Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  More change followed that October as part of Kabul’s annual season of buzkashi, the game often likened to polo, played with a dead goat. It originated in Afghanistan’s north but King Zahir Shah brought it to Kabul because buzkashi was one of his passions and he wanted it to become the national sport. Through the mid-1950s, a game was played each year on the king’s birthday at the Bagram Ground outside Kabul; then several more games were played at the Ghazi Stadium. In both places, the audiences were male except for the occasional foreign woman. But after a horse ran amok in the stadium in 1958 killing six spectators, all the games were moved to the Bagram Ground. Following the unveiling in 1959, Afghan women began watching too.

  Another change involved the theatre, a precarious institution in Afghanistan, suspected of immorality and decadence. While young men and boys generally played the female parts before audiences of men, all-female casts performed before female audiences in the Women’s Welfare Association’s theatre until late 1958 when the association began employing male actors. In October 1959, a mixed cast appeared for the first time before a mixed audience. When Humaira Noorzai introduced this performance as the association’s president, she may have been the first woman in Afghanistan to speak in public before an audience of men and women.

  There were many other landmarks. Where Teachers’ Day had been an all-male affair, more than three hundred women teachers attended the celebrations at the Ghazi Stadium in 1959 and they all went unveiled at the government’s insistence, contrary to its claims that unveiling was entirely voluntary. There were also eight women on the official platform, and one of the main addresses was given by Kubra Noorzai. Before the year was out, Khadija Parwin, the first female singer recorded by Radio Kabul, performed without her chadari in Kabul’s National Theatre, the first opportunity for many of her admirers to see her.

  A few years later, two German commentators deemed unveiling the ‘ultimate test’ for rulers of Islamic countries set on modernisation. Despite Daoud’s pre-emptive arrests and deployment of extra police, opposition was inevitable. A delegation of clerics led by Sebghatullah Mojadiddi, a member of Afghanistan’s pre-eminent religious family, accused Daoud of flouting Islamic law and permitting ‘heathen’ Russians and Christian westerners to ‘pervert’ the nation. Daoud responded by challenging the mullahs to ‘provide positive Qur’anic proof—not interpretations—for their objections’, having been instructed by his advisers that none would be forthcoming. He also had the clerics tailed by his secret police and, when they decried Daoud as un-Islamic, charged them with treason for advocating his overthrow and with heresy on the basis that their invocation of the Qur’an was flawed. While he imprisoned some only briefly, Mojadiddi spent four years in jail and two others died there.

  The modernisers’ sense of vulnerability was apparent when Humaira Noorzai spoke at the Women’s Welfare Association’s theatre in October 1959. In arguing that the unveiling was ‘in accordance with the religious and moral requirements of the nation’, she called ‘on the intelligentsia to withhold no cooperation from the government in its efforts to achieve its national and social aims’. The fragility of the situation was palpable when rumours spread that tribesmen had attempted to assassinate Daoud’s brother, Sardar Mohammad Naim. But gradually the government withdrew its extra police, while instructing those on duty ‘to deal severely with anyone who molested an unveiled woman’.

  Mahbuba Musa, who knew what it was like to be part of a society of unveiled women, having spent much of her childhood in Germany, was eager to test the new opportunities by attending one of Kabul’s two cinemas that had opened since Amanullah fled. When she decided to go chaperoned by her brother, her anxious mother asked the police whether Musa would be safe. ‘We will afford her all protection’ was the reply, and so the police did, escorting Musa and her brother through a vast, silent, staring crowd of men.

  The police were similarly on duty that November when the Women’s Welfare Association staged a play about marriage featuring the ‘modern’ son and daughter of a Kabuli middle-class family—the son besuited and bareheaded, the daughter unveiled—who both insisted they would marry only for love when facing arranged marriages to two of their traditionally-dressed country cousins. The audience included many middle-class Kabuli couples in western clothes, who applauded this resistance to arranged marriage. But the play also attracted some men in traditional dress, who were required by the police to remove their turbans since the government wanted to change their garb too. Before long, men in turbans were being denied entry to cinemas, concerts and theatres in Kabul, as were women in chadaris.

