304 DESTINY DISRUPTED
did not fully wink out until the end ofWorld War I. The same was true of
the khalifate. When Atatiirk abolished the khalifate, he was abolishing an
idea, and that's what jolted the Muslim world.
Or at least it jolted traditionalists, but who cared what they thought?
They were no longer in power. In fact, Atatiirk would turn out to be the
prototypical Muslim leader of the half-century to come. Iran generated its
own version of the prototype. After the war, the last Qajar king faced the
"Jungle Revolution," a guerilla insurgency launched by admirers ofSayyid
Jamaluddin-i-Mghan. The king's forces consisted of two armies, one com-
manded by Swedish officers, one by Russian mercenaries.^1 Little did the
king realize that the real threat to his rule lay not in the jungle but among
the foreigners propping him up. When Bolsheviks began joining the jun-
gle revolutionaries, the British got nervous. Lenin had just seized power in
Russia and they didn't want this sort of thing to spread. The British de-
cided the king wasn't tough enough to squelch Bolsheviks, so they helped
an Iranian colonel overthrow him.
This colonel, Reza Pahlavi, was a secular modernist in the Atatiirk mold,
except that he had no use for democracy (few secular modernist leaders
did). In 1925, the colonel declared himself king, becoming Reza Shah
Pahlavi, founder of a new Iranian dynasty. From the throne, he launched
the same sorts of reforms as Atatiirk, especially in the matter of a dress code.
Head scarves, veils, turbans, beards-these were banned for ordinary citi-
zens. Registered clerics could still wear turbans in the new Iran, but they
had to have a license certifying that they really were clerics (and how could
they meet this irksome proviso, given that Islam never had a formal institu-
tion for "certifying" clerics?}. Still, anyone caught wearing a turban without
a license could be beaten on the street and hauled off to prison.
Much the same thing was happening in Mghanistan, where, an im-
petuous young man named Amanullah inherited the throne in 1919. An
ardent admirer of the Young Turks, this moon-faced fellow with a Hercule
Poirot moustache gave Mghanistan a liberal constitution, declared women
liberated, funded a nascent secular school system lavishly, and, yes, de-
clared the usual dress code: no veils, no beards, no turbans, etc.
What I find interesting about this dress-code policy is that radical ls-
lamists did exactly the same thing fifty years later when they came back
into power in Iran and Mghanistan, except that their dress code was the