reform and repression, 1901–19
Despite this, Tarzi’s Afghaniyya became adopted as part of the mon -
archy’s nationalist discourse and provided an intellectual veneer to justify
the Durranis’ presumed divine right to rule Afghanistan, the ‘Land of the
Afghans’. Tarzi, after all was a Muhammadzai, who also had a Saddozai
heritage. Tarzi argued that the national language, or zaban-i milli, for
Afghans ought to be Pushtu, even though Persian had been the language
of the Durrani court since the days of Saddu Khan, as well as the language
of commerce and diplomacy. This polemic also ignored the fact that the
vast majority of citizens of Afghanistan did not speak Pushtu, indeed for
most of them it was a foreign language. However, Tarzi argued that Persian
could not be the zaban-i milli since it was not unique to Afghanistan and
it was already the official language of Shi‘a Iran. Tarzi therefore demoted
Afghan Persian to the status of rasmi, or the official language, rather than
milli, or national one. Later in the century, in an attempt to distance Afghan
Persian from its Iranian cousin, the government officially renamed the
Kabuli dialect Dari, on the mythic grounds that it was the Persian spoken
at the Mughal court. More practically, Tarzi encouraged his readers to
submit articles and poetry in Pushtu and employed a Pushtu-speaker to
translate works into the language. Even so, the Seraj al-Akhbar published
very few articles in Pushtu. Ironically, the longest submission in Pushtu
came from an Afghan in Turkey. In another irony, despite Turkish being
his first language, Tarzi never published a single item in Uzbeki, Chaghatai
or any other of Afghanistan’s Turkic languages.
Tarzi’s Afghaniyya went much further than merely promoting the
revival of Pushtu literature and culture, arguing that afghan should be
the only official designation of nationality for all citizens of Afghanistan,
ignoring the fact that Afghanistan was a multicultural, multi-ethnic nation
in which the majority of the population consisted, and still consists, of
peoples who were not ethnically Afghan. Tarzi thus sought to impose an
artificial, alien identity on all non-Afghan ethnolinguistic groups and by
so doing indirectly exacerbated sectarian, regional and ethnic divisions as
well as alienating large sections of the population who were reduced to the
status of minorities. It was as if the British government insisted all Scottish,
Welsh and Irish citizens be designated as English on their passports.
Tarzi defined national identity as consisting of four interrelated
elements: Religion (din), which he defined as the Hanafi school of Sunnism;
Patriotism (daulat dosti); the Fatherland (watan); and the Nation (millat),
which combined all three of the other elements. Most of these terms were
derived from Turkish nationalist discourse, but these terms had differ-
ent nuances in Afghanistan. In colloquial Kabuli Persian, for example,
nandana
(Nandana)
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