The Armature of Royal Rule

Having provided some background on Abdur Rahman's life, I now want to relate principles of kingly authority contained in the proclamation that was reproduced and translated at the beginning of this chapter to specific episodes in Abdur Rahman's life story. The organization of this section will be thematic rather than chronological, as I will outline three aspects of kingship revealed in the proclamation and correlate them with scenes and situations found in the autobiography. The three aspects to be explored are those of king as instrument of God's sovereignty, king as patriarch and kinsman, and king as grantor of benefits and rewards.

God and King

The first and most important principle of Islamic kingship, be it an Afghan version or any other, is the paramountcy of God as creator of the universe and the ultimate judge of human affairs. All power in nature and society emanates from God. It is God who “determines the share” that everyone receives, which is to say, the station that they are born into and the capability which they have to improve their situation. As creatures of God, people can achieve something only if God allows them to do so. If He does not, then no amount of effort can alter their destiny. The proclamation builds on this principle of divine control by closely aligning the interests of the monarch with those of God. The king, like other human beings, is subject to God's ultimate authority, and he too will be judged for his actions and his obedience to divine commandments. But in distinction from other people, the king has been allotted an added burden—that of ensuring the general order that will enable those subject to his authority to fulfill their assigned duties as Muslim believers.^[14]

In the autobiography the most dramatic means by which Abdur Rahman conveys his belief in the obligation of the ruler to provide the conditions within which his subjects can fulfill their religious obligations is through his portraits of unjust rulers who fail to live up to their divinely appointed responsibilities. The most egregious of these rulers was the king of Bokhara, whom Abdur Rahman encountered several times on his travels in central Asia. During one journey to the Bokharan court, there occurred an episode that is emblematic of this ruler's sins.

Abdur Rahman was passing a village when he spies “a high piece of ground, which had been prepared to receive the tents of the king.” The ground was covered with blood, which Abdur Rahman assumes was “due to the amount of cows killed for charity to celebrate the king's victory” in a recent campaign. On inquiring of the local residents why the sacrifice had not been performed further from the tents, however, he is informed that this was not the blood of cows but of men. Fifteen days earlier the king's tents had been pitched in this spot, and one thousand prisoners had been brought before the king, who had ordered their throats cut in front of him. Abdur Rahman's response to this news is “shock” that prisoners should be treated in this way, and he goes on to ruminate that the then ongoing conquest of Turkistan by the Russians was caused by “the neglect of the Muslim rulers of God and His religion. They make the true believers slaves, and kill human beings, who are God's creation, without fault.” Ordering his soldiers “to cover over the blood with earth, in the shape of graves,” Abdur Rahman laments, “Bokhara, which had the reputation of being a very religious country, acted so contrarily to the teachings of Mahomet. I regretted the carelessness of the Muslims who are mad in their own conceit, so that the unbelievers, finding them ignorant and hostile to each other, take advantage of this.”^[15]

If Abdur Rahman portrays the king of Bokhara as a ruler who ignores his responsibility to uphold God's law, he paints himself as a ruler who succeeds in this responsibility and is favored by God for doing so. One way God expresses His favor is through a series of miracles that aid Abdur Rahman before he assumes the reins of royal power. The first of these interventions occurs while Abdur Rahman is still a young man and serving as governor of Kataghan in northern Afghanistan. He receives a letter from his fiancée and first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Muhammad Azam, who wrote that the letter was to be delivered into his hands, that it was to be shown to no one else, and that he himself was to write and seal the reply. Never having paid attention to his studies and consequently unable to read or write, Abdur Rahman “wept bitterly” out of frustration and shame, for “while I boasted of being such a fine man, I was really most unmanly, being so ignorant.”

