afghanistandeeply did this symbol become embedded in Afghanistan’s nationalist
consciousness that in the late 1970s the Communist government of Nur
Muhammad Taraki retained it as part of the national flag, although it
was recast to appear more like the Soviet sheaf that symbolized agricul-
tural prosperity. The Taliban, though, would have nothing to do with this
‘un-Islamic’ symbol, but following their fall from power President Karzai
rehabilitated the shrine and sheaf motif. After all, he was Popalzai, and a
member of the Durrani royal lineage.
At least some of these coronation myths derive from European
mis understandings of, or lack of engagement with, contemporary sources,
in particular the account of Joseph-Pierre Ferrier, a French military adven-
turer who travelled through Afghanistan in the mid-1840s. In his History
of the Afghans, Ferrier recasts the nine-man military council as a general
tribal assembly that met in the shrine of Sher-i Surkh. It is Ferrier too who
relates how Hajji Jamal Khan graciously stepped aside in Ahmad Shah’s
favour and records Sabir Shah’s crowning of Ahmad Shah with a wreath of
barley. A more sinister reworking of Ferrier’s account appears in the auto-
biography of Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880–1901). According to his
version of events, after Ahmad Shah was crowned, the assembled elders
all took pieces of green grass in their mouths as a token that they
were [Ahmad Shah’s] very cattle and beasts of burden, and throw-
ing around their necks pieces of cloth in the shape of ropes, as a
sign that they were willing to be led by him, they submitted to his
rule, and gave him the powers of life and death. 27This perversion of the historical account, and the Pushtun concept of
nanawatai, was designed to justify the absolutist monarchy that was the
hallmark of ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan’s reign. In so doing, the Amir reduced
the heads of all the Afghan tribes to the status of slaves or defeated enemies
who, since they deserved no quarter, threw themselves on the king’s mercy.
The Amir graciously deigned to spare their lives, but only because they
had surrendered all their rights and agreed to live like beasts of burden
that could be herded or slaughtered at the whim of the monarch. Yet in the
same place ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan claimed that Ahmad Shah was elected
by ‘the accredited representatives of our nation’ and that 1747 was ‘the
year in which the history of Afghanistan made a start in having an elected
king and constitutional government to govern the country’. 28 These state-
ments are diametrically opposed to his portrayal of Ahmad Shah’s subjects
as slaves and animals, and are equally absurd since Afghanistan had no