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A FG H A NIS T A N R I S I N G
Afghanistan Rising
Islamic Law and Statecraft between
the Ottoman and British Empires
Fa i z a h m e d
First printing
Introduction 1
4. Converging Crescents
Turco-Afghan Entente and an Indian Exodus to Kabul 161
5. Legalizing Afghanistan
Islamic Legal Modernism and the Making of the 1923 Constitution 207
Conclusion 274
viii Contents
Abbreviations 289
Notes 291
Acknowledgments 405
Index 411
M A PS A ND IL LUST R AT IONS
M A PS
2. The Ottoman Empire, Afghanistan, and British India, early 1914 125
5. The greater Middle East a fter the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923 242
F IGU R E S
1.2. Letter from Indian scholars of Dar al-ʿUlum Deoband seminary to Sultan
Abdülhamid II during the first Ottoman mission to Afghanistan, 1877 48
1.6. A sas al-Quzat (Fundamental Rules for Judges), Kabul, 1885 / 1886 62
1.8. Kitab-i Jang-i Rum wa Rus (The Russo-Ottoman War), Kabul, 1890 / 1891 66
3.1. Ottoman map of Iran, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan, 1914 / 1915 126
4.1. “The Girl Writes,” from Kitab-i Alifba-yi Turki (The ABCs of Ottoman
Turkish), Kabul, 1920 / 1921 179
This book draws on sources in Afghan Persian (also known as Dari or Kabuli
Persian), Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Pashto, and Urdu, and utilizes up to four
calendars as methods of dating. The following standards are a dopted to balance
orthographic and chronological consistency with an appreciation for the plu-
ralism at the heart of the subject matter.
published in English (hence Abdul Ghani Khan, not ʿAbd al-Ghani Khan).
Southern / Kandahari dialect of Pashto has been preferred over eastern / Peshawari
“Pakhto.” In all other cases the default transliteration system is Arabic following
IJMES. The following pronunciation guide is provided for readers’ reference.
Calendars
Historical records and manuscripts cited in this book employ one or more of the
following calendars as chronological techniques: Gregorian (CE), Hijri, Ottoman
Rumi, and Persian Jalali. The Hijri calendar is the Islamic lunar calendar dating
to the migration (Hijra) of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE. Tra-
ditionally, Hijri months begin and end based on confirmed local sightings of
the new crescent moon with the naked eye, hence leaving room for minor varia-
tion between locales of great distance before the advent of modern telecommu-
nications. The Ottoman Rumi calendar (also known as Maliye, or fiscal calendar)
is solar-based and derived from the Roman Julian dating system, but with a
start date from the Hijra. Persian Jalali is the official solar calendar of Afghanistan
and Iran, also with a start date from the Hijra.
N o t e o n T r a n s l i t e r at i o n a n d U s a g e xiii
For precision and consistency, Gregorian dates are used by default, whereas
Hijri (h), Rumi (r), and Jalali (j) dates are followed by their equivalent Grego-
rian date or approximate Gregorian year range, as in the following examples:
For the Persian Jalali calendar, Afghan Dari month names have been used in place
of their Iranian equivalents.
A FG H A NIS T A N R I S I N G
Introduction
Two months later, Edison received a response, but from a source much closer
to the action than he expected: Simla, northern India, the summer capital of the
British Raj. In a formal reply from the Foreign and Politic al Department of
the government of India, veteran Raj official Sir James Glasgow Acheson first
lauded the youth’s initiative—“the enterprise displayed in which undoubtedly
deserves encouragement”—but regretted to inform him that “there is unfortu-
nately no generally recognized central Government in Afghanistan, which is in
a state of civil war.” As for the purported role of Colonel Lawrence in the Af-
ghan tumult, Sir Acheson was resolute and dismissive: “These rumours, which
were partly due to anti-British propaganda and partly to sensationalism pure
and s imple are absolutely without any foundation of any kind.”1
The student from Los Angeles had received an answer, but reasonable minds
could differ as to its educational value. Though not exactly inaccurate, the trans-
oceanic letter exchange was noticeably silent on Afg hanistan’s more positive
and instructive achievements in recent years, including its independence from
Britain in 1919 and the promulgation of its first constitution in 1923, among
other milestones in law, governance, and diplomacy in that decade alone. In-
stead, one student’s search for reliable material on the country yielded an ahis-
torical portrait bereft of context—just another day of mayhem in Afghanistan, so
it would seem. In the end, perhaps a fixation on motifs of war, chaos, and regime
change by the questioner and questioned here is not so remarkable. Nearly
a century later, after all, when it comes to Afghanistan many a writer and reader
continue to be drawn to the same themes.
