by Tim Bonyhady
The carpets to excite most international interest were ‘Turkmen’, which were generally made in the north, organised around the medallions known as guls, and characterised by their intricate designs, fine wool, tight knotting and harmonious colours dominated by an array of different reds. While women did the washing, carding, combing, spinning and weaving in their homes, men constructed the looms, bought the raw materials, sold the carpets and controlled the proceeds. Because the looms were horizontal, except for those around Herat, weavers damaged their backs as well as their eyesight.
Antique Turkmen formed a small part of the rug trade. As international demand and prices soared, prompting dealers and collectors to talk of ‘Turkomania’, a small industry began producing high quality fakes, just as occurred with antique weapons. The simplest, most notorious method of aging carpets was to place them on streets where the traffic would consolidate the knots and splice the pile, but many dealers also employed ‘antiquers’ who further reduced the carpets’ pile with knives, smoothed down their backs with blowlamps, thinned their fringes with wire brushes and toned down their colours with bleach. Meanwhile, fabricators in the gun trade sometimes combined original firing mechanisms with new stocks and barrels made to look old, which were inlaid with ivory and brass, though also the occasional plastic chip.
Demand for new Turkmen surged following World War II, with total exports to Hamburg, the centre of the European rug trade, tripling between 1958 and 1966. While few men in Afghanistan could support more than one wife, polygamy was relatively common among Afghanistan’s small Turkmen population because of the income that weaving promised. The bride price depended on the woman’s skill as a carpet maker, but some weaving families still struggled financially as they borrowed to pay for materials, then found themselves in debt, forcing them to sell their carpets in advance for little. Afghanistan also never accounted for more than five per cent of the trade in Oriental rugs, long dominated by Iran, and its rugs had such weak identity that they were usually associated with other countries. They were known either as ‘Bukhara’ or ‘Persian’ carpets, much as the karakul wool from Afghanistan’s long-tailed sheep was often called ‘Persian lamb’.
One expression of the lowly status of Afghan rugs came in 1968 from the English writer Lawrence Durrell, celebrated for his Alexandria Quartet. A character in Durrell’s novel Tunc buys a rug believing it to be an ‘authentic Shiraz’ from Iran, only to be told ‘It’s Afghan. You’ve been cheated.’ Another mark of the low status of Afghan rugs came in 1970 from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when it staged an exhibition of Islamic carpets owned by American collector Joseph McMullan. He was renowned for having pursued not only some of the oldest surviving rugs from the fifteenth century but also much newer village and tribal pieces. Yet the exhibition included none from Afghanistan, which did not feature on a map in the exhibition catalogue of the ‘primary areas of the carpet belt and ancillary production centres’. Between eastern Iran and northern India, there was a vast void.
Insofar as aficianados of Oriental rugs paid attention to Afghan carpets, they typically wanted them to stay the same. Often overlooking the extent of innovation in Afghan rug-making, they thought that to remain authentic carpet makers working in their own homes needed to replicate existing designs in traditional colours with a traditional division of labour between men and women. When production began to be shaped increasingly by the tastes of foreign buyers, they considered this external influence rendered weaving ‘soulless, meaningless and empty’.
Haq Murad, who started out selling rugs made by his family, transformed Turkmen production. In 1967 he opened the country’s first big carpet factory in the northern town of Aqcha, helped found Afghanistan’s first carpet fair, which went on to be staged there annually, and became head of Afghanistan’s new Carpet Exporters Guild. While production in Murad’s factory was still manual, his weavers worked to instruction, making designs they were given. By 1968 Murad had fifty looms and 200 staff; by 1971 he had 125 looms and 250 staff, many of whom lived in accommodation provided by Murad.
He wanted to employ experienced women weavers, but they refused to work away from home or with men who were not family. Consequently, Murad hired men and boys—a profound shift both for Turkmen society and for the international reputation of Afghan carpets, which had been built on rugs being ‘the work of women’s hands, women who have spent their lives, from earliest childhood, to motherhood and grandmotherhood, at the loom’. While the usual focus in the 1960s was on giving Afghan women new opportunities, Murad declared, ‘The factory is a big break because I have employed men in a profession which has been for centuries women’s profession.’
