nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47Constitution until 1923, let alone anything resembling a constitutional
assembly or parliament.
All this mythologizing and sentimentality is even more ironic when
one realizes that Sabir Shah’s placing of the giyeh sabz in Ahmad Shah’s
cap was a jocular gesture that deliberately mocked the Safavid coronation
ceremony. As he placed the stalk of greenery in the king’s cap, Sabir play-
fully remarked that this was Ahmad Shah’s jigha, the regal plume worn
by both the Safavid and Mughal monarchs as symbol of kingship. It was a
joke that all the assembled military commanders would have appreciated,
for they were all too familiar with Safavid and Mughal regal regalia. At
the same time Sabir Shah’s action was a subtle reminder of the dangers of
the new king assuming the sort of airs and graces that were hallmarks of the
Safavids and, indeed, of the Saddozai mir-i Afghanihas too. Ahmad Shah
may have won his battle to be king, but Sabir Shah was reminding him
that if he wanted to hold on to power a degree of humility and modesty
would not go amiss. Subsequently all high Durrani officials in the Saddozai
kingdom wore feathered jighas in their turbans.
There is a further irony in the subsequent elevation of Sabir Shah to
the Afghan equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury, for as far as the
spiritual hierarchy of the ‘Abdali tribe or the Kandahar area was concerned,
he was not only a nonentity but an embarrassment. Faiz Muhammad Katib’s
famous history of the Durrani monarchy, commissioned by Amir Habib
Allah Khan, for example, does not even mention Sabir Shah in his brief
account of Ahmad Shah’s ‘coronation’, 29 while al-Husaini refers to Sabir
Shah as a darwish and a faqir. In fact, Sabir Shah was a peripatetic mystic
who dabbled in the interpretation of dreams that, he claimed, allowed
him to predict the future. In this respect Sabir Shah can be compared
with Rasul, who caused such a sensation during the Nadirid occupation
of Balkh. Sabir Shah was not even a Pushtun but a Punjabi from Lahore,
though Ghobar and those who follow him claim he was from Kabul on
the basis of a misreading of a Persian text. 30
Sabir was born in Lahore and his birth name was Reza Shah, which
strongly suggests he was a Shi‘a, and in his early years he worked as a
farrier or na‘lband. 31 Sometime prior to Nadir Shah’s conquest of Lahore,
Reza changed his name to the more neutral Sabir and turned his hand to
fortune-telling. Like many other faqirs of this era he attached himself to
the Persian army, where his horse-shoeing skills and his alleged occult
powers were much in demand. 32 It was probably while Nadir Shah was
in Lahore that Sabir met Ahmad Shah, so impressing the young Saddozai
that he was engaged as his personal fortune-teller, for it seems that Sabir