by Tim Bonyhady
International interest was intense as Soruya was the first Islamic woman from a royal family to unveil in Europe and Afghan women were considered to be ‘kept in more rigid seclusion and…more closely veiled than the women of any other Muslim country’. Soruya generally was perceived in Orientalist terms, enveloped by ‘the mystery of the East’, but some observers suggested that, wherever she went, Soruya ‘would pass for a European’. Flappers were the archetype of female modernity in the West in the late twenties, and Soruya’s knee-length day dresses, velour hats and furs were, one headline observed, decidely ‘flapperish’. Because it was traditionally a mark of disgrace for the hair of an Afghan woman to be cut, a Parisian friseur gave her a ‘bob that is not a bob’, so Soruya could appear short-haired while retaining much of her long hair.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah—an Indian-born, Oxford-educated member of a family from Paghman outside Kabul, who was the first writer of Afghan descent to reach a significant western audience—was one of the royal couple’s admirers and promoters. In an array of books and articles published through the 1920s, he pronounced Amanullah ‘little short of a genius’, lauding how the king crafted each change so as not to ‘drench the rather conservative Afghan mind with a sudden and wholesale dose of foreign culture’. In a feature for the New York Times, an ecstatic Shah suggested that by ‘discarding the veil’ Soruya ‘completed the emancipation of her sisters in the Middle East’.
The camera was vital to how Amanullah and Soruya were perceived. Both were accustomed to it. Amanullah’s father, Amir Habibullah, embraced photography at the start of the century, exhibiting his own pictures, putting them on sale to raise funds for an orphanage in Kabul and establishing a commercial studio where members of the public might have their portrait taken. Soruya’s father, Mahmud Beg Tarzi, staged Afghanistan’s first photographic competition and reproduced the work of some of the first professional Afghan photographers as editor of the Kabul newspaper Siraj ul akbar, publishing many portraits of men. But while women at court, including Soruya, were often photographed unveiled in western dresses, Tarzi published just two photographs of women: a British convert to Islam in London and a ‘peculiarly’ bearded woman.
This photography—and the exhibition and reproduction of images—was possible because a prohibition in the Hadiths, or traditions, of the Prophets on depictions of living creatures had, on the whole, been interpreted as not applying to images of non-religious subjects or popular art forms. This interpretation was spelled out in 1928 when cheap prints depicting Amanullah went on sale in Kabul. A correspondent of the London Times assumed that these portraits violated a ‘stringent’ Islamic ‘ban on the display of pictures’. The Iman of London’s first mosque responded that this ban was confined to images that encourage idolatory.
Amanullah took photographs with a fold-out camera while Soruya and he travelled through Europe. Their Grand Tour also put Amanullah and Soruya in front of the camera like never before. They were the subjects of thousands of images intended for newspapers and magazines. One, taken at the Cenotaph on their first outing in London, included a row of kneeling photographers with another row standing behind them. The New York Times reckoned photographers generally flattered the queen by excising her plump lower legs. In fact, photographers usually showed her legs, but the most famous image did not. A product of Soruya’s only studio session, at the Bieber Studio in Berlin, this portrait conveyed Soruya’s modernity as well as her royalty by showing her in a sleeveless, low-cut dress with a tiara, diamond necklace, drop earrings, and diamond and ruby bracelets.
Soruya opened herself to world view in very different fashion in Brussels where she spoke with a female correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, her first interview with a journalist. While suggesting that her ‘chief merit’ was to have kept Amanullah monogamous ‘through ten years of happy matrimony’, Soruya identified herself as ‘the first woman in all the long centuries of Afghan history who worked for the emancipation of the women of the country and for women’s education’. She described the veil she had worn in Afghanistan as her ‘only concession’ to Islamic custom, and that this concession was limited as her veil had not been ‘as thick as any other woman’s’. She saw herself as collaborating ‘from afar in the great work of women’s progress in the world’. She took pride in having founded the Mastoorat school where eight hundred pupils ‘reared like European ladies’ could pursue secondary education.
