Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  The writer Bashir Sakhawarz spurred me to explore the use and symbolism of different colours in Afghanistan. In one of his essays, Sakhawarz recounted how, at school in Kabul, in 1972 aged twelve, whistles began blowing outside at a demonstration. Despite the best efforts of the headmaster and teachers, there was an exodus of boys including Sakhawarz, eager to participate without knowing who was outside or what was at issue. On reaching the street, Sakhawarz found a colour-coded protest of three groups as opposed to each other as the government—red-flagged communists aligned with Moscow, white-flagged Maoists who looked to Beijing, and green-flagged Muslim Youth inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

  In exploring this terrain, I have drawn on sources in French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese and English, as well as Dari and Pashto, and have researched and interviewed in Europe, North America and Asia as well as Australia. But because of the risks of travelling within Afghanistan and because much of the visual material which this book discusses is no longer to be found there, I have written this book from afar. While some of this material was intended to be ephemeral, some has been destroyed, some was made for an international audience and some has been dispersed along with key figures involved in its creation.

  Clothes loom largest in this book because of their political significance as a sign of Afghanistan’s orientation towards the modern or traditional, secular or Islamic, and because this book is particularly concerned with how the unveiling in 1959 came about and what it led to. Photography and film are pivotal because the world has seen Afghanistan primarily through the camera. Carpets are crucial because they are the main Afghan art form to bring its war to a global audience. While there are several other recent forms of ‘weavings of war’, Afghanistan can claim, as no country would want, to have the richest local tradition of war art.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  The Ghazi

  Every year through the 1950s, Afghanistan celebrated its independence not once but twice. The focus was the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, which resulted in Afghanistan regaining control of its foreign affairs from Britain. The first celebration was a day in May commemorating the last battle of the 1919 war, and the second was a week-long festival staged in August to take advantage of the end of summer. A prime venue was Kabul’s stadium, the ‘Ghazi’, which was not only a title bestowed on victorious Afghan commanders, including the stadium’s builder King Amanullah because of his success in the Third Anglo-Afghan War, but also a term for Afghan soldiers who engaged in reckless, even suicidal attacks on the British. In 1925, when the stadium was new, the American writer Lowell Thomas defined a Ghazi as ‘a man who goes wild with religious fanaticism and starts out determined to kill an unbeliever’.

  The stadium was intended to seat 14,000 but during Jeshyn, as the independence celebrations were called, at least 30,000 people crammed inside amid great lengths of bunting in the Afghan national colours of black, red and green. The biggest attractions were games of men’s hockey and soccer played against teams from other countries, though local athletes also ran the marathon and threw the discus, and army officers on horseback performed jumps. These events were staged each morning and afternoon and would have continued at night had the stadium been lit. But electricity was in short supply in Kabul and particularly likely to fail during Jeshyn, because of the demand created by all those flocking to the city.

  King Zahir Shah, who had been little more than a figurehead since assuming the throne following the assassination of his father in 1933, gave no hint anything exceptional would occur when he opened the 1959 celebrations in Kabul’s Presidential Palace. Zahir Shah’s first cousin, Mohammad Daoud, who had ruled Afghanistan since 1953 when he became prime minister by ousting one of the king’s uncles, was barely more forthcoming on Radio Kabul. Daoud stated: ‘The day has come when we should take gradual, yet steady steps towards our social reforms.’ He did not elaborate what these reforms might be or that, when he said ‘the day has come’, he meant that these reforms were to start at once.

  The men, who filled the seats of the stadium the following afternoon, expected to see only men, as usual. They had no idea that Daoud, members of his cabinet, high-ranking officials and military officers would be accompanied by their wives, daughters and daughters-in-law, let alone that these women would appear unveiled and in western dress. Having toyed for two or three years with the possibility of having women discard their chadaris during Jeshyn—only to decide against it for fear of opposition—Daoud acted in 1959.

