afghanistanestablishment of holding the nation in intellectual darkness and of being
proponents of superstition and obscurantism. This polemic made Tarzi
and his Young Afghans powerful enemies and, rather than persuading
the religious establishment to accept reform, it served to entrench them
even further, for they feared that Tarzi and his circle were undermining
the whole Islamic framework on which the country was founded. After all,
Tarzi’s ideological opponents were well aware of the radical, anti-shari‘a
agenda of the Young Turks and the Tanzimat era.
Arguably the most important and enduring aspect of Tarzi’s politi-
cal vision was his promotion of a new national identity, a polemic that
subsequently earned him the title of Father of Afghan Nationalism. Tarzi’s
views on nationalism, however, were far from original and were mostly a
recasting of the political philosophy of the Young Turks. The fundamen-
tal premise on which Tarzi’s nationalism was constructed was what he
termed Afghaniyya (plural Afghaniyyat) – Afghanness or Afghanism – a
term coined by Tarzi but which was the Afghan equivalent of Turkism. It
was this ethnocentric world view that led Tarzi to changing the name of
‘Abd al-Ra’uf ’s newspaper from Afghanistan to Afghaniyya. Tarzi treated
Afghan and Pushtun as synonymous terms and Afghaniyya increasingly
became identified with Pushtunness and the Pushtu language, despite
Pushtunness being essentially the values and identity of the hill tribes of
the Afghan–Indian frontier, rather than one espoused by all those who
called themselves Afghan. Some Afghan tribes, for example, including the
urban Durranis, were more Persianate than Pushtun.
The masthead of the first edition of Mahmud Tarzi’s Seraj al-Akhbar dated 15 Shawwal
1329, or 8 October 1911. In many ways its contents were revolutionary, and Tarzi used the
publication to promote his new nationalism. However, the Seraj al-Akhbar was not the first
newspaper to be published in Afghanistan.