  Most Afghans initially did not know what was occurring because the government owned the country’s news agency, radio station and newspapers and Daoud judged it best not to publicise the unveiling. The rest of the world remained oblivious because of the dearth of foreign journalists in Kabul. The first extended account came from Louis Dupree, a thirty-five-year-old American archaeologist and anthropologist who happened to arrive in Kabul in August 1959 as a member of the American Universities Field Staff, a consortium established by universities and colleges ‘to send qualified young men out as their correspondents in foreign areas’. Rather than ‘chadari’, a Dari word employed across Afghanistan, Dupree preferred the Arabic ‘burqa’, used in Pakistan, which was more familiar to Americans. His first report, filed on 9 September, was ‘The Burqa Comes Off’.

  Nehru’s visit a week later led to a Reuters story about the unveiling carried by many American newspapers. But it failed to reach English journalist Andrew Wilson, who arrived in Kabul in late September. When he encountered two unveiled women in the street, Wilson assumed they were the wives of Iranian or Iraqi embassy officials out for a morning’s shopping, just as he had seen on previous visits. It was only when he encountered a second and then a third group of unveiled women that he realised they were Afghans, and he understood he was witnessing something momentous. Because Britain was still largely if not entirely oblivious to the unveiling, Wilson was ‘on tenterhooks’, fearful another journalist would get the story to London before him.

  American journalists Peggy and Pierre Streit, who also visited in September, sought a different audience. In November 1959, the New York Times carried a feature by Peggy illustrated with a photograph by Pierre of women on the streets of Kabul wearing chadaris and another of unveiled women working in the new office of Ariana Airlines. The Afghan government also broke its silence through Afghanistan News, the monthly magazine issued by its embassy in London. Having given hints of what was occurring since its September issue carried photographs of members of the Women’s Welfare Association in western dress at an exhibition opening, it addressed the unveiling directly in its November issue. It reported that ‘the wives of the leading government officials, including that of the Prime Minister, took part in the independence celebrations—without the veil’. The government claimed: ‘The first step in this direction was taken by the women on their own initiative.’ It declared: ‘The wearing of the veil is not part of Islam.’

  Wilson lagged in his reportage because he wanted to visit northern Afghanistan. For a feature, he also needed at least one photograph of unveiled women and he embraced the common assumption that photography of Afghan women was unwanted, if not proscribed, prompting him to use his camera covertly. It was only when these attempts failed that he photographed openly on the streets and discovered that no one appeared to mind. The photograph that illustrated his feature in the London Observer in December showed a turbaned man in front, two female students dressed in white headscarves and black dresses just covering their knees behind him, followed by two women in chadaris of similar length. This photograph was the start of a new genre: ‘modern and traditional walk side by side in Kabul’.

  Another photograph in North from Kabul, Wilson’s book about his travels, shows two other young unveiled women. Wilson wrote that when they walked past, he followed them without photographing. Then one with ‘dark rebellious eyes’, whom
he dubbed ‘Miss Afghanistan, 1959’, asked, ‘Aks-e-mara?’ ‘Won’t you take our picture?’ Astonished by this willingness to be photographed by a man unknown to them, Wilson argued that the unveiling was a ‘revolution’, not a ‘reform’. More than that, it was a revolution which, ‘in Kabul at least, was complete’—though his Miss Afghanistan does not look as if she asked to be photographed, and the other woman has her back to the camera.

  The audience for such photographs was fuelled by the western fascination with what chadaris hid. In a short story published in 1959, American writer Charles Beardsley had one of his American characters wonder ‘casually, as he always did when he saw Afghan women in their billowing cocoons, what was underneath’. Footwear, ranging from brocaded slippers to high-heeled pumps, was usually the only clue. But a gust of wind or a short chadari might reveal more, prompting voyeuristic reports from westerners, female and male, of their glimpses of a stylish summer dress, chic black suit or toreador pants. Once the chadari began to be discarded, westerners wanted to know more. When Wilson lectured in London in 1960 after returning from Afghanistan, a woman in the audience asked: ‘Are the women good-looking and of good physique?’ ‘Magnificent’, Wilson replied.

