Afghan Modern

The History of a Global Nation

Robert D. Crews

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674495760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Rugged, remote, riven by tribal rivalries and religious violence, Afghanistan seems to many a country frozen in time and forsaken by the world. Afghan Modern presents a bold challenge to these misperceptions, revealing how Afghans, over the course of their history, have engaged and connected with a wider world and come to share in our modern globalized age.Always a mobile people, Afghan travelers, traders, pilgrims, scholars, and artists have ventured abroad for centuries, their cosmopolitan sensibilities providing a compass for navigating a constantly changing world. Robert Crews traces the roots of Afghan globalism to the early modern period, when, as the subjects of sprawling empires, the residents of Kabul, Kandahar, and other urban centers forged linkages with far-flung imperial centers throughout the Middle East and Asia. Focusing on the emergence of an Afghan state out of this imperial milieu, he shows how Afghan nation-making was part of a series of global processes, refuting the usual portrayal of Afghans as pawns in the "Great Game" of European powers and of Afghanistan as a "hermit kingdom."In the twentieth century, the pace of Afghan interaction with the rest of the world dramatically increased, and many Afghan men and women came to see themselves at the center of ideological struggles that spanned the globe. Through revolution, war, and foreign occupations, Afghanistan became even more enmeshed in the global circulation of modern politics, occupying a pivotal position in the Cold War and the tumultuous decades that followed.

1 IMPERIAL COSMOPOLITANS

AFGHANS HAVE RARELY imagined themselves as peripheral to the rest of the world. One of the first histories of the Afghans placed them at the center of a universal history. Composed in the seventeenth century, Nimatullah’s History of the Afghans (Makhzan-i Afghānī) mapped their past onto a sacred landscape. It followed the contours of the geography of both the Bible and the Quran and portrayed Afghans in dynamic contact with these holy places. Their history began with Adam and Eve and their descendant, the prophet Yaqub Israel. Their progeny included the original Israelites, and they ruled at Jerusalem, where one of them, Afghana, constructed the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Nimatullah’s history accounted for the later geography of the Afghans by narrating a story of divinely inspired mass migration. Under King Suleiman, a figure named Bokhtnasser subjugated the area. He was responsible for “carrying away the Israelites, whom he settled in the mountainous districts of Ghor, Ghazneen, Kabul, Candahar, Koh Firozeh, and the parts lying within the fifth and sixth climates; where they, especially those descended of Asif and Afghana, fixed their habitations, continually increasing in number, and incessantly making war on the infidels around them.”¹

Their leader, Qais, was summoned to Medina to receive the blessings of the Prophet Muhammad and to fight alongside him against the army of Mecca. There he received a momentous prophecy: God would make Qais’s offspring “so numerous, that they, with respect to the establishment of the Faith, would outvie all other people.” At Medina, the angel Gabriel also revealed “that their attachment to the Faith would, in strength, be like the wood upon which they lay the keel when constructing a ship, which wood the seaman call Pathan [Pashtun].”

Thus it was the Prophet himself that conferred the title of Pathan, or Pashtun, upon Qais and his people. They then returned to the region of Ghor to spread Islam and to pledge loyalty to Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi (r. 998–1030), who had recently laid claim to territories from Iraq to the Sind River. Following the collapse of this dynasty in the twelfth century, a new ruler enticed the Afghans to migrate again. They journeyed farther to the east to another “Kohistan,” or “land of mountains.” The Afghans were to serve as “the guardians of the seat of the empire, and check the infidels about Hindustan.” Having recounted their trek from Arabia to the “Kohistan of Ghor” and then on to their present-day Kohistan, the History of the Afghans turned to a description of their military might. In the Indian subcontinent, they established themselves as sultans, “who sat on the throne in the principal provinces of Hindustan, and practised the right of having the Khotba [sermon] read, and money coined in their name; who carried the ball of justice and equity; and perpetuated their fame in this perishable world.”²

