The bright blue veil of the burqa is one of the most iconic and widely worn pieces of women’s clothing in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, fewer women wear the burqa in Kabul, but elsewhere, in the provinces, the burqa is as ubiquitous as ever.

While they evoke a reaction of horror and disdain from many Western women, the burqa in Afghanistan is a complex cultural signifier. Young married women wear light blue burqas; older women and widows wear a darker blue. White burqas signify new brides, or women from the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. The particular pattern of flowers around the cap and face cover showcase the work of different designers, allowing women to be told apart.

The Zamarai family, shown in the video, have been tailors and burqa-makers for three generations. But recently there’s a new player in the Kabul burqa market: China, which mass-produces a style of burqa that many women here find more fashionable than the Zamarais’ traditional hand-assembled garments.

The Chinese-made burqas’ tightly-crimped folds and machine-produced embroidery have become something of a fashion craze in the last few months in Kabul. As one burqa seller named Hassan explained to me in a crowded Kabul market, “Women love the new, modern style of the Chinese burqas.”

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If you had to imagine what an ayatollah looked like, you’d probably envision someone who looks a lot like Ayatollah Asif Mohseini. He’s a 76-year-old with a creased face, generous white beard, and a tightly-wound turban. Mohseini is the one of Afghanistan’s leading religious figures. When I got in line to see him last week, he was conducting one of the time-honored functions of an ayatollah: answering the religious questions of the faithful. His offices were packed with supplicants seeking answers to questions ranging from, What are suitable prayers to say when caught in rush hour traffic jams?, to literary discussions of Koranic verses.

I was surprised to discover, then, that Mohseini stands at the vanguard of a brave new trend in Islamic education. Mohseini is putting the finishing touches on a new US$5 million educational complex that stands just behind his office, and he wanted me to see it. It’s a sweeping co-ed campus, with lecture halls, science labs, and internet cafés. When the madrassa opens fully this year, the curriculum will consist of half Islamic study, half science, math and computer classes. This is, Mohseini says with a certain gruffness, “a radical break” from traditional syllabi – and having spent a few days last year visiting a madrassa in Yemen where the only textbook was a Koran, I can see what he means.

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There aren’t many ways out from the lowest rungs of society in the Middle East. But there is one route that manages to combine the region’s rising aspirations and its deep-seated piety.

Each year, thousands of young boys attempt the seemingly impossible task of memorizing the Koran. Most fail. But a few, like the subject of this video, succeed in cramming in over 80,000 words. And that is just the beginning. Karis, as they’re called, then pit their knowledge of the text, and the quality of their recitation, against each other in something like a cross between American idol and a spelling bee.

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It's not always easy being Mr. Afghanistan. There's the training and incessant pursuit of bodily perfection; and then the very particular demands of being an Afghan cultural icon. To understand the impact that Mr. Afghanistan,­ aka Dr. Tamim, has had in Afghanistan you have to think back to Arnold Schwarzeneggar¹s heyday, and an era in American pop culture when exposed pectorals captured the excitement of 70s social ferment Under the Taliban, exposing one¹s body, whether a male of female, was a crime punishable by five years in prison (or worse). Body building was a largely underground sport.

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Four months ago, an Afghan teenager was kidnapped on the road between Kandahar and Kabul. Mustafa's crime was his mother’s job: Malalai Ishaq Zai was the only female member of parliament for Kandahar, the deeply conservative southern Afghan city with strong Taliban links.

Since her election in 2002, Malalai has been repeatedly threatened by the re-emerging group. In many ways she was a direct affront to their radicalized beliefs: she did not wear the omnipresent burqa (her election posters showing her face shocked the city), and she stood up for women’s rights and education. Yet she was also a devout Muslim and mother of seven.

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Every Friday for the past few weeks, embassies in Kabul have told foreign nationals to prepare for a rerun of the 2005 Mohammed cartoon riots. Back then, mobs attacked Western businesses and embassies across the Islamic world to protest images in a Danish newspaper that depicted the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. This time the potential affront is a film made by right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, in which he denounces Islam’s Koran as a "fascist" book that "incites people to murder." Rumors put out by the Wilders camp suggest he burns a copy of the Koran in the film.

Both cartoon and film (due to be released next month) are clearly crass and self-serving exercises that pay lip service to the idea of freedom of speech while being little more than vehicles for xenophobia. But rather than dwell on these productions, I'd like to ask what it is about them that provoked such a visceral and, for many, a disproportionate reaction in the Muslim world. Recently in Afghanistan, there have been several similar incidents in which religious intolerance has prevailed: a 23-year-old journalist sentenced to death last month for distributing a text on Islamic feminism; a publisher who released a Dari translation of the Koran without a corresponding Arabic text, and had to flee for his life.

Can these reactions tell us something deeper Islam's relationship to the West?

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We take for granted the idea of progress in America. It's rooted in the collective narrative, and comes with a healthy sense of entitlement, responsibility and pride. But Afghanistan's progress has been fleeting over the past 50 years, and in its absence, the country’s own history has become a more provisional affair.

Whether it’s Karzai’s government presenting itself as a restoration of the benign period under the former monarchy, or the Taliban’s insistence that they are the heirs to the Soviet jihad, all sides dip selectively into the past, often giving the eerie impression that instead of progress, history is repeating itself.

Amid this historical confusion, Islam offers a rare sense of continuity to Afghanistan’s faithful. As Mullah Saiqal, an Islamic history professor at Kabul University, put it bluntly to me: “The past is a mess, and we could do with forgetting several decades.”

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Sharia law gets bad press in the West. It’s the body of law drawn from the Koran, reported sayings of the prophet, and centuries of jurisprudence, and in its most extreme form it prescribes punishments such as beheadings, amputations and stonings. Cases like that of the Saudi rape victim, who was sentenced to 200 lashes for meeting a man who eventually raped her, have largely come to define how we see Islamic law: at best, a kind of medieval anachronism; at worst, barbarous and anti-women.

In Afghanistan, tribal law suffused with Sharia is the only form of legal redress for the vast majority of the country. (A central justice system has yet to take off anywhere other than the capital, Kabul). Terrorism aside, few would argue the sophistication of Afghan crime; most is gun battles between warring families, theft of livestock and land, and government brutality. Those offenses can be found anywhere.

But what's remarkable about Afghanistan, and rural areas of countries like Jordan and Syria, is the degree of community and family cohesion. Terrorism again aside, crime is rarely committed by strangers. Tribal law, usually administered by elders or the local religious leader, is intended not as a form of public punishment but as conflict resolution.

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