Murad also set about producing rugs dubbed ‘Afghan Golds’ or ‘Golden Afghans’ which fitted the western vogue for light interiors. The first of these rugs were created in London where many Turkmen carpets went for washing. When a ‘London bleach job’, using more chemicals than intended, turned some red Turkmen yellow and these carpets sold well, importers bleached many more in this way. But this process was costly, subject to long delays and damaged the carpets. Rather than dye wool red and then bleach it, the obvious solution was to start with wool of the desired colour. Murad was at the forefront of doing so, instructing his weavers to make new geometric patterns in cream, beige, green and pink but predominantly yellow and gold.
The foremost international advocate of these carpets was an American, George O’Bannon, who developed a passion for Afghan rugs after coming to Kabul in 1966 to be assistant director of the local peace corps. Writing in 1974 in The Turkoman Carpet, the first book devoted to Afghan rugs, O’Bannon embraced the conventional preference for work done at home by Turkmen who ‘still basically weave to please themselves’. But O’Bannon also recognised that the introduction of new designs had long been a feature of Turkmen production. He lauded Murad as ‘a sensitive and intelligent merchant’ eager to ‘improve carpet quality’, who provided Turkmen weavers with a secure income during the catastrophic drought of 1969–72, which killed thousands of Afghans and caused thousands more to flee to Iran and Pakistan, while Afghan officials and members of the royal family misappropriated international aid.
Pictorial rugs, known as aksi, also took new forms. In the early 1970s, some were woven in Kabul where Rahemi Salehi, the daughter of a local rug dealer, taught boys and girls otherwise unable to find work to depict buzkashi, animals and other figurative subjects with the tourist market in mind. Most came from Afghanistan’s west. American rug aficianado Murray Eiland identified them with Shindand, a town south of Herat, and suggested they were probably an innovation from the ‘last several decades’ made by weavers of ‘Persian derivation’. Eiland looked on them as ‘a form called into being by the tourist industry’ and hence, debased. His 1976 book Oriental Rugs included one example depicting two camels being led by a man towards a town beneath a bird-filled sky.
When George O’Bannon investigated these aksi a few years later, he identified a much richer array of designs woven by Baluch people in western Afghanistan. The relatively sombre, loosely-knotted, small rugs of the Baluch had long been scorned in Europe and North America, dismissed as far inferior to the much more tightly woven Turkmen rugs. But they began to be revalued as part of a larger embrace of the tribal in the 1970s. The aksi discussed by O’Bannon were made in Ghurian west of Herat and in Adraskan to Herat’s south. Most if not all were based on existing images, including a 1920s portrait of King Amanullah, who was increasingly celebrated in both Afghanistan and the West. Writing in the foremost international carpet journal Hali, O’Bannon lauded aksi as ‘the most unusual and interesting group of recent Baluch rugs’. Much as American anthropologist Nelson Graburn had just argued that tourist art could result in ‘fertile new forms’, O’Bannon recognised that aksi had been ‘undergoing an exciting ferment’.
As with other Afghan rugs, whether made by women or men, working at home or in factories, the weavers of aksi generally remained anonymous.
Because almost all were illiterate, they were in no position to sign their work, even if they wanted to. But their identity also went unrecorded because they were typically regarded as engaged in a craft in which the maker’s identity was of no interest. Najiba Kadiri, a young Herati rug maker usually known simply as Najiba, was an exception as she extended the tradition of weaving portraits of political leaders, which was particularly strong in Iran and the Soviet Union. Najiba first came to public attention in 1968 when she showed one of her carpets in Kabul during Jeshyn and Haq Murad’s Carpet Exporters Guild bought it for Zahir Shah. In 1969 Najiba excited more interest with an unusually large portrait rug of the king. A year later, she had greater impact with an even bigger double portrait, over two metres by three metres, depicting the king and queen above the map of Afghanistan. Najiba’s choice of image of the queen—a much-reproduced portrait photograph taken on one of Humaira’s visits to Europe—was particularly striking. It showed the queen bareheaded, in a short-sleeved top, unlike Najiba who wore a headscarf and long sleeves when she posed next to this carpet for a photograph. In 1972 another of her rugs won a prize at the Aqcha carpet festival.
