a house divided, 1933–73to revise the 1931 Constitution, a decision that the Kabul Times claimed
was designed to put the country ‘on the road to democracy’. 41 At the same
time, the article emphasized the need for gradual change and cautioned
against equating democracy and freedom with ‘outright lawlessness’ and
‘anarchy’. As a sop to his religious opponents, Muhammad Yusuf had
appointed as chair of the Constitutional Committee his Minister of Justice,
Sayyid Sham al-din Majruh, a respected Islamic scholar whose father had
been a spiritual affiliate of the Hadda Mullah. After two years of deliber-
ation, during which the committee sought the advice of a French expert
on constitutional law, the cabinet finally agreed the new Constitution in
July 1964. In September of that year the king convened a Loya Jirga, for its
approval was needed before the Constitution could become law, but unlike
previous Loya Jirgas this session included a number of directly elected
members, including a large minority of non-Pushtuns, six women and a
representative of Kabul’s Hindu community.
The constitutional debate in the Loya Jirga was often acrimonious
and revealed how deeply the country was divided along regional, ethnic
and ideological lines. Representatives of non-Pushtun communities, for
ex ample, demanded that ‘Afghan’ should not designate citizenship or
nationality due to its duality of meaning, but they were out-voted. Islamists
protested that the new Constitution marginalized the shari‘a, for while
Islam was declared to be ‘the sacred religion’ of the country, both the
Constitution and Parliamentary legislation were given a superior role. As
for judges, they could only apply the Hanafi code when the Constitution
or Parliamentary legislation was unclear. Unlike the Constitution of 1931,
the word ‘shari‘a’ appeared only twice in the new Constitution.
There was a heated debate about the Constitution’s definition of liberty
as ‘the natural right of the human being’, which ‘has no limitations except
the liberty of others and public interest as defined by the law’. 42 These
statements were at odds with the 1931 Constitution and the conditional-
ity required by the shari‘a. Since the new Constitution made no specific
mention of women’s rights, it implied that the definition of freedom and
liberty applied equally to both sexes. As such these provisions were a signi-
ficant liberalization and set aside many of the restrictive provisions of the
1931 Constitution, in particular the discriminatory regulations regarding
the rights of women.
The Constitution designated Afghanistan to be a constitutional
monarchy, though in practice this was not the case. The Constitution
perpetuated the bicameral system: the Loya Jirga and members of the
Lower House, or Wolusi Jirga, being elected by ‘free, universal, secret