Challenging conventional narratives of Afghanistan as a perennial war zone,
and the rule of law as a secular-liberal monopoly, this book presents an account of
the first Muslim-majority country to gain independence, codify its own laws, and
ratify a constitution after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. If Afghanistan seems
an unexpected candidate for this distinction, it is because historical approaches to
Afghan law and governance before the Soviet invasion of 1979 remain few and far
between. Based on archival research in six countries, the book uncovers the lost
history behind the rise of Afghanistan as a sovereign nation amid empires, the
makers of its first constitution from Constantinople to Kandahar, and the hur-
dles they overcame in crafting a modern state within the interpretive traditions of
Islamic law and ethics, or shariʿa, and international norms of legality.
Far from being a landlocked wilderness or remote frontier, roughly a century
ago Kabul was a virtual seaport for itinerant scholars and statesmen shuttling
between the Ottoman and British imperial domains. Tracing the country’s long-
Introduction 3
lands. Nor will one find support for conventional tropes of Afghanistan as the
“buffer state par excellence,” a purported no-man’s-land existing only to placate
the rivalries of colonial powers, whether in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.8
By opting out of many routine frameworks where Afghan history and gover-
nance is concerned, this book proposes a new series of questions: What role did
transnational (or transregional) Muslim networks play in the making of modern
Afghanistan’s early legal and constitutional history? What original projects and
innovative solutions came out of the experiments in autonomous Muslim gov-
ernance during the successive reigns of the Afghan Muhammadzai amirs ʿAbd
al-R ahman Khan (r. 1880–1901), Habib Allah Khan (r. 1901–1919), and Aman
Allah Khan (r. 1919–1929)? Did t hese monarchs and their advisors simply repro-
duce European models of law and expertise, or did they contribute something
uniquely Islamic that expanded the horizons of legality for Muslim governments
and international norms at large? If the latter, what approaches, methodologies,
and tensions were most prominent in formulating their visions of the shariʿa in a
modern state? Put together, how did Afghans, Ottomans, and Indian Muslims
interpret and apply Islamic law and statecraft in the virtual laboratory of a rising
independent Afghanistan?
As a historical undertaking, the labor for this book began with asking what
light Afghan, Ottoman Turkish, and British Indian archives could shed on t hese
questions. By unearthing a genealogy of Afghanistan’s first constitution and its
first comprehensive promulgation of nation-state law, the outcome addresses a
gap in scholarly literature on Afghan legal history, but also “interislamic” legal
networks between the Ottoman Empire and British India in Afghanistan as they
evolved over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent years have
seen historians of international law and sovereignty in the age of empire advance
the study of Ottoman extraterritoriality in global directions, pushing scholars
to rethink questions of imperial citizenship as not simply a one-or two-sided
story of European capitulations and Turkish response in the eastern Mediter-
ranean.9 Rather, scholars have begun to explore the myriad possibilities for
contestation, negotiation, and movement for subjects of diverse status and stripe—
Christians, Jews, or Muslims; nationalists, socialists, or Pan-Islamists, to name
a few—in a multipolar and increasingly interconnected late imperial world. This
book contributes to the growing body of literature on extraterritoriality and im-
perial citizenship by highlighting the mobility and activities of Afghan, Ot-
toman, and Indian Muslim statesmen in Afghanistan as the latter transitioned
from a semiautonomous protectorate of Britain to a fully sovereign nation-state.
