The modern Afghan state traces its beginning to 1747, when Ahmad Khan, a young Abdali leader, was chosen king near Kandahar after the assassination of the Persian ruler Nader Shah. Over the next two centuries, with Kandahar and then Kabul as capitals, the country’s borders, institutions and cultural life took the shape later generations inherited, from a court steeped in Persian poetry to new schools, newspapers and, in 1964, a constitution naming Pashto and Dari as official languages.
The Durrani state
After Nader Shah was killed in June 1747, a jirga, or council, of Pashtun chiefs chose Ahmad Khan as king, and in October he was crowned near Kandahar, which became his capital. His Abdali confederation took the name Durrani from his royal title, Durr-i Durran, ‘Pearl of Pearls’. At its height his empire stretched from the Amu Darya to the Sea of Oman and from Khorasan to the plains of northern India.
His son Timur Shah (r. 1772–93), formerly governor of Herat, moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul in 1775 and drew increasingly on urban, Persian-speaking groups in the army and administration. After his death the realm split among rival princes, and from 1826 Dost Mohammad Khan, of the Mohammadzai branch of the Barakzai, established himself firmly in Kabul. By the end of the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901), boundary commissions had fixed the country’s frontiers, which have stayed roughly the same since.
Poets at court
The new state remained a centre of Persian literature and a bridge for literary currents between Central Asia and Muslim India. The ‘Indian style’ of Persian verse dominated, and the poet Bedil became a model for generations of Afghan writers. Timur Shah and his son Shah Shuja wrote Persian lyrics, the poet Ayesha Durrani left a divan, and poets from Iran sought patronage at Timur Shah’s court.
From about 1850, books printed in India, and later in Kabul, reached a growing circle of readers. Among the works of this period is Fayz Mohammad Hazara’s Seraj al-Tawarikh, a history of the 18th and 19th centuries whose first parts were printed in Kabul in 1913–16.
Schools, press and institutions
Amir Sher Ali Khan (r. 1868–79) created an early cabinet, a regular postal service, Kabul’s first public school and the country’s first newspaper, Shams al-Nahar. Under Amir Habibullah (r. 1901–19), returning exiles turned Kabul into a lively intellectual centre and public education for boys began. From 1911 to 1918 the writer Mahmud Tarzi edited the newspaper Seraj al-Akhbar, which shaped modern Persian prose in Afghanistan.
In 1919 the Treaty of Rawalpindi, signed under Amanullah, ended four decades of British protectorate. The first Afghan constitution was approved by a loya jirga in 1924, and French and German schools opened in Kabul. A 1922 agreement with France set up the French Archaeological Delegation, whose finds went to the National Museum in Kabul and the Musée Guimet. A college of medicine opened in 1932; later faculties joined it to form Kabul University in 1946, and women were admitted from 1960.
Two national languages
The constitution of 1964 named Pashto and Dari as Afghanistan’s official languages. Reviving the old name Dari for the country’s Persian expressed the view that Afghanistan was a cradle of the language, and Pashto, second in importance among the Iranian languages, stood beside it. Poets such as Khalilullah Khalili and Abdul Rahman Pazhwak carried classical Dari forms into the 20th century, adding to a literary heritage shared by the country’s many communities.
