The excerpt was written by Joan Ferrante, Sociology: The United States in a Global Perspective, Fourth Edition (Wadsworth Publishing, 2000).

The Historical Context

Before the nineteenth century, mountainous Afghanistan lay in the path of invaders from China, Persia (ancient Iran), and the Indian subcontinent. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the country became a battleground for the British and Russian empires and, after World War II, for the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support a secular government. U.S. observers called Afghanistan "the Soviet Union's Vietnam," a title that history has borne out.

Supported materially by the United States, Afghanistan's military resistance to the Soviets was mobilized in large part through religious institutions that proclaimed a "holy war." The Soviet exit in 1989 left a ravaged country full of religiously charged armed rival factions. When the Taliban government took power in 1996, it justified many of its new policies on religious Islamic grounds. Westerners tend to see such policies as simply fanatical and irrational and to overlook the histories that led up to them. They also tend to disregard the parallels that can be drawn between the role of religion in Afghan society and its significant role in our own.

What is religion? What is its connection to society? How have outspoken religious leaders recently become so influential in government in many parts of the world, including the United States?

In explaining how sociologists view and study religion as an aspect of social life, this chapter helps us make sense of events in Afghanistan.