In today’s Sunday NY Times, there is an article talking about Afghanistan, fron 1930-1970. They point out that under the king, Afghanistan was relatively liberal-woman could wear what hey wanted, and the country was pretty peaceful.
Is there any prospect of a return to a monarchy?
Was the islam practiced in Afghanistan also liberal then? There didn’t seem to be the hostility then, to western thought and custom, than as is now.
Heck, I hate communism devoutly but I’m prepared to say Afghanistan was better off as a conquered Soviet puppet-state than whatever it is they have now.
NY Times needs to do its research more properly. Afganistan was probably better off as a monarchy…200 years ago when it was a major empire as opposed to a rump that it is now.
And the New York times (which I read) even if granted (which I don’t think so) for the sake of arguement will hold true only for Kabul, a city which was dependent on Pakistanis from Islamabad who would drive for the weekend.
Islam as practiced under the Shah wasn’t particularly liberal, and it was certainly part of the state apparatus…Hanafi Islam was the official religion, and the ulema were state supported, but it wasn’t actively political. It could be; Amanullah Shah was overthrown in 1929, largely because his reforms (banning the veil, secular education, declaring religious freedom and equality of the sexes) were seen as anti-Islamic. But, for the most part, the ulema were content to stay uninvolved in politics.
Well…a South Asian monarchy with a large degree of modernization and tolerance for Western thought … was Iran. And you see how well THAT worked out. Heck, the USSR moved to take over Afghanistan in part to make sure that the “revolution” that won there would be of the kind they preferred. The Afghan monarchy fell and was replaced by a socialist-leaning republic, that then in turn was taken over by the communists, who could not get their act together and began turning on each other, so the Soviets invaded outright to put in their preferred faction.
One “advantage” of monarchical/feudal systems in tribal cultures such as Afghanistan in the past was that as long as your tribal leader pledged loyalty to the crown, and the crown in turn recognized the legitimacy of the tribal leader to rule the tribe by its own customs, you could potentially have a polity where each group did its thing and stayed out of one another’s faces. So what if some upper-middle-class woman in Kabul was driving around uncovered on her way to University, just don’t give any ideas to the women of OUR village – that kind of thing. The trouble with restoring the Afghan monarchy NOW is that it would perforce have to be a constitutional monarchy, with the aspiration of having uniform rules for the whole land and population, and all you’d do is reclassify the current presidential contenders to PM contenders and they’d be in the same pickle as now re: trying to assert national power.