Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan
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To make matters worse, these two con artists fell victim themselves to an American con artist named Weymouth, who convinced them he was with the Department of the Navy and said he would present Fatima to the president of the United States—he had his eye on that diamond. The New York press didn’t know which was the real diplomatic delegation from Afghanistan, and they picked the one they found more entertaining: Princess Fatima and her entourage. Every day, the papers ran stories featuring her and her diamonds. By then, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had heard from Britain that Afghanistan was still part of the British Empire, not a sovereign country at all. So the real Afghan delegation went home with nothing. The Princess Fatima lost her diamond to Weymouth, ran out on her hotel bill, and got deported in disgrace.
Despite the American slight, the independence of Afghanistan became a fait accompli. Amanullah gained what his predecessors had made bombastic speeches about, and he did it with diplomacy and negotiation, not war. Amanullah then had more political capital in the bank than most rulers ever enjoy. His people loved him, and he loved them back. He made a habit of calling the notables of the city together in the evenings at a great assembly hall and chatting with them about the golden possibilities that lay ahead for Afghanistan. He toured the country and held public meetings in Kandahar and other cities, where he lectured to the common crowds. Educate your children, he told them. The future lies within their reach. If your children will only learn to read, write, and study, Afghanistan will have airplanes and electric lights and roads. Educate your wives too, he preached. A country can’t progress without contributions from its women. And treat your wives well, he lectured: do as the Prophet did. The Prophet said all people are equal, men and women. Take his words to heart, Amanullah counseled his subjects.
He was the most democratic of absolute monarchs, and if that’s an oxymoron, so be it. He met his people face-to-face, shook hands with them, and heard their pleas. Once, on a journey to the southern border, he insisted on meeting with the laborers working on a road that was being constructed there through difficult terrain, and he embraced these men of the lowest social class and thanked them for their service. He went to all these places without bodyguards, the usual filter between king and people, which all previous amirs had considered indispensable. “The nation is my bodyguard,” he said.
Back in Kabul, he and his wife Soraya, Tarzi’s well-educated daughter, hosted elegant parties. While Amanullah dazzled the men with his visions, Soraya gathered the wives together and made similarly inspirational speeches to them. The royal couple seemed to see themselves as great teachers, shepherding their people toward the light, except that nothing about their attitude was religious. They were avatars of the secular approach to life, the approach that had made the West so powerful.
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King’s Law Versus God’s Law
IN 1923, AMANULLAH PRESENTED THE NATION WITH A DOCUMENT HE had been working on since he took office. He called it the Nizamnama, “the Book of Order.” It was a new legal code he had invented by himself, taken partly from the code Ataturk was promulgating for Turkey, which was adapted from Swiss, French, and Italian codes. Merely creating such a code was a brash act in Afghanistan, for the clerics believed that men could not make laws. That privilege belonged to God alone, and God had already given humanity the laws men must follow: the Shari’a. No man could substitute his own laws for the Shari’a.
Amanullah didn’t call his code an alternative to the Shari’a. He simply didn’t mention the Shari’a. The specific provisions of the Nizamnama were just as revolutionary as the mere fact of the king creating his own alternative to the Shari’a. Some of his edicts were exhilarating, but some made people uneasy.
Amanullah’s code banned torture, even by the government; forbade forced entry into any private home, even by the government; and gave every citizen the right to bring charges of corruption against any government official—and those who didn’t get redress for their complaints at lower levels could take their petition right on up to the king. His code banned slavery too. So far, so good.
But his code also guaranteed freedom of religion in Afghanistan, which made the clerics squint. What did the king mean by “freedom”? Surely he didn’t mean Muslims could convert freely to another faith if they so desired: that went directly against the Shari’a. But what did he mean then, if not that? Was he giving his subjects the right to interpret the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings for themselves? Even that struck directly at the power of the country’s most entrenched establishment, its clerics.
The code went on to outlaw underage marriage. Girls were forbidden to marry until they were eighteen, men till they were twenty-two. Then there was the bride price: in Afghanistan men who wanted to marry a girl customarily paid that girl’s family a sum of money negotiated by the men of the two families. Afghan modernists felt this amounted to fathers selling their daughters for profit. Amanullah’s code did not forbid the bride price but set an upper limit on it of twenty-nine rupees. Brides had been going for 10,000 rupees.1
And then there was purdah—the requirement that women be veiled from men outside their own family. Afghanistan observed the strictest purdah in the world. Afghan women who went out in public had to wear a bag-like garment called a chad’ri or burqa over their bodies, which covered them from head to toe, leaving only a tiny patch of mesh for them to look through. Amanullah’s code said no law could require the burqa. Women could wear one if they wanted, but no one could force them to wear one, not even their husbands. This was truly radical stuff.