Introduction 7
Here the study problematizes literature on the modern Middle East that
silences the non-Ottoman periphery as stagnant backwaters or passive objects
caught between the colonial rivalry of Britain and Russia. By examining the
Afghan court’s patronage of scholarly and bureaucratic networks from Constan-
tinople to Kandahar, and from Damascus to Delhi, it argues that this unique
constitutional project can be reduced neither to European mimicry and obei-
sance nor to an identity politics of Pan-Islam triggered at the behest of the
Sublime Porte. In this manner, the book aims to lift the study of Afg hani
stan from the confines of the Great Game, Cold War, or more recent literature
on failed states. Instead, readers are invited to rediscover Afg hanistan with a
different past—when Kabul represented a burgeoning model of Islamic legal mod-
ernism, constitutional monarchy, and independent state building during an age of
waning empires and rising nation-states.
The research behind this book was grounded in work at five principal places: the
National Archives of Afghanistan in Kabul, the Prime Ministry Ottoman Ar-
chives in Istanbul, the archives of the Turkish Republic and Red Crescent Society
in Ankara, the National Archives of India in Delhi, and the India Office Records
in London. Beyond hosting these world-class repositories, all of the aforesaid
cities play critical roles in the book’s central plot. Drawing on manuscripts, maps,
and government records in Ottoman Turkish, Dari, Arabic, Urdu, English, and
French, the first half of the book traces the burgeoning tripartite ties between Ot-
tomans, Afghans, and Indian Muslims from the Sublime Porte’s first diplomatic
mission to Kabul in 1877 to the eve of the G reat War. In the process, the book
highlights the intersecting legal and administrative worlds of the late Ottoman
Empire, British Raj, and then semiautonomous amirate of Afghanistan.
Afghan ties to neighboring states and regions will not come as a surprise to
specialists in medieval and early modern India, Iran, or Central Asia. Far less is
known, however, about this landlocked country’s links to the eastern Mediter-
ranean. Ask even an avid observer of global politics about international link-
ages between cities like Kabul, Kandahar, and Peshawar to the greater M iddle
East, and the response will almost certainly be the so-called Arab Afghans—a
network of predominantly Saudi, Egyptian, and Algerian Islamists recruited to
fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s (later evolving into the terrorist organization
8 A F G H AN I STAN R I S I NG
al-Qaeda following Soviet withdrawal from the country and the first US inva-
sion of Iraq). Over a c entury before Osama bin Laden and Aymen al-Zawahiri
were born, however, Afghanistan and the Ottoman-ruled lands of Greater Syria,
Arabia, and North Africa w ere as intimately connected, but by a very different
set of actors and themes: sufis, scholars, and royal families working in tandem
with Muslim jurists, constitutionalists, and administrators to build an indepen
dent state within recognized borders and the nascent international legal system.
There were long-standing connections between Afghans and the Ottoman
lands well before the late nineteenth century, but this book argues that the nature
and intensity of these relations changed dramatically due to a re-regionalization
of Muslim-majority societies and minority communities a fter the Russo-Ottoman
War (1877–1878). The emergence of a new “interislamic region” between Istanbul,
Kabul, Lahore, and Delhi, among other locales, therefore had a g reat deal to do
with geopolitics, and the triangular vortex of the British, Ottoman, and Russian
imperial rivalries in particular. (It was an Anglo-Ottoman alliance against Rus
sian expansion in Asia, for example, that formed the background of the first Ot-
toman mission to Kabul in 1877—the subject of Chapter 1.) The formation of new
interislamic currents and circuits had roots beyond interimperial geopolitics, how-
ever. Increased mobility facilitated by new infrastructure, transportation, and
communication grids created new portals for enhanced Muslim-to-Muslim inter-
action across imperial and early national lines. At the same time, a growing racial-
ization of Muslims within European empires, and the extension of this racially
discriminatory approach to existing Muslim dynasties, including to the Ottoman
Empire as the so-called Sick Man of Europe and Afghanistan as the Forbidden
Kingdom, not only made inter-Muslim visions of exchange and solidarity a theo-
retical project and imagined identity but also furthered historical processes of ex-
changing expertise in modern law and state building. In that process, as the first
half of the book shows, Kabul at the turn of the twentieth century became akin to
a port city, harboring Muslim scholars, diplomats, and administrators from as far
as Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul in the west, and Lahore, Deoband, and Luc-
know in the east. Yet the connective tissue bridging these locales was not unbridled
jihadist militancy but modern articulations of Islamic law, state building, and con-
stitutional monarchy operating within an evolving international system at large.
