative Study of Girls’ Schooling in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan in 2018","authors":"Neela Hassan","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0102","url":null,"abstract":"Afghanistan's history suggests that women's rights are integrally connected to cultural norms and political power. Known as the worst place for women and having the highest level of gender inequality in education, Afghanistan and its people are often portrayed in the Western media as passive and backward individuals with sexist and uncivilized cultural values. This study examines the questions of women's access to education in post-2001 Afghanistan based on the narratives and accounts of schoolgirls and their parents in one of the most insecure provinces of Afghanistan. The study was conducted in the summer of 2018. It draws on 18 semi-structured, in-depth qualitative interviews with schoolgirls and their parents in Kandahar, a southern province of Afghanistan that was the battlefield for the Taliban and American forces for over twenty years. The findings suggest that pragmatic reasons such as security, poverty, and access were the most significant barriers to girls’ education, challenging the traditional assumptions that perceive Afghan cultural values as the only obstacle to girls’ education. I argue that contrary to the stereotypical depiction of Afghanistan and its culture, local actors and cultural values played a vital role in promoting girls’ education.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48960722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0104
Hakeem Naim
{"title":"The Genesis of the Afghan Mashrūṭah Movement","authors":"Hakeem Naim","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0104","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies the global and transnational history of the Afghan constitutionalist (mashrūṭah) movement in the early twentieth century. It aims to contribute to the intellectual history of Afghanistan and examine it within the history of modernity, Islam, and reforms in the region, particularly in the late Ottoman Empire. It rejects the notion that the Afghan mashrūṭah movement was an indistinct group of people with a unitary ideology and argues that the Afghan mashrūṭah was an intellectually, socially, ethnically, politically diverse and complex movement, the product of intellectual, political, religious, and economic interactions of Afghans with multifaceted global ideologies such as colonialism, nationalism, Ittihad-i Islam, and top-down modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44209330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0101
B. Auer
{"title":"Marriage, Political Alliance, and Imperial Polities in Early Ghaznavid History","authors":"B. Auer","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0101","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how marriages were utilized in early Ghaznavid history to forge political alliances, establish relationships of power and to bind together different royal family households. Marriage was employed as a diplomatic tool to ease political tensions and to strengthen coalitions. The Ghaznavid ruler Maḥmūd (r. 388–421/998–1030) utilized marriage alliances with great success to consolidate and expand his territories. In 391/1001, he forged a coalition with the Karakhanids through a marriage to the daughter of Naṣr b. ʿAlī (d. 403/1012–3). In 406/1015–16, Maḥmūd married his own sister Ḥurra Kāljī to the Khwarazmshah al-Maʾmūn II (r. 399–407/1009–17). This paper attempts to answer unstudied questions concerning the role of marriage and the influence of female royal family members in the construction of imperial polities of the medieval period in Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. It shows that the effective creation of strategic marriage alliances was a key factor in the success of the early Ghaznavid empire.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48341786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0107
{"title":"Abbreviations used in Afghanistan","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0107","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47821150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2022.0095
A. Shihadeh
{"title":"Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Ghūrid Self-Fashioning","authors":"A. Shihadeh","doi":"10.3366/afg.2022.0095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2022.0095","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the intellectual production of the celebrated scholar Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) during the decade or so he spent in the service of the Ghūrid sultans, from ca. 591/1195 to 602/1206. Operating exclusively within religious disciplines—theology, law and Qurʾān exegesis—and displaying pronounced rhetorical and dialectical features, this production contrasts significantly with his earlier and later production, which most notably exhibits much closer engagement with philosophy. It is argued that this “Ghūrid interlude” in al-Rāzī’s production reflects his role in spearheading the sultans’ project of divesting from the socially and culturally peripheral Karrāmiyya and fashioning themselves as champions of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan orthodoxy, and is furthermore aligned with his patrons’ transregional policies, including their pro-Abbasid stance. Al-Rāzī was in return invested by the Caliph al-Nāṣir with the title “he who summons people to the True One” (al-dāʿī li-l-khalq ilā l-ḥaqq), more commonly attested as “he who summons to God” (al-dāʿī ilā llāh). The article also offers a new examination of al-Rāzī’s Ghūrid-period intellectual biography and oeuvre.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42478396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}