Teaching & Learning Guide for: Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

In contrast to major developments in general South Asian historiography, the historiography of modern Afghanistan has largely persisted as something of a scholarly throwback to the ‘modernization theory’ trend of the 1950s and 60s. The way Pashtun experiences of Islam have been treated in history writing draws heavily upon this larger modernization-oriented thematic, which in turn has existed in a dialectic with journalistic and policy-oriented writing. This article analyzes a number of scholarly works in which questions of Islam and social change in Pashtun polities form a major focus. The article focuses on works focusing on the pre-1979 situation, which has been examined only perfunctorily in works of authors employing more current analytical techniques. The article identifies a number of appropriate thematic questions in existing work which could improve our understanding of the cultural history of pre-1979 Islam in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and raises a few new questions worth investigating. The US has directly involved itself in the domestic politics of a jihad-torn Afghanistan off and on for around two and a half decades, especially the Pashtun-majority regions notorious in western public opinion for being the heartland of the Taliban movement. One might expect that during this time, US and western-based scholars would develop a sizable body of literature on the historical experience of Islam in Pashtun societies predating the war, and that this literature would have kept pace with contemporary trends in historiographical literature. Curiously, the opposite seems to be the case, perhaps in part because of the effects of the particularly closely linked nature of various intellectual genealogies in Afghanistan studies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and (often imperial) statist policy concerns generally. A reappraisal of the field might then be warranted, especially given the modest upswing in Afghan studies since the commencement of the latest, most overtly involved phase of US-spearheaded western involvement beginning in 2001. Also around two and a half decades ago, Ranajit Guha published his seminal essay ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’ in Subaltern Studies II. That journal devoted to the history of non-elites in India has since opened a number of doors in the social and cultural historiography of colonial South