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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 



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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). Here, at Khana-yi-aman, the 
paradoxical ideas of piety and promiscuity come together to create a complex social 
environment women were forced to navigate.  

Chapter two, Portraits of Pain, unfolds the heartwrenching stories, memories, and traumas of 
the inhabitants of Khana-yi-aman and the insecurities and pressures faced by those who run the 
shelter. The chapter conveys an emotional touch while conveying the narratives of each of the 
inhabitants in the shelter. The author argues that the vulnerable and complex histories of the 
runaway women are the result of long battles with families, the state, and the courts. Moreover, 
they take the risk of being called promiscuous along with inhabiting pious womanhood, and 
they try to redefine morality, love, marriage, and religious rights in unexpected ways. 

The third chapter, Poetic Risk, is a closer look at everyday landays (short verses of Pashto 
poetry), which are sung by the Pashtun women in the shelter. Interestingly, anonymity (singing 
under a burqa), collective orality, and communitarian ownership behind the landay singing 
enable women to create alternative voices and freedom and to escape the patriarchal constraints 
as well as invoking themes of love, desire, departure, death, and abandonment. Furthermore, it 
can tell about the possibilities of multiple subject relationships, which are beyond the 
consolidation and destabilization of the normative structure, standing along with Bakhtin's idea 
of the dialogical self (1983). Theoretically, this oral culture among the shelter women 
interrogates the normative assumption on the illiterate Afghan women in the ways the poetry 
belongs to tradition, modernity and literature figures.  

While there is a dominant assumption that the post-Taliban state affords new potentialities of 
selfhood to women, the fourth chapter, Taliban's Women, unveils the micro-histories of Taliban 
women. The chapter dwells upon two questions: how does the Taliban play a key role in 
shaping the life worlds of Afghan women, and what changed in their lives after the fall of the 
Taliban in 2001 and the installation of a secular democratic government? She argues that the 
Taliban have succeeded in universalizing a certain type of public piety aimed primarily at 
Afghan women rather than Afghan men, as well as in articulating women's citizenship through 
historical models of chastity, motherhood, and wifely devotion. 

The fifth chapter, Pedagogies of Womanhood, explores the cultural paradox in the history of 
modern Afghan womanhood in which modern and secular notions of wilful independence and 
freedom, and Islamic and Pashtun conceptions of family, honor, gender, and sexuality come to 
the fore. It alludes to the fact that the modern Afghan woman of the 20th and 21st centuries is 
shaped by both gendered disciplinary and emancipatory mechanisms of the Taliban and the 
state, respectively. The main mechanisms were pedagogical Islamic texts, political and ethical 
ideas of the pan-Islamic movement, and literacy and secularism campaigns in which vatan 
(homeland) is perceived as a female and millath (nation) as a male. What makes this section 
different is the attempt by Ahsan-Tirmizi to link a wide array of Pashtun-based advice manuals 



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(Adab treatises) with its local understanding of Afghan Muslims. Finally, the author's response 
to her question, "what does the intellectual tradition of pious womanhood have to do with the 
self-conception of Afghan women today?" is that the relationships of Khana-yi-aman women 
and their daily negotiations are bounded with these didactic moral texts and the ideas they 
espoused.  

The sixth chapter, Subject of Honour, attempts to understand honor discourses on Afghan 
women and its historical complexity with Islam and Pashtunwali, situated in the Foucauldian 
understanding of subjecthood. Ahsan-Tirmizi reads promiscuity as "the capacity for action” or 
risk as “an emancipatory potential.” She investigates how Afghan women manipulate honor 
codes through various strategic means, rather than reducing honor studies to ideals of honor-
modesty and honor-shame. Given local notions of promiscuity, Afghan women contest 
Pashtunwali honorable subjectivity by pushing themselves into a marginal space, the Khana-
yi-aman. 

In sum, the book is a contribution to scholarship on women who shape their own selfhoods 
differently and adds a new analytical category of promiscuity to the recent academic debates 
on piety, freedom, and subjecthood. Commenting on previous studies of Islam and the Taliban 
in Afghanistan, Nile Green observed that, "they lacked any firm footing in written or otherwise 
published sources by Taliban actors, a problem compounded by the fact very few scholars have 
ever studied Pashto" (Green 2017: 25). Ahsan-Tirmizi’s work marks a break from this history. 
Last but not least, Pious Peripheries can be seen as a theoretical extension of the discourse of 
piety and agency with which Saba Mahmood engaged. Repeatedly, Ahsan-Tirmizi insists that 
"running away was not always an abandonment of tradition but rather an embrace of tradition 
but towards a different end" (5). 

Mohammed Salih is a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS) at 
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He focuses on socio-cultural anthropology and 
sociology, and is interested in social, ethical, sexual and political aspects of knowledge; 
religious education; gendered networks and dissemination; space and embodiment, mobility 
and aspiration, sex education and sex manuals in Islam. His research loci is on the two central 
questions of what knowledge about gender and sexuality is in Islam and Muslim communities 
in the Indian Ocean region and how it is circulated, interpreted, contested and examined among 
the ordinary Muslims. Additionally, he is interested in how the notions of gender and sexuality 
are involved in knowledge-related Islamic settings of South west India. 

 

Works Cited: 

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1983. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: 
University of Texas Press. 

Green, Nile. 2017. Afghanistan's Islam From Conversion to the Taliban. California: University 
of California Press. 



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Mahmood, Saba. 2005.  Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Project. US: 
Princeton University Press. 

 

 

 

 

/© 2023 Mohammed Salih 

 