These rugs led the weekly Zhuwandoon and the Kabul Times to profile Najiba. They reported that she had shown such skill at handicrafts as a schoolgirl in Herat that her parents had employed a Turkmen woman to teach her weaving. By 1969, still aged just fourteen, Najiba herself was also teaching weaving in Herat, employed eight other girls in her workshop, and wanted more. ‘If I receive help from the government or from a rich man of the country,’ Najiba declared, ‘I am ready to develop the industry.’ Her belief that it was possible to develop her own business as a young woman in Herat was a manifestation of how Afghan society had changed under Mohammad Daoud and Zahir Shah. Her identification as ‘a brilliant young artist’ was even more striking.
CHAPTER 8
Flower Power
The London launch of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in May 1967 was a musical and fashion landmark. While the clothes worn by all four Beatles startled the journalists and disc jockeys, John Lennon stole the show with a green, frilly, flowered shirt, maroon corduroy trousers, canary-yellow socks, corduroy shoes and two particularly unusual additions. One was a leather sporran, the other an Afghan sheepskin coat, worn with the fur inside and the skin outside, which was tanned yellow and embroidered with big red flowers down its front and arms.
These coats were soon the stuff of a craze that surprised fashion writers when it started and amazed them in its longevity. ‘Afghans’—as they were often called—were worn by many celebrities through the late 1960s. For the best part of a decade, they were standard youth clothing, an archetypal hippie garment and emblem of the counterculture. Their embrace internationally transformed where and how the coats were made and what they looked like. It also encouraged new regard for traditional clothes among Afghanistan’s elite and led to other Afghan clothes finding an international market. While the craze for these coats could only happen because Afghanistan’s relationship with the rest of the world was changing—with Afghanistan more open to westerners than ever—the coats also changed this relationship.
They traditionally came in three forms—sleeveless or short-sleeved hip-length vests known as pustinchas; knee-length, long-sleeved coats known as pustakis; and ankle-length cloaks called pustins. In another gendered division of labour, men cured the skins, tanned them yellow with the rinds of pomegranates, cut them into pieces and sewed them together, while women and girls embroidered them with geometric and floral designs, usually in red or yellow. Their skins were occasionally bear, fox or goat, but usually karakul. Although often written about as if only men wore them, women did too, and they were such ubiquitous winter-wear that they were identified as Afghan national dress.
The poor could typically afford only the smaller pustinchas or pustakis. If they bought the bigger pustins, these coats were usually plain which made them cheaper. Senior government officials, successful merchants and wealthy clerics bought lavishly decorated pustins that demonstrated their status. In 1946, Maynard Owen Williams of National Geographic considered the pustin to be ‘the ultimate in masculine chic’. The archetypal Aghan man was ‘clad in red-embroidered sheepskin’.
Their prime source was Ghazni, south of Kabul. In 1955 British archaeologist Sylvia Matheson found ‘one shop after another offering nothing but pustin’. While entranced by those with white fur, Matheson rejected them as impracticable for her fieldwork that winter. Instead, she opted for a brown-furred pustincha that was still ‘enchanting, the yellow skin entirely covered in closely stitched flowers of pillar-box red, with here and there a spot of periwinkle blue’. Her choice reflected a trend for western visitors to prefer the cheaper, lighter pustinchas. Oliver Rudston de Baer, a Cambridge university student who was also among the few hundred foreigners to visit in 1955, suggested that in a country more frequented by tourists, pustinchas would ‘have been prostituted as souvenirs’.
Many more foreigners visited from the early 1960s, encouraged by the new Afghanistan Tourist Organisation established by Abdul Wahad Tarzi, a brother of Queen Soruya, who had been Amanullah’s foreign minister. The government made visits easier by granting month-long visas at the airport and extending them for the few who wanted to stay longer, dropping a requirement for internal travel approvals and building new tourist accommodation. Afghanistan also became much more accessible because of new airports and highways built by Moscow and Washington as they competed for influence. In 1965, 10,000 foreigners visited Afghanistan; in 1968, 45,000; in 1970, over 100,000. The biggest group—up to half in some years—were Pakistanis, drawn north by the array of imported manufactured goods on sale in Kabul.