Photographs of Soruya on the Grand Tour reached Afghanistan by March 1928. They caused the ‘gravest consternation’ because they showed Soruya unveiled, exposing some of her body and, in one case, with her hand in the arm of French President Gaston Doumergue, touching a foreign man. Opponents of the royal couple distributed these photographs to fuel opposition to Amanullah. They also took advantage of the fact that most Afghans had no idea what the queen looked like by passing off photographs of other women, wearing fewer clothes, as pictures of Soruya. And a photomontage reputedly placed Soruya’s head on the body of a near-naked dancing girl.
Enthusiastic crowds still welcomed Amanullah and Soruya when they returned in July 1928 after visiting Turkey and Iran. Only men lined Kabul’s streets but some women watched from rooftops reserved for them. An unprecedented array of foreign journalists—including a few women—followed in response to international interest in Amanullah and Soruya. The royal couple returned with European newsreels of their Grand Tour, with at least one showing the queen unveiled in Italy. These newsreels could not be screened in Kabul’s first cinema, opened by Amanullah, because it had just burnt down, with arson by mullahs the suspected cause. But Amanullah showed the newsreels in nearby Paghman where he had built Afghanistan’s only other cinema as part of transforming this hilltop village into his summer capital.
Through that summer and autumn of 1928, Amanullah instituted many changes. The Mastoorat girls school became a lycée, offering the same program as Kabul’s pre-eminent boys school, Habibia. A group of senior Mastoorat girls went to Turkey to be trained as doctors and chemists. One of Afghanistan’s first industrial workplaces, a match factory in Kabul, began employing women. When Amanullah staged another loya jirga, many of the delegates arrived in turbans. Some wore peaked karakul hats made from the wool of Afghanistan’s long-tailed sheep, which Amir Habibullah had promoted as an alternative to turbans at the start of the century. Amanullah required the delegates to wear black morning coats, trousers, white shirts, ties and brimmed hats and urged them to shave their beards and cut their hair. He also had the delegates photographed in their original and their new outfits to document their transformation.
Soruya excited international applause when she returned with a diaphanous veil over just the lower portion of her face and then attended a state banquet in the latest western fashion, unveiled. An Australian journalist predicted Soruya would ‘go down in history as one of the heroines of feminism’. In Kabul, Amanullah responded to protests from clerics with sophistry and contempt. Instead of acknowledging that Soruya was following western fashion, he declared she was entitled to go unveiled since village women in Afghanistan did too. In an article for the government newspaper, Soruya emphasised the absence of any Qur’anic requirement to wear the chadari. She argued that, for Islamic nations to progress, purdah and the veil had to be abandoned, and education for girls allowed.
When Amanullah stipulated that the opening of the annual independence celebrations in Paghman be limited to those in western clothes, about fifty women attended. Some, reported Sorab Katrak of the Illustrated Weekly of India, still covered their faces completely with small black veils; others wore ‘coloured veils a little below their eyes’. But all wore modern European dresses. American journalist Jackson Fleming dubbed them the ‘flappers of Paghman’. When Soruya appeared at the loya jirga while Amanullah was addressing the delegates, he asked British journalist Roland Wild to ‘photograph the ladies, Soruya among them’. Amanullah himself used a cinecamera he had brought back from Europe. Soviet film director Vladimir
Erofeev was on hand, making the first documentary about Afghanistan.
Amanullah also looked to transform Afghanistan’s identity by creating a new national flag. While a green flag had sometimes been used to emblemise Afghanistan, with the green symbolising Islam, the official flag from 1880 was all black because the prophet Muhammad sometimes carried a black military standard and the Abbasids, who ruled Afghanistan from the mid-eighth century, also had one. In 1901 Amir Habibullah placed a white seal on it, which Amanullah varied twice. In 1928 the loya jirga embraced Amanullah’s proposal for a tricolour, following European fashion. Its black stripe represented the sadness of pre-independence Afghanistan. A central red stripe symbolised blood shed in the struggle for independence. A green stripe, hope for the future.
Amanullah had already required that girls not marry before reaching puberty. Now he proposed they be at least eighteen. The delegates at the loya jirga rejected this change but approved a law defining the rights and responsibilities of women. They also agreed to a Society for the Protection of Women to be led by one of Amanullah’s sisters, Princess Kubra, who sported even shorter hair than Soruya and was the first Afghan woman to drive a car. In a feature that Ronald Wild carried to India so that he could wire it to England, he revealed that Soruya would ‘shortly announce her intention not to wear the veil at all’.