The second half of the book turns to the convergence of three simultaneous
developments of profound impact in the twentieth-century greater Middle East:
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a fter World War I, Afghanistan’s indepen
dence from Britain in 1919, and the Indian Khilafat movement (1919–1924). Amid
Introduction 9
this dramatic backdrop of revolutionary politics and anticolonial coa litions, the
book draws attention to an untold juridical story: the collaboration between
Afghan scholars, Ottoman lawyers, and Indian technocrats who converged in
Kabul to market their expertise to one of the world’s only fully sovereign Muslim-
majority countries—A fghanistan during the reign of Amir Aman Allah Khan.
The hallmark of Islamic legal modernists in Afghanistan was a fierce resistance
to transplanting European legal codes, instead opting for a synthesis of Afghan-
Muslim jurisprudential heritage—particularly of the Hanafi school of Islamic
law—with the presumed requirements of modern statehood, legality, and gov-
ernance.10 By paying close attention to the question of originality, heritage, and
provenance in Afghan state legislation, Aman Allah’s lawmakers combined jur-
isprudential continuity and innovation at the same time. Ultimately, the book
argues, it was the synergistic fusion of t hese diverse visions of modern Islamic
law and statecraft in Kabul that produced Afghanistan’s first constitution and
the twentieth century’s first Muslim-majority nation-state.
This account presents a rare opportunity to understand the complexity and
dynamism of Afghanistan’s legal history during a formative interval in the coun-
try’s not too distant past. B
ecause most works on nineteenth-and early twentieth-
century Afghanistan are based on British or Russian diplomatic records, or on the
observations of other European representatives in Kabul, internal perspectives on
Afghan royal courts have been elusive in the historiography.11 As much as this is a
book about Afghans and Afghanistan, however, it is also about a broader transna-
tional world of Muslim scholars, jurists, administrators, and other professionals
from the waning years of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876) to the rup-
tures of World War I. By virtue of their having been hired by Afghan govern-
ments, the study follows a diverse array of Muslim experts as they contributed to
forming a cosmopolitan court of policy makers in Kabul. Tracing the personalities
and politics behind the formative state-building campaigns of Afghan Muham-
madzai amirs ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan, Habib Allah Khan, and Aman Allah Khan
in particular, the book uncovers the contested visions of Islam and modernity at
the heart of a struggle to constitute Afghanistan as a nation and state.
Deprovincializing Afghanistan
Four major themes comprise the connective tissue of this book. The first is a
centering of Afg hanistan from its conventional treatment as a peripheral
10 A F G H AN I STAN R I S I NG
backwater, the Forbidden Kingdom of Middle East and South Asian studies,
but also Islamic legal studies. Rather than treating the country in isolation, how-
ever, this is also a book about the making of a modern interislamic region com-
monly (but inaccurately) conflated today as “the Muslim world.” The book traces
how, just at the time of Eurocentric globalization and a scramble for African and
Asiatic colonies, the barriers between Ottomans, Afghans, and the Muslims of
British India were becoming fewer and more porous than ever before.
