afghanistanArghandab and Nangahar regions, confiscating their lands and prop-
erty, which were sold off cheaply, or gifted, to a new wave of Pushtun
colonists from Nangahar, many of whom were members of Gul Khan’s
Mohmand tribe.
From the mid-1930s Muhammad Gul Khan Mohmand inaugurated a
province-wide redevelopment of the main provincial towns, which aimed
at the eradication of emotive symbols of indigenous culture and making it
easier to control potentially rebellious populations. At the same time it was
a deliberate display of the state’s power to intimidate and reduce potential
points of resistance. The key element of this project was the construction
of shahr-i naus, or new towns, based on a standard grid plan drawn up by
a German-Swiss architect. 10 The construction of the new towns, as one
eyewitness noted, involved ‘tearing the heart out of a place and putting in
a concrete arcade of bazaar-shops instead’. 11 In the process, most of the
old medieval bazaars were levelled along with ancient city walls, citadels,
shrines, mosques, Sufi khanaqas, graveyards and other historic monu-
ments, many of which had significant cultural and historical associations
with the era of Chinggisid rule.
In Mazar-i Sharif, an area of several hundred metres around the shrine
of Shah-i Mardan was completely levelled creating ‘an area of desola-
t i o n ’, 12 while all of the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara populations of Balkh,
the ancient capital of the region, were forcibly evicted and the new town
Maimana looking south showing the standard grid pattern and wide streets typical
of the rebuild of Afghanistan’s northern urban centres in the 1940s.