States of Change: Women, Islamic Reform, and Transregional Mobility in the Making of 'Modern' Afghanistan

Abstract

This dissertation examines women, Islamic reform, and transregional mobility as they intersected to influence early Afghan state formation. Focusing on the reigns of three monarchs, Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880-1901), Habib Allah Khan (r. 1901-1919), and Aman Allah Khan (r. 1919-1929), it traces reformist ideas and elite actors as they moved between regional hubs through the institutions of the press, education, and individual travel. The project draws on periodicals, educational materials, biographies, and legal texts in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu. Rather than a comparative approach, it foregrounds connections between texts and actors to show how the Afghan state and its related modernist discourses were mediated by transregional elites and through horizontal exchanges that transcended simple metropole-periphery binaries. Focusing on horizontal links allows us to observe modernist Islamic movements — pan-Islamism, Salafi modernism, or Hanafization — not from the vantage point of anti-colonial reactions to western forms of governance but as part of longer traditions that were being transformed and reworked in light of contemporary political circumstances. Afghan women played a central and overlooked role in generating these Pan-Islamic solidarities and producing new frameworks for modernity. In order to excavate their contributions, this dissertation applies a “feminist curiosity” to the sources, locating women and their voices not as the subjects of historical inquiry but rather as actors. Attending to women’s contributions reveals that Islamic legal and social reforms in the early 20th Century were influenced by a small set of elite women. Drawing on transregional registers and the pan-Islamic press, these women narrated new forms of Islamic authority that neither directly reflected the state or its opposition, nor adhered neatly to the other examples of regional women’s reforms with which they were in dialogue. Taken in full, this project illustrates how Shahab Ahmed’s “Balkans-to-Bengal complex,” which has galvanized scholars of the early modern Islamic world to think through new spatial frameworks, endured in turn-of-the-century Middle East and South Asia.