"This book provides the first ever overview of the history and development of Islam in Afghanistan. It covers every era from the conversion of Afghanistan through the medieval and early modern periods to the present day. Based on primary sources in Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Uzbek, its depth and scope of coverage is unrivalled by any existing publication on Afghanistan. As well as state-sponsored religion, the chapters cover such issues as the rise of Sufism, Sharia, women's religiosity, transnational Islamism and the Taliban. Islam has been one of the most influential social and political forces in Afghan history. Providing idioms and organizations for both anti-state and anti-foreign mobilization, Islam has proven to be a vital socio-political resource in modern Afghanistan. Even as it has been deployed as the national cement of a multi-ethnic 'Emirate' and then 'Islamic Republic,' Islam has been no less a destabilizing force in dividing Afghan society. Yet despite the universal scholarly recognition of the centrality of Islam to Afghan history, its developmental trajectories have received relatively little sustained attention outside monographs and essays devoted to particular moments or movements. To help develop a more comprehensive, comparative and developmental picture of Afghanistan's Islam from the eighth century to the present, this edited volume brings together specialists on different periods, regions and languages. Each chapter forms a case study 'snapshot' of the Islamic beliefs, practices, institutions and authorities of a particular time and place in Afghanistan"--Provided by publishe

The years 1978 and 1979 were dramatic throughout south and western Asia. In Iran, the Pahlavi dynasty was toppled by an Islamic revolution. In Pakistan, Zulfigar Ali Bhutto was hanged by the military regime that toppled him and which then proceeded to implement an Islamization programme. Between the two lay Afghanistan whose "Saur Revolution" of April 1978 soon developed into a full scale civil war and Soviet intervention. The military struggle that followed was largely influenced by Soviet-US rivalry but the ideological struggle followed a dynamic of its own. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including such previously unused archival material as British Intelligence reports, this is a detailed study of the Afghan debate on the role of Islam in politics from the formation of the modern Afghan state around 1800 to the present day.

Debunking conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly, Faiz Ahmed presents a vibrant account of the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Afghanistan Rising illustrates how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kabul--far from being a landlocked wilderness or remote frontier--became a magnet for itinerant scholars and statesmen shuttling between Ottoman and British imperial domains. Tracing the country's longstanding but often ignored scholarly and educational ties to Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul as well as greater Delhi and Lahore, Ahmed explains how the court of Kabul attracted thinkers eager to craft a modern state within the interpretive traditions of Islamic law and ethics, or shariʿa, and international norms of legality. From Turkish lawyers and Arab officers to Pashtun clerics and Indian bureaucrats, this rich narrative focuses on encounters between divergent streams of modern Muslim thought and politics, beginning with the Sublime Porte's first mission to Afghanistan in 1877 and concluding with the collapse of Ottoman rule after World War I. By unearthing a lost history behind Afghanistan's founding national charter, Ahmed shows how debates today on Islam, governance, and the rule of law have deep roots in a beleaguered land. Based on archival research in six countries and as many languages, Afghanistan Rising rediscovers a time when Kabul stood proudly as a center of constitutional politics, Muslim cosmopolitanism, and contested visions of reform in the greater Islamicate world.

This history of the Afghan resistance movement has been expanded and updated to mid 1989 to include its evolution over the last years of Soviet occupation as well as its relations with Islamic fundamentalist movements.

So-called Islamic State began to appear in what it calls Khorasan (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Iran and India) in 2014. Reports of its presence were at first dismissed as propaganda, but during 2015 it became clear that IS had a serious presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan at least. This book, by one of the leading experts on Islamist insurgency in the region, explores the nature of IS in Khorasan, its aim and strategies, and its evolution in an environment already populated by many jihadist organisations. Based on first-hand research and numerous interviews with members of IS in Khorasan, as well as with other participants and observers, the book addresses highly contentious issues such as funding, IS's relationship with the region's authorities, and its interactions with other insurgent groups. Giustozzi argues that the central leadership of IS invested significant financial resources in establishing its own branch in Khorasan, and as such it is more than a local movement which adopted the IS brand for its own aims. Though the central leadership has been struggling in implementing its project, it is now turning towards a more realistic approach. This is the first book on a new frontier in Islamic State's international jihad.

