afghanistanhis death in 1960, the government allowed his body to be returned to
Afghanistan and he was buried beside his father in the family mausoleum
in Jalalabad. As for Tarzi, he made his home in Turkey. When he died four
years later, he was buried in the cemetery of Eyüp Sultan in Istanbul.
King ’Aman Allah Khan: an appraisalThe reign of King ’Aman Allah Khan is mostly remembered for his failed
experiment in social and constitutional reforms, which, as far as many
Afghans are concerned, was due primarily to the intransigence and obscur-
antism of religious and tribal leaders. Yet at least part of the reason for
the failure of his programme was the blinkered and doctrinaire approach
adopted by the king, Queen Soraya, Mahmud Tarzi and the Young Afghans,
who believed that what was good enough for Turkey was good enough
for Afghanistan. Fired with an unrealistic vision of rapid transform ation,
the king, Tarzi and their supporters tried to impose the Tanzimat and
Atatürk model on Afghanistan, even though Afghanistan and Ottoman
Turkey, despite both countries being Sunni, were in almost every respect
chalk and cheese.
Unlike Afghanistan, the Ottoman kingdom was built on a heritage of
thousands of years of engagement with European civilization. Indeed all
European powers regarded Turkey as a European rather than a Middle
Eastern nation, by dint of its thousand years of Byzantine Christian heri-
tage as well as the fact that many of the greatest cities of Graeco-Roman
civilization lay within Turkey’s borders. Afghanistan, on the other hand,
was both spatially and ideologically isolated from Europe and European
culture. What little interaction Afghanistan had with Europe was mostly
negative, for its two European neighbours, Britain and Russia, were seen
as alien and a threat to the country’s sovereignty as well as its religious and
cultural identity. Afghanistan’s engagement with Europe only began in
the early nineteenth century, and until the reign of ’Aman Allah Khan the
only Europeans who had lived in the country, with few exceptions, were
part of an army of occupation. One of the country’s long-standing foreign
policies was to deny Britain and other European powers any representation
in the country. Britain, too, adopted a closed-door policy to Afghanistan,
while Tarzi’s pan-Islamic and anti-colonial polemic reinforced this intro-
version, even while he advocated modernization based on a model that
was essentially European in origin.
In Ottoman society ethnicity or religious affiliation was no bar to
high office or government service. Christians, Jews, Slavs, Greeks and