Robert D. Crews. Afghan Modern

Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation presents a well-researched and interesting history on the ways that the territories of the various states or empires that have been labeled “Afghan” or named “Afghanistan” and the various groups that have at one time or another been identified as “Afghans” integrated into international relationships. In the process, however, Robert D. Crews makes overblown claims about his work’s significance: “My approach ... starts from the premise that how we conceptualize the country, in our journalism and public-policy debates and in much of our scholarly work, remains intractably mired in tropes that bear little resemblance to historical reality. Pervading all of these genres, the most enduring image of Afghanistan evokes a desolate, inward-looking, and isolated place” (3). The only work Crews cites to illustrate the universality of this discourse is a late-nineteenth-century French study of Afghan folk songs. Other scholars, including myself, have interrogated tropes such as “Islamic fundamentalists,” “ethnic nationalists,” “freedom fighters,” Afghanistan’s “return to the eleventh century,” “tribalism,” “feudalism,” “traditionalism,” and “modernity.” No doubt I am particularly biased on this point, as the first chapter of my principal book on Afghanistan (The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System [2002]) concludes: “The modern or postmodern world is not absent or weak in places like Afghanistan, but it exerts itself in ugly ways we prefer to deny ... The violence and decay of Afghanistan is the reflection in the mirror of that society of the violence that created and maintains our security. ‘If you do not like the image in the mirror,’ says an old Persian poem, ‘do not break the mirror, break your face’” (Rubin, 5).

Afghan · Archaeology · Autocracy · Democracy · Feudalism · Islam · Militarization · Modernity · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law