  Abdul Haq Waleh, an Afghan journalist who spent several years in London and Washington, was thrilled to witness the unveiling at the Ghazi Stadium. He and his friends burst into ‘tears of joys’, Waleh recorded. ‘Our dream had finally come true.’ Some women expressed similar amazement and delight. ‘For years we had hoped, and for years we had been disappointed’, Safia Djawid, Ariana Airlines’ first female secretary, told American journalist Peggy Streit. ‘Prince Daoud’, as the prime minister was often known, is ‘the most wonderful man in the world’, pronounced one of Djawid’s colleagues. ‘I live for the first time’, the wife of a diplomat exclaimed. ‘My chadari has gone with the wind.’

  The ‘modern poetess of Afghanistan’, Mastoora Afghan, who had enjoyed the reforms of King Amanullah and Queen Soruya as a student at the Mastoorat school, celebrated the unveiling in verse. ‘The age of misery for Afghan women has gone’, she declared, identifying the chadari as ‘the enemy of the girl, of the brain of women, and a bag of slavery’. Afghanistan’s only prominent female artist, French-born Simone Shokour Wali, who moved to Kabul after marrying an Afghan studying at the Sorbonne, ‘attracted wide attention and won public acclaim’ with a painting of a woman casting off her veil which Wali titled The Awakening, echoing Reza Shah’s campaign to require Iranian women to show their faces.

  In most cases, men decided what their families would do. Some women were forced to continue wearing chadaris, others to unveil. But there were also instances where women decided their own course and others where fathers and daughters, fathers-in-law and daughters-in-law, and husbands and wives agreed. Sayyid Ahmad Gailani and his wife Princess Adela were among them. He was a leader of a Sufi order dating to the sixth century, which had become increasingly secularised and westernised. She was a half-sister of King Amanullah. Their daughter, Fatima, recalled the ‘large excitement’ in 1959 that ‘women could stop covering their faces’ and the day her mother first went out with her father wearing ‘a beautiful outfit with a manteau and an elegant scarf’.

  A visit that December by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first by an American president, provided one test of the extent to which Afghanistan had changed. To make Eisenhower feel welcome between flying in from Karachi and out to Delhi five hours later, Daoud had fleets of buses transport an unprecedented crowd of 300,000 people equipped with paper flags and confetti. With estimates of the number of unveiled women as high as 20,000, or one in twelve women in the city, Daoud also tried to show off Afghanistan’s modernity by arranging for small groups of unveiled women to be on Eisenhower’s route through rural areas and ensuring there were more in Kabul. Eisenhower did not notice them, but the government newspaper Anis identified this welcome as another landmark: ‘the first time in Afghan history a large number of women came out into the streets of Kabul’.

  Nikita Khrushchev found a different city three months later because the number of unveiled women had grown and because Khrushchev stayed four days, giving him much more opportunity to see what was happening. When he addressed a crowd of 30,000 at the Ghazi Stadium, many women were there, no longer confined to the royal pavilion. As his motorcade drove across the city, Khrushchev was struck that ‘among the tens of thousands lining the streets of Kabul, one could distinguish so many unveiled and smiling female faces’.

  Kabul’s population was about 500,000 in a country of about 12 million but it was home to seventy-five per cent of literate Afghans. That the unveiling might be largely accepted there was no guide to the response elsewhere. Daoud’s power in Kabul was also much greater than in other cities and towns. He knew change there would be smaller and slower, but he still encouraged if not compelled unveiling, while contending it was a matter of individual choice.

  Opposition was greatest in the south where Mangal tribesmen took up arms due to both the unveiling and the government’s building of new roads, which threatened the Mangals’ caravan trade. When they began seeking refuge in Pakistan in November 1959, Daoud denied anything was amiss, maintaining that the Mangals had ‘rendered their full cooperation to the government in its measures to establish schools, develop agriculture and local industry, and build roads’. In fact, the Afghan army and airforce killed many Mangals in suppressing the revolt, causing thousands to flee.

