backs to the future, 1929–33substantial Arabic, Persian and Turkic elements, creating in the process a
vocabulary that was unintelligible to most native Pushtun speakers. Later
Gul Mohmand published a Pushtu dictionary and grammar as well as a
small corpus of Pushtun poetry.
Muhammad Gul Khan Mohmand’s Pushtunism was profoundly polit-
ical and, as Caron notes, ‘successfully translated the monarchy’s case into
a social vocabulary of masculine Pashtun [sic] chivalry... for the bene-
fit of tribes which had always viewed the hierarchy of the state’s ruling
elites with suspicion’. 26 This chauvinistic romanticism was epitomized
in his poem ‘On Pushtu and Pushtunness’, in which Gul Khan declared:
‘Pushtu is essential/true nobility... Pushtu is salvation... Pushtu is
dignity (or majesty)... Pushtu is honour... in Pushtu there is no dishon-
our or degradation... Pushtu is being noble and free-born, Pushtu is
lordship’. 27 According to ‘Abd al-Ra’uf Benawa, a founder member of the
Pushtun Academy, Muhammad Gul Khan Mohmand ended the era of
gul wa bulbul, rose and nightingale, which were the traditional themes of
Persian and Pushtu poetry, while Siddiq Allah Rikhtin, a former president
of the Academy, declared:
Muhammad Gul Khan Momand [sic] brought about political Pashtu.
His work was far more substantial than ours. He was the shadow
over our heads. If he had not had so much force, we would not have
been able to do so much work... His Pashtu was loftier than ours. 28In 1936 the government took this version of Pushtun nationalism to
its illogical conclusion and decreed Pushtu henceforth to be the only offi-
cial language of Afghanistan. The outcome was chaos. Pushtu street signs
were unintelligible and very few schoolteachers spoke or read Pushtu;
even when they did, students did not understand them, nor could they
read the textbooks. Civil servants, threatened with dismissal, frantically
tried to master the intricacies of Pushtu grammar. Even Nadir Shah, his
brothers and their children had to take Pushtu lessons, for very few of the
Musahibans spoke, let alone read, the language. 29 The policy was eventually
abandoned as unworkable and Persian was reinstated as one of two equal
national languages, but the government persisted in its promotion of its
version of Pushtun identity.
Ordinary Pushtuns, who the government sought to co-opt to its
agenda, were not fooled by this attempt to manipulate their identity, nor
did they need a government to tell them about what it meant to be a
Pushtun. This state-sponsored Pushtunism was essentially the creation of