There were certainly myriad forms of ties between the regions covered in this
book before the period of study, from mercantile networks and nomadic circuits
to sufi orders, pilgrims, and marriages between Ottoman, Mughal, and Afghan
royalty.12 Nor should the deep roots and long arc of Turco-Persianate court cul-
tures from medieval Baghdad and Samarqand to early modern Delhi or Lucknow
be forgotten. But a major theme of this work is that the “Muslim world” as
such emerges as a political region in the late nineteenth c entury. Before then,
Muslim populations w ere too scattered and divided among competing small-
scale principalities, or embedded within states and empires in which other reli-
gions were as large or even dominant, to constitute a global region or geopo
litical player as such. Paradoxically, the era of European imperial hegemony in
Eurasia coincided with, and produced, stronger interislamic connections; the
latter proc esses intensified through profound demographic shifts within the
Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires in the late nineteenth to
early twentieth centuries.13 The book highlights how intellectual, political, and
juridical ties between a modern “Balkans-to-Bengal” complex were not merely
imagined or Orientalist constructions, but w ere anchored in a ctual interstate
exchanges between royal courts and a nineteenth-century version of today’s
NGOs and social media outlets combined: Muslim philanthropic and cultural
societies known as anjumans.14 This study focuses on how juridical exchanges
linking Muslim scholars and administrators in Istanbul, Kabul, and Greater
Delhi emerged through the crucible of European imperial hegemony and
through the independent dynastic and state-building projects of the Muham-
madzai amirate of Afg hanistan, with important consequences for this new
region as a whole.
In approaching these problems, this book employs a conceptual framework
influenced by legal anthropologist Laura Nader’s user theory of law and soci-
ologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field. Rather than viewing law as
an autonomous body of texts or rules deduced by authorized experts in the sterile
environs of a courtroom, judge’s chambers, or scholar’s den, this book treats law
Introduction 11
as an inherently political arena, a field of power relations where rival groups clash
over competing interests, beliefs, and visions of the good society. H ere, dynastic
rulers and military commanders, avant-garde intellectuals and religio-legists, but
most of all ordinary p eople, prosecute, defend, negotiate, and ultimately shape
“the law” vis-à-vis practices of learning, professional habitus, mediation, and
everyday living. It is the interaction between these multiple sites of authority
and dispute resolution that together form a society’s juridical field.15
There comes the question when Afg hanistan is concerned, however, of
whether one can talk of a juridical field in the singular. In relation to this problem,
the book also draws from historian Christopher Tomlins’s notion of multiple
legalities to highlight the challenges and novelties of legal history in so-called
frontier or borderland settings. As Tomlins has argued with regard to colonial
North America, English law digests of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
represented not so much theoretical solutions to abstract jurisprudential quan-
daries, but how expanding empires and states endeavored to homogenize, uni-
formize, and consolidate juridical authority amid environments of extreme
legal pluralism. Simply put, it was in such frontier settings where the law code
signified, above all else, a “struggle to transform strangeness into familiarity
and to fix authority on the outcome, so that henceforth that outcome would
prevail and no other.”16 These observations are far from exclusive to E ngland’s
colonies in the New World. From the beginning of the nineteenth c entury
until the mid-t wentieth century, Britain’s Indian Empire adopted similar ap-
proaches in governing its northwestern and predominantly Pashtun territo-
ries bordering Afg hanistan in the form of the Frontier Crimes Regulation.17
Better known as the Murderous Outrages Act in Raj parlance, this special
enactment of laws exclusively for British India’s Federally Administered Tribal
Areas zone (later Pakistan’s FATA) represented European attempts, as in North
Americ a, “to colonize the landscape—to give it system, regularity, purpose,
familiarity.”18
From the legal manuals of ʿAbd al-R ahman in the 1880s to the niẓāmnāmihs
(codes, regulations, or ordinances) of Aman Allah in the 1920s, the Afghan leg-
islation examined in this book presents important parallels and contrasts with
the British Raj’s Frontier Crimes Regulation. First issued between 1867 and 1877,
the latter was designed to exclude frontier tribes from the British Indian state
judiciary, nonetheless managing them through notions of fixed “traditions.”19 It
is thus important to remember that projects of legality, including drafting consti-
tutions and codes, do not necessarily signify liberal, democratic, or other kinds
12 A F G H AN I STAN R I S I NG
Language: English
By DAVID MASON
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