And, while he was at it, the king had some recommendations. Yes, technically, Islam allowed a man to have up to four wives, but only if he could treat them equally, which in practice was impossible for any man except the Prophet; so really the Qur’an was discouraging polygamy, so the king declared. He himself had only one wife, and one, he suggested, was enough for any man.b
There was more. The Nizamnama prohibited shoemakers from making the old-fashioned Punjabi style shoes that curled up at the toes, the norm for most Afghan men. Henceforth, Afghan shoemakers could only make Western-style shoes. Men with beards could not work for the government. They had to be clean shaven. Government officials could not come to work in the traditional native outfit of turban, long shirt, and baggy trousers. All who worked for the government would have to wear suits and ties and hats with brims.
The Nizamnama hit the society like a fertilizer bomb, but Amanullah and his queen didn’t worry. They took the attitude that Afghans would learn: all they needed were schools. So Amanullah began building schools all over the country, and not just for boys. In the new Afghanistan, girls would be educated too. The first schools were not coeducational, but that was coming. The country already had one government high school, the one built by Habibullah. Amanullah added three more. Each of the four high schools taught a foreign language, and, in the upper grades, the scientific subjects were taught in a European language: English at Habibia and Ghazi, German at Nejat, and French at Istiqlal. Boys who graduated from these schools would be equipped to go to universities in Germany, France, England, and America to learn the skills needed to implement the king and queen’s vision for a new Afghanistan.
Nadir Khan and his brothers saw both disaster and opportunity in this program. Nadir had spearheaded the military aspect of the war for independence, at which time he had built strong links to tribal leaders in the south. He wanted to disassociate himself from this mad rush to transform Afghan society, and thus avoid squandering the popular support he enjoyed in the countryside. Nadir was too calculating to voice his disapproval out loud, because Amanullah was still the king, but he sought out private meetings with British officials to assure them of his admiration for Britain. He said that Amanullah’s revolutionary enthusiasm probably reflected Soviet influence and that he himself favored a strong and friendly relationship with Great Britain. Hint hint. Then he got himself a diplomatic posting to Paris and settled down to observe events from a sa
fe distance.
Amanullah’s program came right out of Tarzi’s teachings, but his methods made even his mentor nervous. Tarzi counseled his son-in-law the king to slow down, make changes one at a time, give the people time to adjust. Amanullah and Soraya paid no attention. They were like teenagers. To them, old man Tarzi might have had some good ideas in his day, but he was a relic now. Amanullah did take one piece of Tarzi’s advice to heart. Tarzi told him to learn from Ataturk. The father of modern Turkey built invincible military strength before launching his reforms. Tarzi advised his son-in-law not to let reforms get ahead of military preparedness.
On this point, Amanullah decided that his father-in-law might be right, so he revived his grandfather’s policy of hasht-nafari or “every eighth man,” which meant that the king’s officials would go out and draft every eighth man they encountered.
Amanullah had finally gone too far. Outside the cities, religious leaders were already preaching that the king had become an infidel. Now, they said, he was trying to create an army to enforce his infidel will. He would come into men’s homes and rip the veils off their women and God only knew what else. In 1924, a tribal rebellion erupted near the Durand Line. Amanullah defeated these rebels, because his army had superior weapons and he still had considerable tribal support.2 After his victory, however, Amanullah faced a dilemma.
His dilemma had to do with the most eminent religious personalities in Afghanistan, a set of brothers popularly known as the Hazrats of Shor Bazaar, “the Revered Ones of Hubbub Market.” Hazrat, a title accorded only to the most highly regarded of religious men, implied learning and scholarship, but it also connoted mystical power and charisma. The Hazrats of Shor Bazaar didn’t just have “followers.” They had devotees by the thousands.
The Hazrats of Shor Bazaar belonged to a family known as the Mujaddedis, “the Newcomers.” They had started out as strong supporters of Amanullah. The eldest of them had placed the royal turban on Amanullah’s head and declared him king on that day in the mosque in 1919. But the eldest brother had died just as the rebellion was starting, and his younger brother Sher Agha Mujaddedi had lost enthusiasm for the amir, for he opposed the reforms. He may in fact have helped incite the rebellion.
Amanullah could not arrest Sher Agha, because this was not some isolated mullah preaching in the mountains. This was a national religious personality in a country that took religion more seriously than it took anything else. Sher Agha was so respected he could not even be insulted, much less be accused of criminal treason, even by the king. So Amanullah merely met with the Hazrat and suggested he might be more comfortable in another country. Sher Agha took the hint and moved to India, settling in the vicinity of a town called Deoband.
An ominous choice. Deoband had a famous religious university from which had sprung a revivalist movement called Deobandism. For several generations now, graduates of the Deobandi school had been circulating among Muslims of India, preaching that Islam must be restored to its original form, the form practiced in Mecca and Medina in the seventh century. Theirs was not merely a religious movement but a political program. The Deobandis were asserting that, because Islam provided a comprehensive template for society, Muslims had a duty to help create a state guided only by the Shari’a, a state in which there was no law but God’s law.