  The chadari was adopted in Afghanistan in the early nineteenth century by women from wealthy families who did not work. One spur was probably a passage in the Qur’an instructing ‘believing women’ to ‘cast down their eyes and guard their private parts…and cast their veils over their bosoms’. The chadari was also pivotal to the institution of ‘purdah’, which sought to stop women coming into contact with men they did not know. Chadaris allowed women to leave the privacy of their homes while remaining shielded from view.

  Many women did not wear them. Because chadaris required large quantities of cloth, the poor generally could not afford them, and their shape and size made them difficult to wear when doing manual labour. For a woman to wear a chadari was a mark of social and economic status, with the fabric and decoration providing women with a rare opportunity to engage in conspicuous consumption. In the 1950s, those of the wealthy in Kabul were red, green, blue, violet, purple and gold; made of silk, satin, crepe or the finest cotton; sometimes glistening with crushed mica, often lavishly embroidered around their visors with elaborate floral designs.

  The occasional westerner—almost always female, often British—lauded the chadari. Archaeologist Sylvia Matheson declared it ‘much more feminine’ than its counterparts in Pakistan and India. Mountaineers Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie considered it ‘most beautiful in colour and design’. But foreigners usually wrote as if chadaris were uniformly shapeless, coarse, drab, ugly and impersonal. They likened them to tents—the literal meaning of chadaris—and to parachutes, sacks, shrouds and cocoons. These visitors included Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who first saw a fully veiled woman in Kabul in 1955. ‘This made a painful impression on me,’ Khrushchev would recall. ‘It was as if a statue with the features of a human being was walking along with a basket on its head and with a black rectangle in front of its eyes.’

  Edward Hunter, a CIA agent who used journalism and book-writing as a cover to travel extensively in Asia and fuel fear of communism, concurred after visiting in 1956. Hunter identified the ‘abasement and enslavement’ of women as Afghanistan’s ‘fundamental problem’, which spread ‘its tentacles into every phase of life’, blighting the lives of women but having ‘even greater impact’ on men since ‘the elimination of women from true affection’ led them to homosexuality. Hunter saw the chadari as central to this system and provided many examples, some clearly sensationalised, of how women in Kabul hated it. The jacket of his book The Past Present, published in London early in 1959, may have been the first to use the chadari to symbolise Afghanistan’s benightedness.

  These responses were typical of the horror expressed by foreigners at the various forms of veil worn by Islamic women. Many colonial officials and missionaries, who were set on attacking Islamic institutions and otherwise displayed no interest in improving the position of women, decried the veil as a means of subjugating them and denying their individuality. Yet some Afghans also came to abhor chadaris. They found support for discarding the chadari in the Qur’an, which mentioned ‘the exposed face and hands of women’ as if this were acceptable. As they looked for change, they were part of a transnational movement that enjoyed significant success in the Middle East and North Africa, prompting British-Lebanese historian Albert Hourani to write in 1956 of ‘the vanishing veil’.

  Afghanistan was one of the world’s poorest countries with one of the highest infant mortality rates. Discarding the chadari galvanised a relatively small, privileged section of
Afghan society, educated with texts that promoted modernisation. In 1954 Scottish writer, Peter Ritchie Calder, reported that women from the royal family had petitioned the king to allow them to stop wearing the chadari, which they considered a ‘complete humiliation’. In 1958 American Ruth Woodsmall found that the antipathy of Kabul’s growing middle class to chadaris was ‘general, perhaps universal’. The clothes that the well-to-do wore underneath were a sign. Instead of the voluminous pleated trousers, known as delaqs, they increasingly wore western-style clothes that they made themselves, ordered from Kabuli tailors or bought abroad.

  Radio Kabul, the country’s sole station, was one of the government’s vehicles for change, though it had limited reach: it broadcast for just a few hours a day, and most Afghans could not afford radios. Initially, the station acted surreptiously. When Khadija Parwin, a member of the extended royal family, became the first woman to take part in a radio program in 1950, the station recorded her singing at home and presented her songs as those of a girl. It also recorded the first female newsreader at her home, then rushed the tapes to its studios. But before long, women announcers and singers were working at the station and their identities were no longer disguised—a crucial step in normalising the idea that women’s voices should be heard outside the family circle. While the station’s staff went there in chadaris and entered through a back door reserved for them, inside they wore headscarves. In 1954, the station presented its first radio play with a mixed cast.

