"Pious Peripheries brings the reader into a diverse and opinionated world of Afghan women thrown together only because they all refused to abide by gendered social norms. Sonia Ahsan's willingness to step aside and allow these remarkable women to speak for themselves is a tremendous strength."—Thomas Barfield, Boston University

"The extraordinary achievement of Pious Peripheries lies in Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's astute explanation of how Afghan women exercise agency despite their subjugation to often brutal male authority. In this stunning ethnography, she skillfully shows how courageous women navigate the dynamics of piety and promiscuity to achieve seemingly inaccessible freedoms."—Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

"Pious Peripheries offers a compelling challenge to the idea that Afghan women need 'saving.' Via a highly original and intrepid ethnography, Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi reveals how, from the margins of Afghan society, a community of formidable women is fashioning their own distinctive claims about Islam, Pashtun identity, sexuality, and the state."—Robert D. Crews, Stanford University

"Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's Pious Peripheries disrupts conventional categories of piety and secularism to bring to light the immense resourcefulness of Afghan women living at society's margins. Erudite and deeply empathic, with lucid vignettes that will stick in your memory, this is a must-read for anyone interested in feminism, Islam, and the tormented history of Afghanistan."—Julie Billaud, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies

"Boldly and poetically defying patriarchy, the runaway women of Pious Peripheries become the surprising harbingers of an emancipatory politics in war-torn Afghanistan. Immortalized by Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's brave and soulfully crafted ethnography, these women's nomadic existence shatters myopic notions of religious identity and expands our sense of where reworlding comes from."—João Biehl, Princeton University

"For practicing traditionally male-ascribed roles of hospitality, refuge, guest hosting, justice, friendship, love, and courage, Ahsan describes the women (through the Pashto poetic tradition of landay) as using their agentive action to reimagine what is legitimate and authorized and what could be. Most important, these women demonstrate that promiscuity is not the opposite of piety or morality but the potential basis for constructing new and different worlds for women. Recommended."—B. Tavakolian, CHOICE

"Pious Peripheries is the model of engaged scholarship based on ethnographic research among marginalized groups... The diverse experiences of these runaway women reveal the confluence of concerns about subtle feminist and religious expressions and their yearning to reinvent a new sense of belonging inside the shelter system."—Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Acta Via Serica

"Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan is a compelling and poignant exploration of the lives of Afghan women during the 20 years of direct US and Western intervention in Afghanistan. Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi's study offers a unique perspective on the struggles, resilience, and most importantly the agency of Afghan women as they navigate a society in transition."—Orzala Nemat, Pacific Affairs

Sonia Ahsan-Tirmizi is Lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University.