Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi

Columbia University

2022 Fatema Mernissi Book Award Winner

Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan

Stanford University Press 

Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan is a timely and intimate account of the lives of Afghan women standing up to patriarchy and community authority. Through remarkable ethnographic fieldwork in a shelter for women who have escaped their households—some running away from violence and abuse in their homes, others seeking divorce or a marriage that their families do not consent to—and careful textual analysis of religious, literary, and historical sources, Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi showcases agency and impossibility, everyday struggles and courageous acts. Pious Peripheries traces networks of support and solidarity that arise from brave women’s efforts to stand up to legal, social and familial injustice. It deftly sketches the various regimes of power–political, legal, familial–that Afghan women negotiate as they seek to fashion futures which challenge hegemonic prescriptions of  womanhood, honor, and piety.

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