Nimatullah’s compilation of prophetic genealogy and epic migrations serves as a reminder that the history of the Afghans—and their thinking about their place in the world—did not begin with the state whose borders took form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the modern era, the space that would become Afghanistan belonged to very different political geographies. The largest of these territories was known as Khorasan. It was an ancient fixture in the writings of Arab, Armenian, and Iranian geographers. Khorasan was an elastic and often expansive construct, and writers imagined it as the eastern part of the Iranian lands. But they differed on whether it covered all of the Hindu Kush and reached to the Indus River and how far it extended beyond the Amu Darya (Oxus River). This latter region geographers regarded as a separate entity, Mawarannahr, or Transoxiana. It was anchored in long-standing urban centers such as Bukhara and Samarkand. These sites had been fertile ground for Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Manicheans, Jews, and Nestorian Christians before the Arab conquests and conversion to Islam. Whereas Mashhad and Herat were the two urban pillars of Khorasan, Kandahar had long faced the east. A former outpost of the Gandhara empire in India, the site of important Buddhist temples, and the seat of governors who spoke Aramaic and Greek, Kandahar tended to belong, according to early Arabic geographers, to the province of Sind. However, rulers from Khorasan and western Iran would challenge this association, waging campaign after campaign to seize the town and the valuable trade routes that passed through it. Kabul, once synonymous with utter remoteness in a saying favored by Arabic geographers, had occupied a more intermediate position, shaped at different moments by Hellenic and, later, Indic rulers and traditions. At the source of the Oxus, Badakhshan was yet another entity with its own history and politics. It was described by Chinese and Arab writers and widely known for the Badakhshani rubies that earned the praise of Marco Polo and became a stock image of Persian poetry.³

Other regions bore the name of peoples: Turan and Turkestan were inhabited by Turks, the Hazarajat by the Hazaras, and Baluchistan by the Baluch (though Baluch chronicles recounted their migration from an ancient homeland in Syria). Between the tenth and seventeenth centuries, a succession of imperial dynasties would also leave their mark. Besides the Ghaznavids and the dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, the Timurids, Shibanids, and Mughals as well as smaller states based in Badakhshan and Baluchistan would seek to integrate parts of this territory along with its resources and populations in their respective imperial projects.

In short, the inhabitants of this space were for centuries the subjects of competing empires, princely realms, and city-states oriented toward cultural and political centers of gravity beyond the region. At the same time, though, there was much to connect the inhabitants of this space. People were mobile, and boundaries fluid. Moreover, different kinds of networks—commercial, diplomatic, religious, literary, and artistic—sustained connections among the major urban centers, while linking them to other parts of the world.

To Europeans writing about the country later, Afghanistan seemed to be a prisoner of this past, one that they mistook for an endless stream of marauding invaders and savage conquests. A British eyewitness to the Anglo-Afghan War of 1838–1842 painted a typical portrait of the Afghans: “The people are a fine race, tall, athletic, and handsome; in Affghanistan they are remarkably fair, many of them scarcely darker than Europeans; they are accustomed to war from their childhood, and the history of their country, so far as we know it, presents a continual struggle between rival competitors for power—a series, with scarcely an intermission, of anarchy, blood, and confusion.” When Americans became involved in Afghanistan after the Second World War, they adopted a similar perspective. “For ages, the arid, twisted mountain masses of Afghanistan have formed the vortex for countless whirlpools of human migrations which have swept through Asia,” wrote Waldo Drake in the Los Angeles Times in 1947. “Invariably,” he claimed, “these invasions have been attended by wholesale massacres of populations, by the ravishment of great cities which housed the transplanted cultures of Iran, of Greece, of India.” These contradictory images of a timeless country that was at once landlocked and isolated and simultaneously an ancient crossroads for invading armies have doggedly persisted into the present.⁴

