by Tim Bonyhady
His minimal role has come to be regarded as vital to the Mappe, which formed the centrepiece of the most significant Boetti exhibition, staged in 2011–12 by the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In their joint introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the museums’ directors characterised the Mappe as a ‘collaboration with artisan embroiderers in Afghanistan’, ignoring that ‘collaboration’ implies significant interaction between participants of similar status. The directors also likened Boetti to the language theorists Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, lauding Boetti for ‘neutralising the spectre of authorship’, though his identification as the maps’ artist remains vital to their cachet and value for museums and the art market.
CHAPTER 11
Miss Afghanistan
National competitions were part of Zahir Shah’s Afghanistan. One, held each June by the Women’s Welfare Association, was to identify the country’s ‘best mothers’, whose children had done exceptionally at school despite their fathers dying or being incapacitated. Another, initiated with government approval in 1972 by the weekly magazine Zhuwandoon, was to discover the first ‘Miss Afghanistan’. Its title suggested a beauty contest, and that was part of it. But the competition, cast as a search for the ‘best all-round girl’, was also designed to encourage young women to play a bigger role in Afghan society, give them more voice and increase Zhuwandoon’s circulation.
The first beauty contest in an Islamic country was staged in Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey in 1929 by Cumhuriyet—the Istanbul daily that celebrated Queen Soruya’s ‘civilised’ western dress and lamented her exile that year. First, entrants submitted their portraits, and readers voted for their favourites. Then the finalists appeared unveiled in gowns revealing their necks and shoulders before a panel of male and female judges who picked the winner. From 1930, Miss Turkey competed internationally; in 1932 she became Miss World. In the late 1950s, a Pakistani group sought to establish a similar competition with entrants wearing bathing suits before female judges and burqas before male judges within Pakistan; then the winner going to California for the Miss Universe competition. This contest was abandoned after Pakistan’s Brotherhood of Mullahs declared it ‘a disgrace to the Eastern social order and conventions’.
The Afghan contest was conceived more cautiously, involving neither swimsuits nor international competition. It still appeared vulnerable in the wake of the attacks on women in western dress in Kabul in 1970. However, Islamists in Afghanistan proved more interested in attacking their political opponents, so Zhuwandoon’s competition proceeded without controversy, giving not only the winner but also the four other ‘best girls’ unprecedented opportunities to discuss—and deplore—the place of women in Afghan society.
The competition’s organiser, Shukria Raad, was a striking example of generational change. Her father was amir of Bokhara until the Soviets deposed him in 1920, prompting him to seek refuge in Kabul, where he was the first person fined in 1928 for flouting King Amanullah’s new dress code for men by wearing a turban. Raad took a very different trajectory after what she considered an ‘ordinary middle-class’ upbringing. Having enrolled in the university’s first journalism class in 1961, she continued her studies, despite marrying aged nineteen in 1962, and graduated in 1964. Then she went to Germany for further training. Back in Kabul, she began receiving opportunities that prompted one British visitor to identify Afghanistan as ‘a paradise for the well-educated and ambitious woman’.
Raad’s first job was delivering Radio Afghanistan’s daily program for housewives. Then she became director of the station’s educational programs, while also editing the women’s page of the daily Islah. After four months in Sydney with the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1968, she began editing Zhuwandoon aged twenty-five and redesigned it, had it printed in colour and created new sections devoted to women and fashion. She gained further foreign experience when she spent a week in Moscow at the invitation of the Soviet–Afghan Friendship Society and had an internship with Newsweek in the United States. A photograph of Raad at her desk in Kabul shows her wearing thick-rimmed glasses, hair pulled back: an embodiment of modernity and style, of course with no headscarf.
The Miss Afghanistan competition was a hit. Young women began ‘storming’ Zhuwandoon’s office with their entries. Every issue of Zhuwandoon for months featured at least four, usually six, and sometimes eight entrants, who were all required to be unmarried. In addition to a short biography, they each had to submit a portrait photograph. As more than 120 did so, it was clear that, far from being troubled by photography, many young women in Kabul wanted to be pictured in the press.