  Afghanistan had only one women’s organisation, the Women’s Welfare Association, founded in 1946 by Elisabeth Naim Ziai, the first European to marry into the Afghan royal family. One of her priorities was changing the appearance of Afghan women—leading her to buy electric curlers and hair driers in Europe so the association could open Kabul’s first beauty salon. In 1958, Naim Ziai’s successor, Zeinab Seraj, another royal, met a Polish journalist dressed in a ‘modern grey checkered shirt, pink pullover, petite block shoes with pencil heels, discreetly applied eyebrows, and fingernails painted in the same colour as her pullover’. When Seraj agreed to be photographed for publication—perhaps the first woman of her class and generation to do so in Afghanistan—she wore dark glasses but did not bother with a head covering. By then, a combination of government funding and the association’s own generation of income had built a suite of buildings in its own extensive walled compound where it provided free education to women who had missed out as children and brought women into paid employment as embroiderers and seamstresses in segregated workshops. Its 500-seat theatre, the best in Afghanistan, was the prime venue where women watched movies and saw plays, primarily didactic works ‘designed to counteract some of the traditional superstitions’.

  Anahita Ratibzad, yet another member of the extended royal family, was also at the forefront of change. Her education at Kabul’s foremost girls school, the Malalai, was truncated when as a teenager she married and had three children. But when her doctor husband won a fellowship to Chicago, Ratibzad studied nursing there. On returning to Kabul, she became head of its nursing school and the most senior Afghan woman in the medical profession. When Kabul University began allowing women to study medicine in 1956, she enrolled and became the first locally trained female doctor and first female member of the medical faculty.

  Women from outside the royal family also benefitted from these changes. Kubra and Humaira Noorzai, daughters of a successful building contractor, were particularly prominent. After graduating from Malalai where she achieved outstanding results, Kubra became one of the first women to study science at Kabul University, then returned to Malalai aged twenty-seven in 1954 as the first Afghan woman principal. Four years later, having served on a government commission to improve girls high schools, she spent a year studying in Paris, then had three months in the United States on a leadership program. Meanwhile, Humaira became principal of another high school and succeeded Zeinab Seraj as president of the Women’s Welfare Association.

  Their opportunities depended on Prime Minister Daoud, a cautious moderniser who gradually challenged the practice of purdah. In 1958 Daoud selected several women including Anahita Ratibzad and Kubra Noorzai to represent Afghanistan at international forums and authorised two women teachers to visit the United States unchaperoned. In the spring of 1959, he supported the employment of women in new workplaces. While thirty women became telephone-exchange operators, forty started work, unveiled, in the Kabul china factory alongside men.

  That June, the Afghan airline Ariana hired Safia Djawid, the daughter of the Women’s Welfare Association’s founder, Naim Ziai. She became the first Afghan woman employed as a secretary, until then a male occupation. Then Ariana hired three other young women to be flight attendants and, after ‘a careful indoctrination and grooming sesssion’ in Beirut, they began work that July in western uniforms. According to Francis Swayze, an American employee of Pan Am working with Ariana, this initiative ‘created a sensation in this country’—all the more so because the women were unveiled when travelling to Ariana’s office in Kabul and the airport. By some accounts, the flight attendants required police protection both en route and at home. The company’s president Faiz Mohammad Ahmedzai declared them ‘very brave’.

  When Daoud told his senior officials and officers of his plans for more change that summer, he is reputed to have asked: ‘How can we progress when six million of our people are kept in the darkness of purdah?’ His closest ally was his brother, Sardar Mohammad Naim, Afghanistan’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. On 24 August, the first day of Jeshyn, Naim’s wife, Princess Zohra, appeared in the special pavilion reserved for the country’s rulers at the Ghazi Stadium wearing western clothes with a headscarf. The following day, about thirty women followed suit. Just as Princess Zohra was there with Naim, Daoud was accompanied by his wife Princess Zainab, one of Zohra’s sisters. Anticipating opposition, Daoud arrested several clerics pre-emptively and put an unprecedented number of police on Kabul’s streets.

