dreams melted into air, 1919–29with the germ of the West so seriously as to lose his sense of proportion.
Yet that was exactly what was happening.’ 47
’Aman Allah Khan appears to have been unaware of the storm of
criticism his tour had excited, not only among his religious opponents
but reformers and the military hierarchy too. His praise of Mussolini’s
Fascist government did not endear him to those wanting a more demo-
cratic government or constitutional reform, while the acceptance of the
Grande Collana and his audience with the Pope was exploited by Islamic
opponents to reinforce their claim that the king was an apostate. His visit
to the Soviet Union was not particularly diplomatic given the Bolsheviks’
establishment of an atheistic state, while ’Aman Allah Khan’s enthusiasm
for the secularizing and disestablishmentarian reforms of Mustafa Kemal
and Reza Shah angered the Islamic lobby even further. Other officials,
particularly in the military, were unhappy about the terms of the Turco-
Afghan Treaty, which promised even more unpopular Turkish domination
of both the military and education. To cap it all, Queen Soraya and other
women in her entourage had discarded the veil during the European leg
of the tour and worn instead the clinging, low-cut dresses that were all the
fashion in the Roaring Twenties.
King ’Aman Allah Khan’s reforms: the second phaseOnce back home, ’Aman Allah Khan proceeded to add even more fuel to
the fires of discontent. During his stopover in Kandahar the king informed
local dignitaries that he planned to reinstate universal education and eman-
cipate women, declaring: ‘Is it not shameful that the women of Europe are
more laborious and more active than the men of Afghanistan?’ 48 Comparing
Pushtun men unfavourably to women, especially farangi women, could not
have been more insulting, especially since many of the assembly would have
had access to the Urdu press and seen photographs of Queen Soraya in her
revealing dresses. All ’Aman Allah Khan’s remarks did was to exacerbate
fears that the king planned a similar ‘fate’ for their women.
When he finally arrived in Kabul, ’Aman Allah Khan ordered a Loya
Jirga to convene at the end of August 1928 and in the meantime he retired
to Paghman, leaving affairs of state in the hands of Sardar Muhammad Wali
Khan. Assisted by an Iranian legal expert and the Turkish ambassador,
’Aman Allah Khan then began to plan his social and legal revolution and
over the following six weeks he issued a series of bizarre decrees, including
requiring all visitors to government offices to wear European clothes. The
king then made radical changes in his cabinet, appointing Sher Ahmad