A few were in the workforce, having been unable to continue their education due to financial or personal difficulties. Most were students in senior high school or university who planned to complete their education before marrying and looked forward to getting jobs. Some wanted to be doctors, others to be nurses. One hoped to become a flight attendant. Another had gained admission to Kabul’s Police Academy, a new occupation for Afghan women, but had opted to become a teacher.
Several of the entrants advocated equality for women and looked forward to their lives no longer being blighted by what they viewed as superstition, ignorance and outmoded traditions. Most emphasised their homeliness and love of sewing, knitting and cooking as ‘a must for each Afghan girl’. While some endorsed national costume, none mentioned the chadari. It was more than twelve years since the unveiling at the Ghazi Stadium: they were part of a generation that could not imagine being veiled. Although they came from that part of Kabuli society most interested in fashionable western clothes, they advocated ‘mild dress’, ‘void of extremity’, to have a chance of winning. They also declared themselves against both miniskirts and hotpants—Mary Quant’s latest creation to have a big impact, which reached Afghanistan in 1971, worn by a western model in a fashion parade at the Intercontinental Hotel.
‘Hotpants in Kabul? Wow? Yes.’, the local Times announced. ‘No’, responded Rahim Nawin, Afghanistan’s most popular cartoonist, who was otherwise a gynaecologist and deputy rector of science at Kabul University. His vehicle was Tarjoman, a satirical weekly with the largest circulation of any of Afghanistan’s non-government newspapers, which escaped censorship by not lampooning the king or Islam. In a cartoon captioned ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, Nawin showed five stages of female dress. The cartoon started with the chadari, voluminous trousers of the delaq and slippers. It progressed through a chadari revealing a knee-length skirt and western shoes, to an unveiled woman wearing a scarf and long dress, to a woman with no head covering and a very short skirt, and another in a dress which revealed much of her underwear. The final frame was headed ‘Stop’ and so Afghan women did, wearing neither dresses so short nor hotpants.
Laurence Brun, the first western photographer to live in Kabul, was particularly interested in the city’s women, while there from 1970 until 1972. She photographed women in chadaris—selling paper bags; struggling to cross the street because of how their clothes impeded their vision; exiting a school for married women. Many of her subjects were young—often women she knew. Her goal, Brun has written, ‘was to show their daily life, within secular Muslim traditions together with the existing modernisation of their condition as well as the emerging women’s emancipation movement which was taking place in the capital. All these women who had strong personalities were courageous and generous. They dared to live and speak. As a French woman living among them, I wanted to show their struggle to exist.’
She photographed a female doctor with a male patient; a biology lesson at the Malalai school; a stewardess in Ariana’s new uniform combining the traditional and modern; a female university student in a short-sleeved, tight-fitting top, cigarette in hand, with plucked eyebrows and long painted nails, talking intently to a young man with long sideburns; a school for nurses and midwives with ‘uterus’ written large on the blackboard; and Afghan an
d Soviet female doctors of the Women’s Welfare Association’s gynaecological service seeing patients. She also photographed three young, confident, smiling women wearing long sleeves but unusually short skirts in the Shahr-e Naw. While aware of Brun’s camera, they were not posing for it. Her photograph gives the sense that these women—all ineligible for the Miss Afghanistan competition because of their skirts—usually walked down the street that way.
Her focus on May Day was, again, young women—capturing the intensity of their political engagement. A pupil from the Zarghouna high school with a scarf draped over her head, stands among her schoolmates and gesticulates as she addresses them, while a banner behind carries the text: ‘Let us walk towards peace, democracy and social progress.’ A bare-headed girl from the Aisha Durani school declaims from a book, while many of the girls seated on the grass look intently at her. The flags and banners, some identifying the first of May as the day of unity of all workers, are all communist red.
