nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47
The confrontation between Hajji Jamal Khan and Ahmad Shah,
though, was rooted in a historic rivalry between the two clans for, in an
attempt to undermine the Saddozai–Safavid alliance, the Mughals had
patronized the Barakzais. During the era of Mughal rule in Kandahar the
governors had appointed a Barakzai as mir-i Afghaniha, and when Saddozai
power shifted in Herat, the heads of the Barakzais refused to recognize the
election of a Saddozai mir-i Afghaniha since his appointment was made by
the ‘Abdalis of Herat. More than likely Hajji Jamal Khan was a descendant
of these Mughal-appointed maliks.
The dispute between the two men was only resolved after several days
of heated debate. In the end Ahmad Shah swore on the Qur’an that in
return for pledging his loyalty to him as king, Hajji Jamal Khan and his
heirs would hold the post of wazir, or chief minister, in perpetuity. This
meant that he would be second in rank only to the king and he would
wield almost as much power, since it was the wazir, not the monarch, who
ran the day-to-day affairs of the kingdom. Even so, the power struggle
between the families of Hajji Jamal Khan and Ahmad Shah rumbled on
and ended in bloodshed and civil war. Eventually Hajji Jamal’s descend-
ants deposed Ahmad Shah’s family and established their own dynasty, the
Muhammadzais.
Having reached agreement that Ahmad Shah was to be king, his
personal spiritual adviser, Sabir Shah, offered a prayer and, in al-Husaini’s
words, ‘took a stalk (or blade) of greenery (giyeh sabz) and fixed it to
the cap (kula) of Ahmad Shah, declaring that by this token the king had
been crowned’. Muhammadzai historians in the twentieth century later
took up this laconic account and transformed it into an elaborate coron-
ation myth. During the reign of Amir Habib Allah Khan (r. 1901–19), the
giyeh sabz was transformed into a formalized sheaf of barley or wheat and
became a key item of dynastic insignia, appearing on the national flag,
stamps, coins and the State’s official letterhead. This highly stylized sheaf
bore a striking resemblance to the laurel wreath awarded to the winners of
ancient Olympic competitions and the golden coronet held over the head of
Roman emperors during a Triumph. In the 1940s Mir Gholam Mohammad
Ghobar, in his history of Ahmad Shah, even included a romantic sketch
by the famous twentieth-century Afghan artist ’Abd al-Ghafur Breshna,
which depicts Sabir Shah crowning Ahmad Shah with a sheaf of gold (see
p. 112),24 while the American historian Louis Dupree speculated that the
giyeh sabz harked back to some ancient fertility rite. 25 The wheat sheaf was
given even greater potency by its use in encircling an image of the shrine
of the Khirqa-yi Sharif, or Noble Cloak, Kandahar’s most holy relic. 26 So
nandana
(Nandana)
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