  Even greater conflict followed that December in Kandahar after the city’s governor tried to force local leaders to bring their wives to a public event and rumours spread that the government was intent on establishing co-educational high schools. The cinema, as under Amanullah, was a flashpoint. Kandahar had one which, as with those in Kabul, generally screened Indian films because of their popularity. A notice announcing its opening to women prompted men to create a pyre of chairs and incinerate the building. The following day rioters torched a girls school, assaulted several of its students and brought down power and telephone lines. They also targeted members of Kanadahar’s small American community who they viewed as kaffirs. They set fire to the Cadillac of one who was overseeing construction of Kandahar’s new American-funded international airport. They knifed another working on the Helmand Valley Project, a vast infrastructure scheme to dam Afghanistan’s main river system. When an Afghan official tried to explain the government’s actions, they killed him and his five police escorts, prompting the city’s governor to flee.

  These attacks, just a fortnight after President Eisenhower’s welcome in Kabul, led some Americans to question Washington’s relationship with Afghanistan. There was at least as much to trouble Moscow, as protesters marched through Kandahar, blaming the Soviets for the government’s un-Islamic measures. When a ‘secret democratic front’ plastered the city with posters, some urged Kandaharis to put an end to ‘the present era of tyranny in the country’ by ‘uniting and forcibly ejecting the Russians’. Others fixed on Amanullah, who was still loathed by conservative Afghans, claiming the former king was set on returning from exile, when he was close to death from heart failure.

  Afghanistan’s modernisation assisted Daoud. When local officials reported what was happening in the south using new radio and telephone networks, Daoud sent lorries of troops and dozens of tanks from Kabul on the new roads. On reaching Kandahar, their commander imposed martial law, threw a security ring around the city and stopped people entering or leaving. According to Pakistani reports, denied by Daoud, his airforce bombed Kandahar and several other towns. When he regained control after almost six weeks, the scale of the bloodshed remained unclear. The Afghan media probably downplayed what had occurred. Pakistan probably exaggerated the conflict as part of its larger enmity with Afghanistan, fuelled by their dispute over the Pashtun parts of Pakistan, which Afghanistan argued should be given independence with a view to them becoming Afghan. Foreign correspondents could not get visas.

  The death toll in Kandahar�
��perhaps as high as 700—did not trouble most foreign observers. They looked on the relaxation of purdah and increased employment opportunities for women, which came with their new clothes, as a greater good. A columnist with the Times of India declared: ‘In a backward country like Afghanistan such reforms are bound to be resented by the orthodox who can easily excite the people; even riots can occur. So what? Afghanistan must advance and all such forces, which stand in the way of progress, must be suppressed, if necessary ruthlessly.’ Another Indian commentator saw the government’s ‘brutal’ suppression of opposition in Kandahar as a turning point because Daoud had inspired unprecedented respect for Kabul’s power and destroyed the myth that ‘no reform is possible except with the consent of the mullahs’.

  Both sides of the Cold War applauded. Nikita Khrushchev declared that what ‘touched’ him ‘beyond all’ on his visit in 1960 was the sight of so many women ‘innocent of the chadari which had so disfigured them, turning them into faceless shadows’. Soviet Orientalist Roman Timofeevich Akhramovich identified the unveiling as a ‘radical’ measure with ‘the greatest social significance’. American Louis Dupree considered it ‘one of the most important events in modern Afghan history’ and congratulated Daoud on building such an ‘efficient’ secret police force that he could easily arrest ‘ultra-conservative’ mullahs.

  A very different response came from Pakistan: its media lambasted the unveiling of Afghan women and alleged that police had torn veils off women in Kabul, as communist officers had done in Uzbekistan and Tajikstan in 1928 and Reza Shah’s police had done in Iran from 1936. In turn, some Afghans accused Pakistan of hypocrisy since many upper-class women had begun wearing western clothes in Karachi and Lahore. Daoud accused Pakistan of ‘exaggerated and false reports’, ‘subversive propaganda’, ‘local imperialist intrigue’ and ‘unfashionable colonialism’ and claimed that Afghan mullahs opposed to the unveiling were in the pay of Islamabad.