The Emergence of Afghan Nationalism: Islam, Modernity, and the State

In the early 19th century, the rulers of Afghanistan found themselves an opportune moment to reform society’s traditional power structures, centralize the political power of their state, and to modernize their society on Western lines. The inherent problem with all three of these pursuits was the incompatibility present between modernity with its Western origin and the classical Islamic paradigm that dominated Afghanistan and the Muslim world. These changes, also, were incumbent on the adoption of nationalism as the state’s ideology as it was only nationalism that could provide the state with the necessary political legitimacy and justification to pursue these, often aggressive, modernization reforms. This thesis seeks to argue that, in order to find that said nationalism, the Afghan elite, namely Mahmud Tarzi, attempted to invent a new “Afghan” nation, from which a nationalism was derived, that relied on Islam, the Pashtun culture and language, and the territorial bounds of the Afghan state as the basis for it existence. This formulation used Islam in a manner that was a break from the past and that used anti-colonialist rhetoric in the face of the reality that much of its intellectual origins traced back to the Western powers that it sought to reject. In turn, Amanullah Khan, who saw himself as Afghanistan’s enlightened ruler, sought to use this newly developed nationalism to break the power of the tribes and the ‘Ulema, who dominated Afghan society, and to subsume their power structures and institutions under the purview of the state.

Author

• Siddiq, Mir A. Wali

• Afghanistan
• Nationalism
• Afghan Nationalism
• Islam and Modernity
• Mahmud Tarzi
• Amanullah Khan

Identifier

hdl:1920/14265

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14265