The weekly Gahiz provided a forum for many traditionalists appalled by the liberalism of the king’s rule. One contributor was incensed by a picture on display in a photographic studio that showed Adam and Eve ‘completely nude’, especially ‘the prophet Adam’. After vainly asking the government to ban this image, he called on Muslims ‘to wholeheartedly fight any lewd and blasphemous propaganda launched by the infidels against the holy tenets of the Islam religion’. But such vituperation failed to satisfy a twenty-three-year-old member of Muslim Youth expelled from the Polytechnic due to his activism who went under the pseudonym ‘Merajuddin’ or ‘Zenith of God’. He sought funding for a printing press from the American embassy early in 1972 because Gahiz refused to publish pieces advocating the violent overthrow of the government.
Merajuddin argued that Washington should assist because ‘true Muslims and Americans had a common interest in fighting’ communism, which was ‘diametrically opposed’ to their ‘way of life’. He showed off a loaded pistol as evidence of his participation in this fight and claimed to have been responsible for the lynching of a young communist called Abdurahman six months before in the eastern province of Laghman. The embassy concluded that Muslim Youth could ‘easily have helped stir up the agitation’ but identified this murder as primarily the work of local mullahs in Laghman’s ‘up-tight religious atmosphere’.
The embassy refused Merajuddin’s request, but political murders in Kabul soon followed. The first occurred in June 1972 at the university as part of a clash between Muslim Youth and Maoists. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an engineering student who led Muslim Youth, was jailed for killing the Maoists’ leader, Saidal Sukhandan, but whether Hekmatyar or one of his followers did so remains contested. The next murder, that September, occurred at the home of Menhajuddin Gahiz, the editor of Gahiz, after six men arrived by car, two got out and one asked Gahiz to publish an article. When he refused, the two men shot Gahiz and one of his nephews. The killers’ interest in publication in Gahiz suggests they too were Muslim Youth.
More religiously and politically inspired murders, motivated by fanaticism and xenophobia, followed in Kandahar. The victims were four young Frenchmen in search of drugs. The killers were two Kandaharis, including a mullah reputedly eager to become a Ghazi by slaying infidels. When the Frenchmen fell asleep after the Kandaharis gave them hashish, the Kandaharis beheaded them. Within three months, the murderers had been tried and hung as the government sought to maintain Afghanistan’s reputation as a safe tourist destination.
The Miss Afghanistan competition proceeded unaffected, with the entrants judged on their looks but also interviewed and tested on their general knowledge and subjects that most interested them. When the tenth round took place in September 1972, one male judge deplored how almost all the girls dressed in European clothes rather than Afghan national dress, which he declared to be as beautiful as it was appropriate. Both judges decried the contestants’ lack of general knowledge, which saw some identify Japan as the capital of China and another locate Burma in Europe—much as most westerners could still not locate Afghanistan.
The competition concluded that December at the Intercontinental Hotel, which was seeking local custom after failing to attract sufficient foreigners. One of the functions staged there was the marriage of Fatima Gailani, whose father Sayyid Ahmad Gailani had become a Sufi pir and Zahir Shah’s religious adviser in between securing the Peugeot franchise for Kabul, which he turned into the largest car dealership in Afghanistan. As his entrepreneurial activity had brought him great wealth, Gailani hired the Intercontinental’s ballroom for Fatima’s wedding—‘a truly royal occasion’, ‘very lively, with all the latest fashions’, attended by the Crown Prince, the eldest son of Zahir Shah and Humaira. The Miss Afghanistan gala drew five hundred of Kabul’s elite, presided over by another royal, Princess Belqis. The eighteen finalists were all present. A committee of men and women chose the five ‘best girls’.
The winner, Zohra Yousuf, whose father had studied at Columbia University before going on to become Afghanistan’s surgeon-general, had already attracted the Kabul Times’ attention for topping her class at Malalai. That night at the Intercontinental she wore a floor-length evening dress but no headscarf, unlike the ‘Miss Afghanistan’ photographed by Andrew Wilson in 1959. She characterised the competition as a forum ‘for appreciating the talents of women, and their claims to equality with men in this basically masculine society’. The runner-up, Parwin Azimi, who was working at the D’Afghanistan Bank but was eager to study abroad, declared that most families still did not want their daughters educated.
