Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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resulted in the leftist coup d’état of April 1978.
Cultural and Artistic Life
For urban upper- and middle-class women, the reign of Zahir Shah was a period of openness and freedom. Afghanistan was at peace. Located on the hippie trail, Kabul attracted tourists from Europe and North America, searching for spirituality, adventure, and cheap drugs. In Kabul, Chicken and Flower Streets had shops, cafés, guesthouses, and restaurants where Afghans and foreigners met, intermingled, and sometimes made friends.
Figure 6. Record store, Kabul. From Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways (Afghanistan Ministry of Planning, 1969), 145.
Radio Television Afghanistan broadcast foreign movies in which new lifestyles were promoted. With the creation of the first national film production company, Afghan Film, in 1965, the Afghan film industry blossomed. It produced documentaries and news films highlighting the official meetings and conferences of the government before it started to produce its first feature films in the 1970s. Radio Kabul, later on renamed Radio Afghanistan, the state-owned radio, hosted a whole generation of modern Afghan artists such as Ustad Mohammad Hussain Sarahang, Ustad Farida Mahwash,1 and Ustad Mohammad Hashem Cheshti. These master musicians were revered not only in Afghanistan but also in India, Pakistan, and the entire Middle East. King Zahir Shah promoted dramatic art by creating the National Theatre Company and building Kabul National Theatre, and with its construction the first generation of female actresses were recruited.
Figure 7. “Radio Kabul announcer during one of the station’s many daily news programmes.” From Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways (Afghanistan Ministry of Planning, 1969), 110.
This version of “modernity” that the different governments, from Amanullah to Zahir Shah and later on Daud and the Communists, tried to impose remained largely alien to the majority of the Afghan population. Outward looking, the agenda of reforms and foreign tastes kept the poorer classes alienated from the process. This reconfiguration of Afghan identity along values and lifestyles considered as “foreign” indicated a move away from a traditional Islamic lifestyle that did not help unite the Afghan population and in fact achieved the opposite. Ideals of equality conveyed by the new media challenged patriarchal authority and created intense public distress. The visibility of women in public life disturbed the norm of private family life, turning women and sexuality into contested political matters. Modernists envisioned the veiling of women as the main obstacle to Westernization, while the Islamists saw it as the leading symbolic force against the degeneration of society (Göle 1996, 52). The absence of communication between the ruling class and the rural majority was largely caused by the secular criteria for modernization. This meant cultural alienation for those who felt threatened by these new norms, a situation that became acute when a Marxist modernizing elite started to exert its influence within the government from the mid 1960s onward.
The Communist Regime, 1979–92
In 1965 the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was formed, a pro-Communist group that may have helped Mohammad Daud to seize power from his cousin King Zahir Shah and declare Afghanistan a republic in 1973. He was toppled in turn by his former PDPA allies in April 1978 during what is known as the Saur Revolution.
The Communist period was marked by a proactive approach toward the implementation of gender policies. Decrees were introduced as part of a program of social and political reforms intended to effect the rapid transformation of a patriarchal society (Moghadam 2004, 454). For instance, a decree limited the payment of bride-price and gave greater freedom of choice to women with respect to marriage. Another one raised the marriagable age for girls to sixteen years. In addition, the government launched an aggressive literacy program aimed at educating women and removing them from seclusion (Majrooh 1989, 90). However, in the city each family accommodated aspects of modernity compatible with their general lifestyle, which generally meant a certain degree of compliance with patriarchal demands and norms when it came to important decisions regarding female mobility and, above all, marriage. Such intimate family matters belonged then as now to personal space (mahrem) and still suffer no interference in urban and rural families alike.
During this period, women were present in all major government departments as well as in the police force, the army, business, and industry. Women taught, studied, and acted as judges in the Family Court, dealing with issues related to divorce, custody of children, and other family matters. They composed over 75 percent of teachers, 40 percent of medical doctors, and almost 50 percent of civil servants, all of them city based (Emadi 2002).
Women were also present in the different ranks of the party and the government with the exception of the Council of Ministers. The Loya Jirga (parliament) counted seven female members in 1989. The Central Committee of the PDPA included Jamila Palwasha and Ruhafza (alternate member), “a working-class grandmother and ‘model worker’ at the Kabul Construction Plant, where she did electrical wiring” (Moghadam 2002, 24). Women were working in security, in intelligence, and on the police force. They were employed as logisticians in the Defense Ministry. In 1989, all female members of the PDPA received military training and weapons.
The true innovation of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan was the women’s branch of the party, the Democratic Organization of Afghan Women, also founded in 1965, which set about to address specifically every aspect of women’s conditions, not only limited to issues of marriage, with the aim of turning women into citizens and partners in an egalitarian secular society (Moghadam 1994).
The program of the DOAW was very much based on strategies of public visibility, which involved women’s enrollment in grand marches organized by the party to foster ideas of women’s emancipation. Nancy Hatch Dupree writes: “Frequently, these grand marches ended in ‘volunteer clean-up’ sessions, and the people of Kabul were treated for the first time to the sight of girls wielding brooms, sweeping the streets in public in the company of men” (1984, 318).
Nevertheless, the distance between reforms on paper and actual practice was considerable. The DOAW and its supporters were generally sophisticated cosmopolitan middle- to upper-class women with a foreign education—just like the progressive circles around Kings Habibullah and Amanullah with equally limited connections to the rural majority. According to Nancy Hatch Dupree (1984, 317), women activists under the Communist regime were totally co-opted to “the purposeful manipulation of the women’s movement as an appendage to national politics.” As a result, no strong and well-organized women’s movement emerged from this period.
In the countryside, the imposition of compulsory education for both boys and girls, forced enrollment of men and women in “detachments for the Defence of the Revolution,”2 and coercive secularization attempts provoked strong resentment and resistance. In general, gender policies implemented under the Soviet occupation were imposed with little sensitivity for local codes and practices, often using heavy-handed tactics to implement programs. The PDPA coup of 1978 met with violent opposition not so much because of its progressive ideology but because of its brutal implementation, which cost the lives of thousands of Afghan citizens. The reforms, instead of being presented in a pragmatic, technical manner, were given a Marxist packaging that alienated the vast majority of the population. Compulsory education, especially for women, was largely perceived as an encroachment of the state in families’ private affairs. The secular narrative that accompanied the reforms was seen as going against tradition, as antireligious, and as a challenge to male authority. This lack of regard for religious and societal sensibilities resulted in massive backlash, especially in rural areas.
Figure 8. General Khotul Mohammadzai, 1970s. Collection of Julie Billaud.
Figure 9. “Women at a demonstration in Kabul” (original caption). From The Revolution