A small number of westerners, typically older, arrived by plane, with lots to spend, prompting the Afghan Government to build Kabul’s first five-star hotel. In 1969 it opened, under lease to the Intercontinental Group, with rooftop dining and dancing facilities, a cocktail lounge, brasserie coffee shop, tennis courts and swimming pool. Yet most western visitors were hippies who, as English poet J. C. E. Bowen put it, travelled overland ‘in every imaginable kind of clapped-out motor vehicle…through the bottleneck of Kabul on their way towards the imagined Elysium of Kathmandu’. Their prime destination was Chicken Street in the Shahr-e Naw, a garden suburb close to the city centre, which was the most westernised part of Kabul under King Zahir Shah. Once a domain of poultry vendors, Chicken Street became a tourist strip lined with antique shops, clothing, embroidery and jewellery stores and carpet dealers.
A contributor to the Kabul Times claimed that of all the foreigners in Afghanistan, hippies were ‘most responsive to Afghan habits and way of life’, ‘with the most cross-cultural sensitivity’. But hippies also shocked and offended many Afghans because of their ragged clothes or lack of them, with some women wearing see-through shirts and no bra. As hippies were accused of immorality and of exploiting the traditional generosity of impoverished Afghans, there were calls for the government to deny them entry. Instead, it required them to carry at least $200 and issued them with visas only one week long, which did nothing to diminish their numbers. In Across Asia on the Cheap, the first Lonely Planet guide, published in 1973, Tony Wheeler described Chicken Street as ‘the freak centre of Kabul’. Bruce Chatwin—a great hippie hater—accused them of ‘wrecking’ Afghan society and driving ‘educated Afghans into the arms of the Marxists’.
Hippie capitalism was commonplace. As some travelled, they looked for local products to sell in the West and, if they made a good profit, imported more. Richard Neville, the Australian of Oz Magazine fame, who bought a pustincha for himself while travelling overland from Sydney to London in 1965, encouraged this commerce. In Play Power, his 1970 manifesto and manual for hippies, Neville recognised the larger exchange of dress occurring in Afghanistan and other countries on the Hippie Trail. He advised: ‘Sell your western-styled jeans in Nepal, and your long leather boots in Morocco. Once you could make 500% profit b
ringing back sheepskin jackets from Kabul, and you can triple your money with antique robes.’
Craig Sams, a young American who also travelled through Kabul in 1965 before settling in London, became a supplier. His prime outlet was Granny Takes a Trip—London’s ‘weirdest’, ‘most extreme’, ‘most exotic’, ‘hippest’ boutique—on the King’s Road in Chelsea, which soon eclipsed Carnaby Street as London’s fashion centre. At first, Granny Takes a Trip sold Victorian clothes, often modified to create ‘a slightly modern feel’. By 1967, when it began stocking pustinchas, its range included ‘Charleston dresses of the 1920s, Victorian bustles from the 1880s, Boer War helmets, African fezes, Arab headdresses and Chicago gangster suits from the prohibition era’.
The pustinchas were bought by men and women as Granny Takes a Trip was one of the first boutiques not to differentiate male from female dress. But it was men, particularly rock and pop stars, who brought them to public attention. Jimi Hendrix wore his orange-red, brocaded, sleeveless pustincha over an iridescent purple shirt with huge flared sleeves in one of the first all-star rock events in England, at the Kensington Olympia in London. Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of The Who also wore them on stage. Eric Burdon, of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ fame, got married in his.
Afghans were on sale in several Chelsea boutiques by the end of 1967 and much more widely available through the clothing chain John Michael, which took a middle path between ‘boredom on the one hand and fancy dress on the other’. The first ‘Persian’ or Iranian imitations had also reached the British market with the Afghan for once having more cachet. While a female model sported one on the fashion page of the London Times, all four Beatles wore pustinchas inside-out in their film of the Magical Mystery Tour and on the album’s cover. When the Beatles tried their hand at retail, their Apple Boutique had shelves of them. From across the Atlantic, it appeared to Life in 1968 that pustinchas had been ‘launched last season in England by the Beatles and their followers’.