Afghan Modern

Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a forsaken country frozen in time. Robert Crews presents a bold challenge to this misperception. During their long history, Afghans have engaged and connected with a wider world, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the decades that followed.

Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a forsaken country frozen in time. Robert Crews presents a bold challenge to this misperception. During their long history, Afghans have engaged and connected with a wider world, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the decades that followed.

Examines the evolution of the modern Afghan state in the shadow of Britain's imperial presence in South Asia during the first half of the nineteenth century, and challenges the staid assumptions that the Afghans were little more than pawns in a larger Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry known as the 'Great Game'.

What impact does 40 years of war, violence, and military intervention have on a country and its people? As the "global war on terror" now stretches into the 21st century with no clear end in sight, Identity and Politics in Modern Afghanistan collects the work of interdisciplinary scholars, aid workers, and citizens to assess the impact of this prolonged conflict on Afghanistan. Nearly all of the people in Afghan society have been affected by persistent violent conflict. Identity and Politics in Modern Afghanistan focuses on social and political dynamics, issues of gender, and the shifting relationships between tribal, sectarian, and regional communities. Contributors consider topics ranging from masculinity among the Afghan Pashtun to services offered for the disabled, and from Taliban extremism to the role of TV in the Afghan culture wars. Prioritizing the perspective and experiences of the people of Afghanistan, new insights are shared into the lives of those who are hoping to build a secure future on the rubble of a violent past.

Afghanistan and its people, whether in Afghanistan or in its global diaspora, have generated substantial interest and the desire to understand more about the country is widely felt. This title contains chapters on a wide range of issues, which contribute to our understandings of modern Afghanistan.

The Afghan crisis has grabbed the attention of the entire world, and underlined the desperate need in the West for a better understanding of the region and its challenges in the face of increasingly militant interpretations of Islam. Carved up and fought over by the British and Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century, and under Soviet domination for much of the twentieth, the lonely passes, deserts and peoples of the five Central Asian republics have remained shrouded in obscurity. Even Afghanistan, the site of almost constant conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1978, is little known beyond the media images of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement. Martin McCauley draws on his vast knowledge of the region and its history to provide a clear and highly readable account of Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tasikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, from their medieval pasts to the unpredictable present. Illuminating languages and landscapes, cultures and society, he examines the rise of militant Islam and its impact on the region, the push and pull of global economics and politics, and possibilities for stability in an inherently unstable part of the world.

With the unleashing of the "War on Terror" in the aftermath of 9/11, Afghanistan has become prominent in the news. However, we need to appreciate that no substantive understanding of contemporary history, politics and society of this country can be achieved without a thorough analysis of the Afghan encounter with cultural and literary modernity and modernization. Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan does just that. The book offers a balanced and interdisciplinary analysis of the rich and admirable contemporary poetry and fiction of a land long tormented by wars and invasions. It sets out to demonstrate that, within the trajectory of the union between modern aesthetic imagination and politics, creativity and production, and representation and history, the modernist intervention enabled many contemporary poets and writers of fiction to resist the overt politicization of the literary field, without evading politics or disavowing the modern state. The interpretative moves and nuanced readings of a series of literary texts make this book a major contribution to a rather neglected area of research and study. Winner of the Iranian World Prize for Book of the Year in Islamics Studies 2009

Afghanistan's recent history is a sad one: Soviet invasion in 1979; Pakistan-backed internal conflict in the 1980s; the Taliban regime; and then the US invasion and the multi-national occupation after the events of 11 September 2001. Why does Afghanistan remain so vulnerable to domestic instability, foreign intervention and ideological extremism? In reconstructing the tempestuous narrative of modern Afghanistan, Amin Saikal provides a sweeping new understanding of its troubled past and present. He identifies the country's inability to develop stable political structures as stemming from the inter-dynastic rivalry (complicated by polygamy) that scarred successive royal families from the end of the eighteenth century until the pro-Soviet Communist coup of April 1978, all exacerbated by foreign interventions - feeding on fragile domestic structures - and the rise and fall of different ideological streams. Here, for the first time, is an up-to-date analysis of the era of the Taliban's rule, the effects of US domination in the country and attempts to negotiate a US withdrawal - including talks about talks with the Taliban themselves. This book, which sets the crisis of Afghanistan in the context of the country's modern history and social structures, makes a major and highly original contribution towards a better and more nuanced understanding of this ill-fated land. It is the definitive study of Afghanistan and its troubles in national, regional and international contexts from 1747 to the present day.