As an alternative to these enduring clichés, texts such as Nimatullah’s History of the Afghans open up the possibility of exploring interpretations that are more carefully grounded in historical evidence. As with all such texts, the context for his imaginative invocation of distant Jerusalem and Mecca was crucial. The setting for its compilation was, after all, an imperial court in India: Nimatullah took up his pen under the patronage of an Afghan nobleman at the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). In the north Indian palaces and courtyards of Delhi, Agra, and elsewhere, we encounter figures such as Nimatullah who were molded by vibrant and cosmopolitan imperial worlds, not merely as the hapless victims of “foreign invasions” or passive bystanders at some mythic “crossroads” of civilizations but as actors who engaged in complicated ways with imperial societies and institutions.⁵

Empire, in this setting as in others, was about more than occupying territory. It was an adaptive form of governance that projected power over vast distances and forged distinctive forms of connectivity among far-flung locales. It established hierarchies based on cultural, religious, and other distinctions and integrated diverse populations to varying degrees. The deep imperial imprint on the history of the region should not be taken for some uniquely Afghan pathology marked by a relentless cycle of imperial subjugation and resistance, however. The peoples who inhabited this space shared the experience of imperial rule with most other humans on this planet for lengthy periods of our recorded history. From the Romans to the Mongols, the Chinese, the British, and the Americans, empires seized territories and exploited subject populations. At the same time, though, they built new connections and facilitated exchange across regions and around the globe.⁶

Before the rise of Afghanistan and other nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inhabitants of the assorted polities that dotted and traversed this space were linked in innumerable ways to distant parts of the planet. Dynastic states of varying sizes jostled for authority over this space, continuously creating new political and social geographies that differ dramatically from those of modern maps. In the mid-seventh century, for example, the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–906) stretched all the way to Kabul and Herat. Other global connections would emerge not through conquest but via trade relations made possible by the web of early modern empires that spread across the region. The arrival of silver and tobacco, among the most important commodities exported by Europeans from the New World, attests to the global scale of these connections.

Migration was another factor. Beginning with traders, agriculturalists, and mercenaries who had moved to the east from at least the tenth century, groups calling themselves Afghan, or labeled such by those around them, became a diaspora of sorts. From the mid-fifteenth century Afghans who migrated from the eastern ranges of the Hindu Kush to the north Indian plains established dynasties there. Their descendants spread to nearly every corner of the subcontinent, with many of their number maintaining a sense of connection to the mythical territory mapped by Nimatullah. They would be called Afghan, Pathan, or Pashtun, depending on the setting. Yet they are not the only actors in this story.

The history of this area is also about the interaction of diverse populations. In analyzing events of this and later time periods, we will follow the practice of the historical sources in utilizing the names of groups as the authors of these accounts do, though with the proviso that they are sometimes deceptively modern sounding. Thus, in the eighteenth century we might encounter an “Afghan” on the Bay of Bengal, but this term does not have the same meaning as the word used with increasing frequency in the second half of the twentieth century to denote subjects of the state of Afghanistan. From the outset, we should note that labels such as “Afghan,” “Hazara,” “Qizilbash,” “Uzbek” were never fixed permanently; nor did they neatly bind political or social groups in any time period. Group identities—even those asserting detailed genealogical narratives as evidence of an unchanging “tribal” condition—emerged and continuously shifted in relation to imperial politics and institutions.

Throughout this space then, empires put people, goods, and ideas into motion. Imperial institutions, mentalities, and sociabilities in turn left profound legacies for the making of Afghanistan and the worldview of its elites. It was in the dynamic political context of imperial power, and the global connections that it enabled, that particular identities crystallized. Modern Afghans were formed in the cauldron of empire, and their state would retain many of its central characteristics long after the imperial polities that gave birth to it had faded.