Traces the political history of Afghanistan from the sixteenth century to the present, looking at what has united the people as well as the regional, cultural, and political differences that divide them.

Pakistan's interaction with Afghanistan was to an extent influenced and fashioned by the historical legacy of pre-1947 Afghan-British Indian relations. This intriguing study explores how the Pakistan Army's involvement with the Afghan islamists became integrated with the Pakistani elites' post-Cold War strategic agenda. The analyses take into account the nature of the Pakistani polity and the foremost role of the Pakistani military in policy formulation. Particular attention is given to the interrelationship between the changes in the geopolitics of the Southwest and South Asian regions with the security policies of the Pakistani decision-making elite. Security concerms play a pivotal role in Pakistan's attempt to create a client state in Afghanistan in order to enhance Pakistan's wider economic and political influence in the region. Continued interest in the region since the events of 9/11 make this volume highly suitable for courses on South Asian studies, international relations and political Islam. It will also attract readers interested in terrorism and contemporary politics of South and West Asia.

This volume brings together Gilbert Achcar s major writings on these issues over the past decades. The essays collected in "Eastern Cauldron" describe and explain the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism, the fate of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its aftermath, and above all the Palestinian conflict in which the regional stakes are so dramatically embodied and contested. Achcar analyzes the social bases, strategies and tactics of PLO, Hizbollah, Israel and the United States from the establishment of the state of Israel to the second Intifada. He pinpoints the contradictions of the Israeli state seeking at the same time to be Jewish and yet democratic and the impact of these contradictions on all parties to the conflict. "Eastern Cauldron" is primarily aimed at producing a better understanding of the conflicts of the region. Achcar s work is informed by strong moral and political commitments but is never limited to polemic."

Drawing together Indian and Iranian Muslims with Christian missionaries, Hindu nationalists and Japanese imperialists, this book brings to life the local sites of globalisation that transformed Muslim religiosity through the long nineteenth century. Nile Green evokes terrains of exchange that range from the Russian empire's borderlands to the Indian princely states and the car factories of Detroit. He casts a microhistorian's eye on the religious productions that spilled from these many sites of contact. Whether looking at imperial evangelicals and Iranian language-workers, or Indian Muslims and Yogi masters of breath control, each chapter unravels local forces of religious contact, competition and exchange. Green draws on a huge range of materials, from Indian magazines for African Americans to Muslim Japanology; from Urdu tales of ocean-going saints to the diaries of German missionaries; from Bibles in Tatar to the first Arabic printed books. Challenging perceptions of an age usually identified with the unifying ideologies of Pan-Islamism and nationalism, his book reveals more muddled human terrains in which Muslims defended, reformed and promoted in an increasingly connected world. Terrains of Exchange presents not only global history from the bottom up but global history as Islamic history.

Frontier of Faith examines the history of Islam-especially that of local mullahs, or Muslim clerics-in the North-West Frontier. A largely autonomous zone straddling the boundary of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Tribal Areas was established as a strategic buffer zone for British India, and the resulting autonomy allowed local mullahs to assume roles of tremendous power. After Partition in 1947, the Tribal Areas maintained its status as an autonomous region, and for the next fifty years the mullahs supported armed mobilizations in exchange for protection of their vested interests in regional freedom. Consequently the Frontier has become the hinterland of successive, contradictory jihads in support of Pashtun ethnicism, anti-colonial nationalism, Pakistani territorialism, religious revivalism, Afghan anti-Soviet resistance, and anti-Americanism. Considering this territory is said to be the current hiding place of Osama bin Laden, there couldn't be a better time for a sourcebook detailing the intricacies of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands today and the function of the mullahs and their allies.