  American writers Delia and Ferdinand Kuhn, who were not in Kabul at the time, claimed that the women in the stadium on 25 August ‘cowered together in a corner’ of the pavilion ‘like a flock of frightened penguins’. Other accounts suggest women attended joyously. They seemingly were untroubled by the irony of King Zahir Shah opening Jeshyn with a speech lauding the winning of sovereignty from ‘the clutches of aliens’, when their new clothing mimicked those aliens. They were probably unaware that the veil was acquiring a new role in Algeria as a symbol of resistance to westernisation and imperialism. Shirin Majrooh, whose father-in-law was one of Daoud’s ministers, recalled of that first afternoon: ‘I, the daughter of a Pashtun mountain lord, was among the first to have dared the impossible. I was more than a little proud!’

  CHAPTER 2

  A Flapper Queen

  The unveiling at the Ghazi Stadium was shaped by the rule of King Amanullah, whose relationship with Queen Soruya broke radically with tradition. Where Amanullah’s father, Amir Habibullah, had four wives and many concubines, Amanullah married Soruya for love, embraced monogamy and closed the royal harems. Pursuit of female emancipation was a family affair for Amanullah and Soruya. Her father, Mahmud Beg Tarzi, Afghanistan’s foremost advocate of modernisation, was a prime influence. Inspired by him, Amanullah prohibited child marriages, required polygamous marriages to have special judicial approval and outlawed the bride price that compensated fathers for the loss of their daughters’ labour. Meanwhile, Soruya established Afghanistan’s first girls school, the Mastoorat, and founded Afghanistan’s first women’s magazine, which was edited by her mother Asma who also oversaw the Mastoorat school.

  Amanullah and Soruya were emboldened by Amanullah’s success in securing Afghanistan’s independence. But this success also deprived Afghanistan of funding provided by London, forcing Amanullah to raise taxes and reduce his army. His vulnerability was exposed in 1923 when there was a rebellion in the eastern province of Khost by Mangal tribesmen who, like Amanullah, were Pashtun, the large
st Afghan group. When many of Amanullah’s underpaid conscripts refused to fight, he struggled to suppress the revolt. By revoking several of his reforms at a loya jirga, an assembly of tribal leaders, he secured more soldiers, enabling him to defeat the Mangals and execute fifty of their leaders. Then he resumed modernising. On a visit to the Mastoorat school, he declared that purdah had been ‘enforced to an absurd extent in Afghanistan’.

  For decades, Afghanistan had been notorious as a closed land: a much-photographed sign erected by the British on the Indian side of the Kyhber Pass declared it ‘absolutely forbidden to cross this border into Afghan territory’. Amanullah announced that foreigners with visas were welcome. Having never been outside Afghanistan, he also decided to travel with Soruya, who had been born in Damascus when her parents were in exile but had lived in Kabul since she was five. In December 1927, the thirty-six-year-old king and twenty-nine-year-old queen embarked on a seven-month, thirteen-country Grand Tour through India and Egypt to Europe, then back through Turkey and Iran.

  Their appearance expressed their appetite for the modern. Most Afghan men wore beards because it is said the prophet Muhammad had one. Even before Amanullah departed, he sported only a moustache; then minimised it in Charlie Chaplin fashion. While abroad, Amanullah generally wore top hats, homburgs or brimmed military caps, flouting the Islamic convention that the forehead be kept clear for touching the ground when praying. Soruya discarded her chadari on leaving Afghanistan, but wore a heavy black veil in Karachi and a transparent white one in Bombay. She also usually wore a veil in Egypt, but discarded it on reaching Naples. After Amanullah stepped on the gangplank with his right hand raised in the fascist salute expected in Mussolini’s Italy, Soruya revealed herself to the world in a sumptuous fur coat and smart Parisian gown. The New York Times described her as ‘very beautiful, with black, dancing eyes, delicate features, smiling lips and a clear white skin’.