On retiring that evening, Abdur Rahman prays to God “with all humility, beseeching the souls of the Saints to intercede” for him and asking that his heart and mind be enlightened so that he would not be “ashamed in the eyes of Thy creation.” After Abdur Rahman falls asleep, a holy man appears to him and twice tells him to rise and write. Both times, the younger man raises his head from his bed only to fall back asleep, but the third utterance of the command is punctuated with the threat: “If you sleep again, I shall pierce your chest with my staff.” At this, Abdur Rahman rises and begins to search his memory for the letters he had learned as a child. One by one they come back, and before dawn he is writing words in an awkward scrawl. By late afternoon, he is responding to his fiancée's letter and perusing official correspondence. The holy man's intervention thus enables him both to maintain privacy in his domestic relations and to overcome that great obstacle to proper rule—overreliance on court advisors.^[16]

In the course of his autobiography Abdur Rahman recounts several other divinely inspired dreams “from which I drew much comfort, as they gave me hope that I should not fail in my mission as a king, and that I should be successful in the end.”^[17] Perhaps the most dramatic occurs just before he leaves Turkestan to make his drive on Kabul. In this dream, two angels take him by the arms and bring him into the presence of a man he does not recognize: “He had a very mild, gentle face, of oval shape, a round beard, and beautiful long eyebrows and eyelashes. He was wearing a large loose garment of a blue color, and a white turban. His whole appearance was the perfection of beauty and gentle nature.” Seated beside the man, whom he perceives to be a ruler of some sort, are four other men—two on each side and all dressed in Arab robes. Into this august assembly is brought a man who, when asked a silent question “in the unspoken language of the eyes,” replies that he “will destroy the churches of other religions and build them into mosques, if I am made king.” The sovereign is displeased with this answer and orders that the man be taken away. Then the same question is asked of Abdur Rahman who responds that he “will do justice and break the idols and [uphold the Islamic declaration of faith] instead.” Hearing these words, the sovereign's four companions look at him with kindly expressions on their faces:

It was an expression of consent to appoint me king. I was inspired at the same moment with the knowledge that the king was the Blessed Prophet Mahomed, the two men at his right hand were his companions Abu-Bekr and Osman; the two at his left hand were his companions Omar and Ali. Upon this I awoke, and was so happy to believe that the Prophet and his Four Companions, whose authority it is to appoint the sovereigns of Islam, had chosen me as the future amir.^[18]

Like many Islamic rulers before him, Abdur Rahman uses dreams not only to legitimate his efforts but also to lend them a sense of inevitability. This practice can be seen in a series of episodes that occurs just as Abdur Rahman, accompanied by a tiny contingent of cavalry, is setting off on his final, desperate bid for power in 1880. On the eve of his departure from central Asia, he has a dream in which a saint tells him to take one of the flags flying over his nearby tomb and “erect that flag in front of thine army, and thou shalt always be victorious.” Abdur Rahman does as he is told but, shortly after setting out for Kabul, is confronted by an opposing army that he guesses to be 10,000 men strong. Despite the numerical superiority of the force arrayed against him, Abdur Rahman never loses heart or wavers from his goal: “I knew that no courage, however great, could succeed against such a number, but as I had given my life for the service of God, and knew all the verses of the Koran which promise rewards to those who sacrifice themselves for the suffering, to me 10,000 were the same as 1,000,000.^[19]

The next day, as he marches to face the enemy contingent, an astonishing sight greets his eyes. “The enemy began to disperse gradually in different directions, as if under the influence of an evil spirit. I could not understand what had happened. In the meantime, a body of sowars [cavalry] belonging to the Mir of Badakhshan…was approaching from another direction praising God.” Soon thousands of chiefs and common people from the surrounding areas are flocking to his camp and swearing fealty to his cause, an outcome that he explains thus: “A wise man will understand how I conquered the hearts of these 20,000 men in one day, because the hearts of men are in the hands of God, who turned them that day towards me.”^[20]

Such are the claims of kings, of course, but it is still important to recognize the significance to a ruler of his being able not only to convince the people that God supported his cause but also to believe it himself. If a ruler can convince the people that God is behind him, and if he can support that conviction through successful action, then popular support will mushroom. Likewise, if a leader can convince himself of his own divinely favored status, he can act in a fearless manner that befits his station. While it is undoubtedly true that many of those rendered fearless in this way wind up dead, those who survive are fortified by their survival and become formidable indeed. Abdur Rahman is one such survivor who was favored by circumstances and possessed of the requisite credentials to achieve what he took to be his destiny.

