afghanistanwhile some of the more radical Pushtunists claimed that the Pushtun
‘race’ was part of the Herrenvolk, or Master Race. From the 1940s onward
the government began to employ the term Aryana for state institutions,
including the state airline and national press. Aryana was even used as a
synonym for Afghanistan itself. Another outcome of Tarzi’s Afghaniyya was
the emergence of the Pushtunistan, or Pukhtunistan, movement, which
sought the political ‘reunification’ of the Pushtun tribes on both sides of
the Durand Line. In the 1960s the establishment of Pushtunistan became
official government policy, but the idea was mooted as early as 1916 by Dr
Aurang Shah, one of the first Afghans to study in California, who founded
the Azad Pakhtunistan Association of America. 23
In two important respects, however, Tarzi departed from the national-
istic vision of the Young Turks. He was a staunch advocate of the monarchy
and argued for the perpetuation of shari‘a as the foundation of the state
legal system. As a Muhammadzai, two of whose daughters were married
to Habib Allah Khan’s sons, Tarzi had a vested interest in maintaining the
dynastic status quo and even the title of his newspaper, the Seraj al-Akhbar,
was an affirmation and endorsement of the monarchy. As far as Tarzi was
concerned, patriotism was not merely the love of watan and din but loyalty
to the Amir, the Durrani dynasty and the monarchy in general. 24
When it came to the role of Islamic law, Tarzi adopted a bipolar pos -
ition. On the one hand he attacked Islamic leaders for their obscurantism
and superstition, while on the other he maintained that the Hanafi mazhab,
arguably the most conservative school of Islamic jurisprudence, should
remain the foundation stone of Afghanistan’s social and legal system. Tarzi
thus endorsed the political and cultic status quo in an era when Muslim
nationalists in Turkey, Iran and Arab countries were demanding root-and-
branch reform of the Executive and legal systems, including a constitution
based on European legal norms, the disestablishment of Islam, democratic
assemblies and republicanism. According to these reformers, the auto-
cratic nature of the monarchy and the domination of state legislation by
the ‘ulama’ were the two most serious hindrances to modernization. For
Tarzi, however, freedom and liberty were defined primarily in terms of
independence from Britain, rather than the establishment of democratic
institutions or representative government.
Every edition of the Seraj al-Akhbar included a great deal of syco-
phantic praise for Amir Habib Allah Khan’s modest reforms and included
detailed accounts of the Amir’s activities. Furthermore, with the exception
of the publication of official dispatches related to the Khost uprising of 1912,
the Seraj al-Akhbar studiously avoided any mention of political unrest or