Toward this end, they said, Muslims must cleanse themselves of infidel ways, such as those exemplified by the European imperialist colonizers. They must return to the pristine ways of the prophet and his companions. You might suppose that radicals of this stripe would have no truck with the infidel British; but the Deobandis, at least in this period, were more concerned with their own backsliding brethren, especially Muslim modernists. They were ready to make deals with the British to combat this “near enemy” (as Osama Bin Laden would later term secular Muslims), confident that, once they had beaten the near enemy, they could take on the further foe. Amanullah personified everything the Deobandis abhorred, and the Deobandis represented everything Amanullah was fighting.
During the rebellion, in order to secure the help of the tribal elders, Amanullah had been forced to cancel his reform program. After the rebellion, he went right back to implementing his Nizamnama. And while Amanullah was proceeding with his reforms, Sher Agha Mujaddedi was keeping in close touch with his friends and allies in Afghanistan. Deobandi agents were traveling back and forth across the Durand Line, carrying messages and reports. Clerics and tribal powers throughout the countryside, taking inspiration and direction from the exiled Hazrat, agitated against the king. He’s become a kafir, they whispered. He’s become an infidel. Afghan conspiracy theorists believe the British secretly incited, promoted, and funded this corrosive campaign.
In 1927, Amanullah decided to do what no Afghan king had ever done. Even with all this whispering unrest in his country, he decided to visit Europe. He left his country in the hands of a regent and traveled through India as a private citizen to Bombay. There, he and Queen Soraya boarded a boat bound for Egypt. En route, Soraya exchanged her heavy Afghan veil for a piece of cloth that covered only the lower half of her face. When she stepped ashore in Cairo wearing this veil, the paparazzi snapped her picture.
The king and queen of Afghanistan drew considerable crowds in Egypt, for here was the giant killer, the only Muslim monarch ever to back down a European colonial power and achieve complete independence for his country. The excitement in Egypt attracted press coverage in Europe, and a buzz began.
But the events in Egypt made news in the east as well. When Amanullah visited the thousand-year-old Al-Azhar University, the heart of the Islamic intellectual universe, alma mater of the greatest Muslim theologians, scholars, and sages of all time, he didn’t wear traditional Muslim garb. He came decked out in a dove gray Western-style suit and prayed in the mosque in a top hat instead of a turban. The professors frowned; the clerics bit their lips. Amanullah’s opponents in Afghanistan rubbed their hands gleefully.
From Egypt the couple went to Italy, where some reporters felt Amanullah outclassed their own King Victor Emmanuel in sophisticated grace. As for Soraya, she now let the public see her face, and the public fell in love. The press played up the royal couple from Afghanistan as the fairytale prince and princess. The government of Italy went out of its way to prove it could host such a couple in suitable style. The photographers kept snapping pictures.
From Italy, the king and queen moved on to France. There, even more fervid crowds turned out, for their celebrity had preceded them. By no means would the French allow the Italians to outclass them! The president of France himself came to the train station to greet the royal couple. When Soraya stepped onto the platform, he bowed low, took her hand, and gallantly pressed his lips to it. Photographers caught the moment.
The French press went into a swoon. “Soraya,” they noted, sounded like sourire, the French word for “smile.” The queen came to state dinners clothed in exquisite Parisian couture, and oh how well she carried it off! She eschewed the short skirts then in fashion (this was the flapper era), but the evening gowns she wore to state dinner left her shoulders bare, and the little veil she was wearing now, covering only the lower half of her face, was just a film of transparent gauze. She achieved a look delightful to the French, simultaneously exotic and sophisticated, modern and mysterious.
By the time Amanullah and Soraya got to Germany, they were greeted like rock stars. Germany could not hope to match Italy and France for style, and their German hosts floundered a bit, trying to figure out what to serve guests who didn’t drink beer or eat pork sausages. But they did the best that money could buy: the government tried to close the gap with gifts and trade deals and offers of economic aid. Amanullah accepted several aircraft, a promise of some transport trucks, and a bunch of industrial machinery, including everything he needed to set up a soap factory, not to mention a trade agreement with a private Germany company, which offered to buy 830,000 rupees worth of Afghan lapis lazuli each year for the next three years.3
The whole time the royal couple was basking in the adoration of European audiences, however, the photographers were taking pictures of them; and those pictures were being published in European magazines, and those magazines were making their way to India, and from there the Deobandis and the Hazrats’ agents were taking them into Afghanistan.
Photographs of Queen Soraya with her bare shoulders passed from hand to hand in those mountains. Old bearded and be-turbaned men gawked and clucked at pictures of their beautiful queen sitting half naked at tables with foreign men, half her face exposed, the other half covered only by a filmy little strip of gauze designed, clearly, not to hide her features but to enhance them for the decadent pleasure of lustful viewers. And here was the queen offering her hand for some man to kiss—to kiss! And with her husband standing right there! What was Amanullah thinking? What kind of man would put his wife on display like this? Was he a king or a pimp?