Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi. 2021. Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan.Standford, CA: Standford University Press. 239 pp., ISBN: 9781503614710

Keywords: Afghan women, Taliban, Khana-yi-aman, landay, Promiscuous modernity, honor, ethics, piety, selfhood.

Pious Peripheries opens with the question of what happened to the runway Muslim women living in Khana-yi-aman (“home of safety”) after the second fall of Afghanistan back to the rule of the Taliban regime in 2021. The work of Ahsan-Tirmizi is a deeply anthropological endeavor in both thought and content. It unveils the underexplored narratives behind a shelter built to host Afghan women who have run away from their homes for different reasons (including abuse, rape, and violence). The shelter was established by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) in 2001 to handle women’s rights issues in Afghanistan. Now, the MoWA has been replaced with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in  September 2021.

Ahsan-Tirmizi’s ethnographic articulations as both a participant observer and an empathized activist, and her autoethnographic insights as an insider woman who can speak Pashto through seventeen years of growing up in Peshawar, provide unparalleled richness to the text. At the backdrop of wider scholarship on Islam and feminism, particularly related to the Taliban and Afghanistan, Ahsan-Tirmizi takes the promiscuous self of the runaway Muslim woman as a central aspect of the project, looking beyond the binary understanding of tradition and modernity and affirming the idea that the everyday struggles of Afghan women are not limited to the consolidation of norms and their subversion.

The study consists of six chapters, which are painstakingly written with first-hand accounts of Khana-yi-aman in Kabul. The first three chapters are ethnographic illustrations of Khana-yi-aman and the diverse modes of struggles taking place there. The following three chapters speak about three power structures: Taliban, Pashtuwali, and Islam, and the configuring meanings of piety, chastity, and promiscuity in both Taliban and non-Taliban (feminist and modernist) literature. Additionally, the introductory part highlights major theoretical and methodological inputs that make this text unique, such as dismantling the binary between tradition and modernity and proposing the notion of the promiscuous modern, connecting how running away is interwoven with sexual transgression through the views of the Taliban and the state. The conclusion reveals the intellectual goal behind the project which is not to give voice to the women, but to talk about the ambivalent everyday struggles of the runaway women within the context of gendered piety in Afghanistan.

The first chapter, Shelter, delves into the structure of Khana-yi-aman and its ordinary operations in governing the everyday lives of the runaway women. The home was essentially viewed as a house for women who were categorized as adulterous or promiscuous and acted as a halfway house between prison and community reintegration. Ahsan-Tirmizi conveys a paradox regarding this institution: on one hand, Taliban supporters believe that women’s rights organizations protected promiscuous women and encouraged noncompliant sexual attitudes among them. Simultaneously, the Khana-yi-aman management was concerned about increasing Islamization in the shelter when “the inhabitants fully practiced the rituals of Islam through prayer, fasting, reciting the Quran and veiling” (22). H