The writing of the history of the communities that inhabit Afghanistan has long been about the search for their origins. In the nineteenth century, Europeans, especially those who dreamed of sowing the seeds of Christianity among them, were enthralled by the assertion, like that made by Nimatullah, that the Afghans descended from the ancient Jews. Were they one of the fabled “lost tribes of Israel”? Bernhard Dorn, a German philologist in Russian service who translated Nimatullah’s work in the late 1820s, rejected an Afghan tie to the Jews. But he added other important elements to their mythic history. Dorn traced their origins to the seventh century, “when, about 682 A.D., they issued from their mountainous habitations, and caused desolation and destruction in the contiguous countries.” In addition to their “pretended origin from the Jews,” the Afghans merited further study, Dorn continued, because their many tribes and clans, “which, according to Historians, amount to three hundred and fifty-nine,” gave them “a great resemblance to the ancient Scottish clans.” What truly distinguished the Afghans from among “all other Asiatic nations,” though, was for Dorn “their indelible love of freedom and liberty.” “They never submitted,” he insisted, “to a despotic government; but, at every time, succeeded in maintaining their natural right: and the present King of Kabul is little more than the first citizen of the empire.”⁷ Writing a half century later, H. W. Bellew, a British military officer, relied on linguistic speculation to identify “certain tribes now inhabiting Afghanistan” as “the representatives of the posterity of the Greeks who anciently ruled in that country.” “The country now called Afghanistan is the Ariana of the ancient Greeks,” he concluded. He went on to offer a scheme allowing observers “to recognise in many of the existing tribes of Afghanistan the modern representatives of the ancient nations of Ariana” and “to form an accurately founded distinction between the old possessors and the later settlers; between the remains of subsequent dynastic invaders and the stragglers of transitory plunderers.”⁸

The quest for the discovery of Afghan origins has had relevance far beyond speculative musing about a foggy past. Whether Afghans had affinities with Jews, Greeks, or independent Scots, and whether some of Afghanistan’s peoples were “invaders” or “stragglers,” would have political implications far into the future. The trope of the Afghans’ “indelible love of freedom and liberty” would persist as a staple of commentary on Afghanistan; and from the 1930s, Afghan elites would make a claim to descent from the Aryans a foundation of Afghan nationalist ideology. What all of these conceptions of the Afghan past shared was the idea that it had been stamped by an ancient migration followed by a period of static immobility continuing into the present. Shifting our focus from the quest for origins to reconstructing connections between Afghans and the wider world distances us from these racialized and nationalist categories and reveals a more dynamic picture of mobility and exchange.

Whatever ruling dynasties may have prevailed in the towns that now dot the Afghan landscape, it was the steady stream of commerce that more or less continuously linked their inhabitants—and their rural hinterlands—to distant trading centers. The history of trade networks tying the region to faraway places dates back long before the caravan routes linking the Roman Empire and Han China, a network of corridors for the movement of all manner of commodities, later referred to as the “Silk Road.” At Ai Khanum, a Greek city (now in northeastern Afghanistan), archaeologists have found objects that include a silver medallion likely brought from Syria depicting the goddess Cybele on a lion-drawn chariot. Excavations at Bagram uncovered glassware and other objects from Alexandria. Lapis lazuli from the famed mines of Badakhshan had been among the luxury commodities sought out by the Greeks. Traders brought the precious stones to Kabul, where they were passed on via Peshawar to Karachi and then by sea to markets elsewhere. A Chinese visitor to Herat in 1414 discovered that “the people have abundant quantities of gold, silver, gems, coral, amber, crystal, diamonds, cinnabar, chopping stones, pearls, and green jade,” which, he added, had “come from other places, but no one knows where.” Dating back to the Tang dynasty, the horse trade continued to link these towns and their pastoralist hinterlands to the Timurids (1370–1506) in Central Asia and the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in China. In the sixteenth century, traders from Kabul transported their goods to China via the towns of Central Asia. At Yarkand, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci observed a caravan of merchants arriving from Kabul wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Imperial Cosmopolitans
• 2. Forging an Afghan Empire
• 3. Bodies in Motion
• 4. The Star of Asia
• 5. Seduced by Capital
• 6. The Atomic Age
• 7. Revolutionary Dreams
• 8. At the Center of Humanity
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index