Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

Abstract In contrast to major developments in general South Asian historiography, the historiography of modern Afghanistan has largely persisted as something of a scholarly throwback to the ‘modernization theory’ trend of the 1950s and 60s. The way Pashtun experiences of Islam have been treated in history writing draws heavily upon this larger modernization‐oriented thematic, which in turn has existed in a dialectic with journalistic and policy‐oriented writing. This article analyzes a number of scholarly works in which questions of Islam and social change in Pashtun polities form a major focus. The article focuses on works focusing on the pre‐1979 situation, which has been examined only perfunctorily in works of authors employing more current analytical techniques. The article identifies a number of appropriate thematic questions in existing work which could improve our understanding of the cultural history of pre‐1979 Islam in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and raises a few new questions worth investigating.