ABSTRACT
On October 1, 1901 the “Iron Amı¯r” Abd al-Rahma¯n died in Kabul. In the wake of the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001 in America, the iron rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan came to a violent end. The intervening hundred years-the tumultuous twentieth century-constitute Afghanistan’s intricate and often tortuous encounter with modernity. This book is not a study of Afghan modernity, in all its varied and complex facets, in a social context where aspects that are considered hallmarks of modernity remain full of paradoxes, contradictions, and twists and turns. Rather, as the first full-length analysis of a hitherto neglected area in the fields of contemporary comparative, post-colonial, and Persian literary studies, it is a study of the experience of cultural modernity as projected and expressed in the elaborate interweaving of texts and their socio-historical contexts in a “Third-World” society. More specifically, it elucidates the dynamic conjunction of intellectual and literary-aesthetic discourses with history and politics in the peculiar propagation and reception of modernity in Afghanistan.
