dreams melted into air, 1919–29Armenians all played a major part in Ottoman commercial, intellectual
and political life. This was not the case in Afghanistan. The country’s tiny
religious minorities were marginalized and discriminated against and,
with the exception of one or two Hindus, they played little part in the
country’s political life. Even sectarian Muslim groups, such as Shi‘as and
Isma‘ili, were regarded with hostility and on occasion subject to pogroms,
while Tarzi’s redefining of national identity along the same ethnolinguis-
tic lines as post-Ottoman Turkey exacerbated an already existing sense of
disenfranchisement among non-Pushtun groups.
As for the political and social transformation of post-war Turkey
under Mustafa Kemal, this was the culmination of more than a century
of struggle, yet ’Aman Allah Khan was naive enough to believe he could
achieve the same degree of transformation in a decade. Turkey’s revo-
lution was led by a well-educated intelligentsia and officer corps that
had studied in Christian schools and European universities or had been
trained by German officers. All of them, to one degree or another, posi-
tively engaged with European culture and its political philosophies. As for
Mustafa Kemal’s post-war disestablishment of Islamic institutions, this was
only made possible because he was a war hero who commanded the loyalty
of a well-equipped and well-trained modern army. Finally, his reforms had
widespread, popular support.
None of this was true of Afghanistan. King ’Aman Allah Khan was
no general and he had played no active military role in the Third Anglo-
Afghan War. The Afghan army was barely fit for purpose, being defeated
not just by the superior technology and discipline of the British army, but
by lightly armed and untrained tribal levies. The culture of intellectual
enquiry that Elphinstone noted at the court of Shah Shuja‘ in 1808/9 had
long since dissipated, or had been forced underground by state repres-
sion. As for Afghanistan’s intelligentsia, they were a tiny urbanized clique
of mostly Muhammadzais who were out of touch with public opinion,
partly because they despised it. European ideas of education, a key driver
of Turkey’s ‘Enlightenment’, had yet to take root in Afghanistan. Habibiyya
College, the first educational institution to include modern sciences and
humanities in the curriculum, had been open for less than two decades and
admission was restricted to a privileged few. The only education available
to the majority of the population was the madrasa, where engagement with
non-Islamic world views was more often than not actively discouraged.
In 1919 probably less than 5 per cent of Afghanistan’s male population
was literate, and until Tarzi began his programme of translation very few
Afghans had read any works by European authors. Of all the Muslim