The Taliban, women, and the Hegelian private sphere - Part III: individual, family, community, and state

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Juan R.I. Cole

THE society created by the Taliban in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001 constantly evoked outrage and reactions of open-mouthed disbelief in the Western press. Even the ayatollahs in Tehran issued a statement condemning the Taliban for defaming Islam by confusing it with medieval obscurantism. Since the Islamic Republic of Iran had long been called "medieval" itself by political opponents, this criticism of the Afghan government has a delicious irony. One key to comprehending the somewhat strident bewilderment that the Taliban provoked in many observers is their reconfiguration of the public and the private in their quest for a pure Islamic countermodernity. I use the phrase countermodernity rather than antimodernism because the Taliban adopted some key motifs from high modernism and depended on modern techniques for their power (the state, radio, mass spectacle, tank corps, and machine guns mounted on Toyotas). They put these tools, however, to purposes very different from the goals of the industrialized democracies, especially with regard to the private sphere. The public/private divide as drawn by modern liberalism affects everything from how power is attained and exercised to how women are treated. Did the Taliban strike outsiders as bizarre in part because they drew those lines very differently than most other contemporary societies?

The German sociologist Jurgen Habermas argues that the divide between public and private is a feature of modernity. He reports that the word privat, derived from the Latin, can only be found in Germany from the late sixteenth century, and that it initially referred to someone who was not an officer of the state. He says that institutionally, "a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages." The power of the kings and aristocrats was "public," not in the sense of a sphere of society but in that of a status position. The lord "displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of 'higher' power." The arena in which power was represented to a wide audience was public, but was not characterized by public participation--it was public the way a stage play is, for a passive audience. The church was likewise "public" in this sense of open display of ritual and authority until proponents of the Enlightenment increasingly coded it as private from the eighteenth century forward (Habermas, 1993: 7, 11). Joan Landes draws attention to Habermas's emphasis on "features of visibility, display and embodiment, that is, an "aura" that surrounded and endowed the lord's concrete existence." She argues that "staged publicity" was fundamental to absolutist society in the early modern nation-states. This representative performance of kingly authority by a royal subject before an audience was not dependent on having a permanent location or on the development of a public sphere of communication (Landes, 1998: 138).

Habermas's use of a binary opposition between the "medieval" and "modernity" and his concentration on select areas of Western Europe create a teleological natural history of the public sphere that remains highly Eurocentric. His account obscures the ways in which power as representation, and religion as public, continued to characterize many societies in modernity. Rather than being conceived of as medieval throwbacks, such societies must be viewed as forms of alternative modernity. Even in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Lenin's vanguard theory allowed power to be exercised in the twentieth century by unelected bureaucrats, in part through massive military parades and other spectacles. In Bolivia and Greece, religion remained public, even as it was privatized in Turkey and Mexico.

What of the private sphere? Seyla Benhabib notes three meanings of the private sphere in modern political thought. She says, "first and foremost, privacy has been understood as the sphere of moral and religious conscience," referring to the separation of religion and state and the granting to the individual of autonomy in deciding such matters, which are "rationally irresolvable." The second is private enterprise, or the "non-interference by the state in the free flow of commodity relations." The third, she says, is the "intimate sphere"--"meeting the daily needs of life, of sexuality and reproduction, of care for the young, the sick and the elderly"--which she says are typically recognized by modern thinkers as belonging to the domain of the household. She points out that for many modern thinkers, a tension exists between their vision of a patriarchal domestic realm, in contrast to the values of equality and consent in the political sphere (Benhabib, 1998: 86). I will argue below that the Taliban stance on the first and the last of these three meanings of the private was the precise opposite of those Benhabib attributes to modern political thought.

As Landes and others have noted, Habermas did his early work on the public sphere before the wide impact of 1970s feminist theory, and he neglects the issue of gender. In retrospect, this lacuna is the most problematic, since all societies imbue the public and the private with overtones of male and female. Even a modern thinker such as Hegel could write,