Imagining the Nation in the Public School Textbooks of Afghanistan (2001-2021)

Abstract

This thesis applies critical discourse analysis to analyze the discursive construction of the nation as an imagined community (Anderson, 2006) in the patriotism, civic education, and history textbooks of Afghanistan’s secondary public schools in circulation prior to the return to power of the Taliban in 2021. This study considers the textbooks both as sites for the contentious construction of ideology, discourse, and knowledge and as cultural artifacts. This analysis is situated in a double reading method. A dominant reading reconstitutes the imagining of community in the textbooks and a negotiated reading establishes the relationship between the textbooks’ representations of the imagined community of the nation and the already imagined community in the society at large. The study finds that the imagining of the nation in the identified textbooks is problematically articulated with overlapping incoherent and negotiated discursive formations of nationalism and citizenship. The imagining is articulated by means of a conceptual pyramid in which history is the base or foundational element of the pyramid, tradition and democracy are the two side elements, and Islam is the apex of the pyramid with which all the above elements attain meaning. The textbooks imagine the nation as limited and sovereign through primordial, ethnocentric, and economic determinist representations and articulations of nationalism. A system of representations and articulations problematically constructs an incoherent and negotiated imagining that entails five thousand years of historical continuity, geographic fixity, and Aryan racial purity, all forged into a unity defined as contemporary sovereign Afghanistan. An exclusionary imagining blemishes what Anderson calls the horizontal comradeship of the imagined community by inserting an implied master ethnicity, progressive but selective and stereotypical gendered acts and products of nationalism, and an urban-rural divide into the imagining. The imagining of the textbooks excludes subaltern identities, including those of Hindus and Sikhs, and the intersecting identities such as the uneducated women and the poor. The textbooks adapt and modulate conceptions that are textually in tension, constructing forged unities such as a pre-Islamic glorified Aryan racial nobility and Islamic morality; the embraced advent of Islam by Muslim invaders in Afghanistan and patriotic resistance against the Arab invaders; a historical, indigenous, yet modern constitutional democracy and Islamic law; and, a moderate Islam for domestic consumption and a confrontational, jihad-oriented, and a martyrdom-nurturing Islam against a globalizing and invading West. The textbooks banally imagine the national community in Afghanistan by presumably benign representations of acts and products of nationalism and citizenship including rhetorical devices, analogies and metaphors; national maps, the anthem, and flags; the deixis of we/our; poetry and biographies; national heroes; and, images of monuments and historical artifacts. The textbooks historize, indigenize, Islamize, and gender both nationalism and citizenship in such a manner that one often becomes the building block of the other, culminating in overt and covert constructions of othering both nationally and internationally against Western schools of thought, systems of governance, and cultural expansion. The findings of this study reveal a deep disparity in educational supply and demand, despite the popularity of education in Afghan society including for female students. National education policies incoherently officialized a centralized, standardized, and uniformed education across the country, which was often at odds with local realities. The national education strategic plans exceedingly became progressive and inclusive while the national curriculum frameworks faced the opposite trajectory, revealing the incoherence and impermanence of imagining the nation in education officialization. This study contributes to the understanding of the discourses of nationalism and citizenship in the imagining of national community in education in general, and in the context of Afghanistan, in particular.