Hawaiian-born writer-photographer-artist May Mott-Smith was particularly interested in the ‘Kabul flapper’. She reported that the veils worn by upper-class women were getting thinner and those who had not discarded the chadari had ‘shortened it, along with their dresses, to the latest European knee depth’, revealing silk stockings and French shoes. A few went bareheaded at parties at the houses of ministers and diplomats. They met their husbands’ male friends at home, again unveiled. They mixed with men in Kabul’s first restaurant. Although imbued with condescension typical of westerners writing about Afghans, Mott-Smith’s reports conveyed the modernisers’ excitement: ‘The Afghans are fairly drunk with their own progress. Like amazed but somewhat bewildered children they thump themselves on the chest and exclaim, “Look at us now and remember what we were two years ago!”’
Opposition was growing. One of Amanullah’s ministers told Mott-Smith that he ‘was not for emancipation of any kind, “and never would be”’. When religious leaders called on Amanullah to withdraw his reforms and he refused them an audience, the clerics excommunicated him. A mullah in Afghanistan’s north underlined Amanullah’s new status as a heretic by failing to mention him in Friday prayers, which had been delivered in the king’s name long before the Afghan constitution required them to be. In turn, Amanullah asked Kabul’s chief judge to approve his reforms. When this judge fled instead, Amanullah had him arrested, charged with treason and executed. He also announced further changes in a fifteen-hour speech, delivered over five days in Kabul’s Ester Palace. One was compulsory coeducation for primary-school boys and girls in Kabul. Another was a new dress code for the city. Men were to wear western hats, ties and trousers. Women were to wear a veil covering just the lower part of their faces, together with an overcoat and hat. They were not to wear the chadari because it was ‘both expensive and unhygienic’.
The new clothes were part of an international movement. Egyptians Huda Shaarawi and Seza Nabarawi had been in the vanguard when they returned in 1923 from a congress of the International Woman Suffrage Association in Rome. As their train entered Cairo’s main railway station, Shaarawi and Nabarawi stood on the running board and lifted their veils to applause from a crowd of waiting women who partly followed their example, while men at the station reputedly ‘turned away in disgust’. In 1927, Uzbek women marked Soviet Women’s Day by gathering in city squares and streets under the guard of militiamen and ‘ostentatiously tore the veils from their faces, threw them into prepared bonfires, and exhorted others to do the same’. In response, many other women added their veils to the bonfires, ‘then surged through city streets…chanting challenges to the old order’. In Turkey, as Amanullah and Soruya witnessed, Kemal Ataturk was pursuing female emancipation and dress reform, and Reza Shah appeared set to do the same in Iran.
Kabul’s new dress code, which Amanullah announced in his epic speech at the Ester Palace late in 1928, applied forthwith to men. Women had two months to comply. But Soruya, who was present, immediately tore off her short, diaphonous veil and several women from the royal family followed suit. As rumours spread that Amanullah had proscribed all veils everywhere, Tajik tribesmen in the north-east rebelled, supported by much of Afghanistan’s religious leadership including many Pashtuns. In response, Amanullah sent out his army and ordered his new airforce to bomb the Tajiks, whose leader was usually known—and denigrated—as Bacha Saqqao, ‘Son of a Water Carrier’.
Because several of the pilots were Soviets, regarded in Afghanistan as kaffirs, or unbelievers, Amanullah’s reputation for godlessness grew. Although Amanullah revoked nearly all the changes he had introduced since Soruya and he returned from their Grand Tour, the rebellion spread. When many of Amanullah’s troops deserted and others surrendered without fighting, he abdicated and escaped south, where he turned to a very different piece of clothing—a cloak said to have been worn by the prophet Muhammad. Amanullah donned this ‘Cloak of the Prophet’, which had been housed in Kandahar since 1768, to restore his Islamic credentials. When he failed to secure sufficient support, he and Soruya fled to Europe.
