afghanistanthe ground to be declared king. What exactly happened after Ahmad
Shah reached Kandahar, however, has been obscured by an Arthurian-
style legend. Indeed, few other events in modern Afghan history have
been subjected to so much mythologizing. As a consequence the histor-
ical events surrounding Ahmad Khan’s establishment of an independent
Saddozai kingdom in Kandahar have been lost in a fog of romance that is
regurgitated uncritically by both Afghan and Western historians.
According to this mythic narrative, when Ahmad Shah arrived
in Kandahar he summoned all the tribal leaders to a Grand National
Assembly, or Loya Jirga, to elect a king. It is claimed this assembly included
all the Pushtun tribes of ‘Afghanistan’, as well as leaders of the Baluch,
Uzbek and Shi‘a Hazaras. The assembly then unanimously ‘elected’ Ahmad
Shah as king after Hajji Jamal Khan Barakzai withdrew his candidature
in the wake of the intervention of Sabir Khan, the guardian of the shrine
of Sher-i Surkh, who declared that since Ahmad Shah was a Saddozai his
claim to the throne was superior to any other ‘Abdali. Sabir Khan, so the
story continues, then placed a sheaf of wheat or barley on Ahmad Shah’s
turban and declared him king in front of the whole assembly.
So deeply embedded is this version of events that even Ganda Singh
and Umar Kamal Khan repeat this story almost verbatim, despite admit-
ting there is no contemporary textual evidence to support this narrative.
‘Umar Kamal Khan even states that ‘early chronicles... are unanimous that
the leadership of the Afghan nation was decided on the road by younger
elements of [the] Afghan contingent... [the] rest was formality.’ 18 These
‘early chronicles’ include the history of Mahmud al-Husaini, 19 Ahmad
Shah’s official court historian, who gives a very different version of events
and one that is consistent with accounts of European travellers in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 20 The only near-contemporary
Persian source that has any similarity to the later coronation myth is that of
‘Abu’l-Hasan ibn Amin Gulistana, whose history was written some thirty
years after Ahmad Shah’s death. Yet even Gulistana portrays the meetings
in Kandahar and Ahmad Shah’s subsequent ‘election’ as a formality. 21
According to these Persian histories, shortly after reaching Kandahar
Ahmad Shah had a stroke of fortune with the arrival of a large military
convoy containing the annual revenues of Sind, which amounted to as much
as two crore, or 20 million, rupees. 22 The convoy was guarded by hundreds
of Qizilbash ghulams commanded by Taqi Beg Khan Shirazi, Nadir Shah’s
governor of Sind, and included a fil khana, or stable of war elephants.
Taqi Beg had little love for Nadir Shah, for a few years earlier he had been
castrated and blinded in one eye for leading the revolt in Shiraz and then