The five ‘best girls’ won the opportunity to travel both outside and within Afghanistan escorted by Shukria Raad. After visiting Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan, they went to Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-e Sharif. They not only engaged in standard tourism but also promoted literacy and visited Family Guidance clinics, girls schools and a women’s prison—the one novel subject Eve Arnold had photographed in 1969 for the Sunday Times. In her accompanying essay, Lesley Blanch had reported how Afghan women convicted of adultery had been stoned to death until the late 1950s and some women continued to be imprisoned ‘to save them from family vengeance’. When the five place-getters visited Herat’s jail early in 1972, they found fifty-two women forced to weave carpets as part of standard vocational training of inmates. Many explained that police had caught them after they deserted their husbands. ‘We must find out why they left their husbands,’ Fatima Akhtar Herawi, the third place-getter, declared. ‘Was the lack of rights for women in the family not the main reason?’
Like other children of successful Kabulis, Zohra Yousuf had engaged in some Afghan tourism when her family took a ‘heat break’ from the city every summer and a ‘cold break’ each winter. Interviewed in 1971, she enthused about ‘summer excursions in the cool of the gorges of the Panjshir Valley north-east of Kabul, glimpsing the past of the country in the valleys of Bamiyan, and following the sun in Jalalabad during the winter’. But much of the country remained foreign to Yousuf as she discovered on becoming ‘Miss Afghanistan’. As she recounted many years later, she ‘encountered explosive mixtures of religion and culture’ and ‘learned there were places in Afghanistan where men and women did not stand on equal ground’.
CHAPTER 12
Great Leader
Images of Zahir Shah abounded when Washington’s ambassador to Kabul toured Afghanistan in 1975. ‘He’s our king. He’s still there,’ the ambassador was told when he asked about these portraits. But the king was not—a mark of the gulf between Kabul and the countryside, a mark too of other signs of the end of Zahir Shah’s rule not reaching those whom the ambassador met. While stamps picturing Zahir Shah remained in use, the Afghan postal service often scrubbed out his head. Afghanistan also had a new tricolour with horizontal stripes, the green band enlarged to symbolise new hope and confidence. The emblem on this new flag was inscribed 26 Saratan 1352, the Dari equivalent of 17 July 1973, which marked the start of a new era when Mohammad Daoud, Zahir Shah’s f
irst cousin, brother-in-law and prime minister until 1963, again became Afghanistan’s leader.
Daoud’s ambition to regain power had been well known. Zahir Shah intended a provision in the 1964 constitution, stipulating that the prime minister could not be from the royal family, to stymie him. A coup was another matter and, as rumours of one intensified in 1972, Zahir Shah sought to stop Daoud by appointing a new prime minister, Musa Shafiq, whose talents were widely acknowledged. A product of both Al-Azhar University in Cairo and Columbia University in New York, Shafiq embarked on a more conservative course by reimposing segregation on Kabul’s buses, instructing Radio Kabul to broadcast the Islamic call to worship traditionally made from mosques and releasing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from prison less than a year into his sentence for Saidal Sukhandan’s killing.
Kabul’s Community Church, which had been completed with its big crucifix visible from afar, presented Shafiq with a particular challenge when American evangelical members of its congregation held covert Bible and Sunday-school classes for Afghans. Anxious not to alienate the Nixon administration in Washington, Shafiq tried to have the proselytisers undertake not to continue their evangelism or leave ‘on an informal basis’ for breaching the government’s prohibition on proselytism. When they refused, Shafiq expelled several, including the Reverend Christy Wilson, then removed all signs of Christianity from Afghanistan’s public domain by bulldozing the church, which the evangelicals cast as Islamic zealotry.