Bacha Saqqao became Afghanistan’s first Tajik ruler in January 1929. Such was the symbolic importance of women’s clothes that, even though Amanullah had already revoked his dress code, Bacha Saqqao’s first law ‘cancelled’ it. Bacha Saqqao also required men to grow beards and wear turbans. He lampooned Amanullah’s abbreviated moustache, declaring it made him ‘look like a butterfly’. He invited Kabulis to inspect a photograph of Soruya in a car driving ‘naked’, in other words, acting immorally by exposing too much of her body.
Pillaging was a traditional recompense for Afghan soldiers in place of salaries, but Jackson Fleming credited Bacha Saqqao with preventing the customary ‘orgy of looting’ by imposing severe penalties. Most accounts cast the Tajiks as ‘satans’ who vandalised, looted and raped, blew one of Amanullah’s brothers-in-law ‘to pieces from a cannon mouth’, hanged a supporter of Amanullah and ‘exposed his body in the street for three days’, and had others ‘dragged behind fast-moving motor cars’. In Paghman, the Tajiks torched the cinema, leaving Afghanistan without one.
Pashtun rule—the usual order—returned when Nadir Khan, who had been Amanullah’s Minister for War, retook Kabul in October 1929 assisted by British arms and funding. After doing much greater damage to the city by bombarding it and engaging in more pillaging, Nadir Khan’s men seized Tajik women from the north. Nadir Khan also had Bacha Saqqao and fourteen other leading Tajiks beaten, stoned, shot and hanged—despite having agreed to pardon them if they surrendered and pledged their loyalty—then left them on the gallows for three days. Soon photographs of the executed Tajiks were being sold in Kabul. They also were viewed by ‘all and sundry at a charge of threepence’ in Peshawar, while postcard publishers in Peshawar and Karachi reproduced them with English texts, with British soldiers a prime market.
Rather than restore Amanullah to the throne, Nadir Khan kept it for himself, but he supported Amanullah and Soruya in Italy with a state pension. Meanwhile, Amanullah became an international laughing stock for his spectacular 1929 crash after shaping Afghanistan’s distinctive roaring twenties. His longstanding Afghan-Indian advocate, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, recast Amanullah as a profligate, self-indulgent, naïve blunderer, whose ambition to embrace ‘the somewhat superficial civilisation of the West’ inflicted ‘lasting damage upon his country’. But modernisers in Turkey lamented his downfall. A front-page story in the Istanbul newspaper Cumhuriyet headed ‘Why was the King forced to abdicate?’, included a photograph of Soruya in a heavy coat, hat and veil covering her entire face, and another photograph showing her in a summer dress with b
are face, shoulders and arms. Cumhuriyet identified the first of these photographs as ‘Afghan attire’, the second as ‘civilised attire’. A few westerners also deplored Amanullah’s ousting as a tragedy for women in not just Afghanistan but also Iran, where Reza Shah slowed his reforms in response.
A Soviet official argued that Amanullah blundered by initiating ‘bourgeois reforms without the existence of any national bourgeoisie’, so his changes yielded him no support. Other pundits contrasted Amanullah’s broken promise to double his soldiers’ salaries and improve their conditions with how Ataturk nurtured his army in Turkey. The premise of this argument was that in order to transform an Islamic country, one needed to be a strongman, ready to suppress dissent with force. The standard explanation was that Amanullah’s attempt to unveil women triggered his overthrow because it provoked Afghanistan’s mullahs who professed Islam ‘with a fanaticism probably unrivalled in the present-day world’ and retained ‘complete control over the people’. When Prime Minister Daoud tried again thirty years later, he expected his police and military would ensure he prevailed.
CHAPTER 3
Gone with the Wind
Within days of the unveiling at the Ghazi Stadium in August 1959, a few women were eating in Kabul’s restaurants. Some were probably at the stadium for the biggest soccer game that Jeshyn, when a crowd of 30,000 saw India squander many chances but still defeat Afghanistan 5–2 in a preliminary round of the Rome Olympics soccer tournament. Several women attended a state dinner in mid-September in honour of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was accompanied by his daughter Indira Ghandi, the new president of India’s Congress Party. ‘I understand this is an unusual occasion,’ declared Nehru. ‘I trust it will cease to be unusual. The burden of the world must be shared by men and women together.’