afghanistanAllah Khan’s accession, attacked the Nizam Namas as un-Islamic and they
and other Deobandi-trained ‘ulama’ mocked attempts by the government
theologians to justify the Constitution on the basis of the shari‘a. They
demanded that, as a precondition to supplying levies for war against
Mullah-i Lang, a committee of ‘ulama’ redraft the Nizam Namas so that
they would conform to their interpretation of Islamic law.
’Aman Allah Khan had little choice but to agree to their demands,
whereupon the revising committee, dominated by Deobandis and sup -
porters of Nur al-Mashayekh, proceeded to turn the Constitution on its
head. They even wrote the revised criminal code in Arabic in order to
emphasize the ‘sanctity’ of the new laws and then translated it into Persian.
The changes were swingeing. 39 Afghanistan for the first time in its history
officially became an Islamic state governed by the Hanafi legal code, and a
council of ‘ulama’ was established with executive power to review, change
or veto any legislation that did not comply with the shari‘a. The council
reinstated the traditional distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim
and made personal freedom, or azadi, conditional on the ‘strict religious
observance as imposed by the shari‘a and the state penal codes’. The judi-
ciary was placed in the hands of religious judges, the marriage and family
laws were abrogated, and girls’ education was limited to attendance at a
madrasa, but only until puberty.
Once ’Aman Allah Khan had agreed to these changes, albeit under
duress, the council of ‘ulama’ issued a fatwa denouncing Mullah-i Lang
as a rebel, and the Kohistani and Tagabis returned home to assemble their
forces. In effect, one faction of anti-reformist Islamizers sacrificed another
equally reactionary group for their own ideological and political ends. In
order to counteract Mullah-i Lang’s accusations that he was an apostate,
the king then executed several Ahmadiyya converts. Nothing that ’Aman
Allah Khan did, however, could disguise the fact that the Loya Jirga had
been a public humiliation and someone had to be blamed for the debacle.
The unfortunate scapegoat was Maulawi ‘Abd al-Wasi‘, chair of the commit-
tee that drafted the Nizam Namas and whose arguments in defence of the
Constitution had been excoriated by his opponents. For the second time in
his life ‘Abd al Wasi‘ was imprisoned, but once the storm had died down he
was released and reinstated as head of the royal mosque at Pul-i Kheshti.
Relations between him and the king remained tense, however, and he
used the occasion of his Friday sermons to indirectly criticize government
policies.
Reinforced by the levies from the Kohistan, in the middle of August
Shah Wali Khan, who was now in charge of military operations, attacked