Kingship and Kinship

Patriarchal authority is the binding cement of Afghan society, and it is therefore not surprising that Abdur Rahman exploits that tie in the proclamation when he notes “the kindness and mercy of the king for his subjects” is as natural as “the kindness and mercy of a father” for his son. Like a father, the king's desire for his subjects is that they should earn a good name for themselves and accomplish in their lives what God has given them the capability to achieve.^[21] If instead they act in illicit ways and disobey lawful commands, their ruler, acting again like a dutiful father, is required to reprimand and punish his subjects in order lead them back to the right path and preserve the general prosperity of the community at large.

According to Bernard Lewis, the use of patriarchal symbols of authority is unusual in Islamic political writings, and one rarely finds instances in which a king is referred to as the “father” of his country.^[22] The language of the proclamation suggests, however, that patriarchal images are vitally important in Afghan political culture, and that conclusion is buttressed if we consider the evidence of the autobiography, in which virtually every important political relationship is negotiated in and evaluated through the terminology and ideology of kinship relations. One area in which this can be seen is in the relationship between dynastic rivals. The first such example in the book occurs between Abdur Rahman's father, Muhammad Afzal, and his younger half-brother, Sher ‘Ali Khan. The meeting between them that is described below was initiated by Sher ‘Ali after he has learned from his spies that Muhammad Afzal's army is “too strong for him to stand against, and that he must resort to intrigues, or he would meet with defeat.”

Shere Ali, listening to this, sent Sultan Ali, son of Sirdar Kuhandil of Kandahar, with an oath on the Koran, in which he undertook to look upon [Muhammad Afzal] as his father, and saying he was determined not to disgrace the name of their father Dost Mahomed by fighting against his son. My father being deceived by these assurances, took the Koran on his eyes, and kissed it, starting out for the camp of Shere Ali. … On his arrival at his brother's camp [Sher ‘Ali] walked out to welcome him, and kissed his stirrups, thus treacherously flattering him, and expressing his sorrow for thinking of going to war with his elder brother.^[23]

Not long after this scene, Sher ‘Ali breaks his oath to Abdur Rahman's father and throws him in prison. As mentioned earlier, Sher ‘Ali's power was short-lived—within two years, he was overthrown and Muhammad Afzal was installed on the throne. The issue of succession again arose when Muhammad Afzal died a short time later, but the bloody battle that most observers expected between the dead Amir's brother, Muhammad Azam, and his eldest son, Abdur Rahman, never transpired. The following description of the meeting between Abdur Rahman and his uncle purports to tell why:

Three days after [the funeral], I said to my uncle (Mahomed Azim) that as long as my father was alive, he was his younger brother, and I was as a younger brother to him (my uncle); now my father was dead, I would look upon him as occupying his place, and I would take his myself, leaving my place to his eldest son. My uncle replied that I was the rightful heir, being the late amir's son, and he would be my servant. But I replied: “Your white beard, uncle of mine, makes it unfitting for you to be a servant of any one. I am young, and therefore will serve as I served my father.”^[24]

In the first of these two scenes, the illegitimacy and infidelity of the pretender, Sher ‘Ali, is illustrated in multiple ways: by his breaking of a sacred oath, by his treacherous invocation of his grandfather's name to a kinsman he was conspiring to destroy, and finally by his use of kinship etiquette to lull his rival into a false sense of security. In the second vignette, the respect properly shown by a son to his father is invoked as a model for the decorum that a subject should exhibit to his king. Use of this kinship model in the latter instance allows a potential political crisis (in which the principle of seniority conflicts with that of lineal succession) to be peacefully resolved.

Another arena in which kinship terminology is used as a basis for negotiating uncertain political relationships is in meetings between unrelated rulers. An example of this sort of negotiation can be seen in Abdur Rahman's description of his arrival at the court of the Khan of Khiva:

They fired fifty guns as a salute to me, and the Khan walked out to receive me. I dismounted, and we shook hands, and hand-in-hand we walked into the Durbar hall. … We spoke together for two hours, during which time he told me that he regarded me as his elder brother, as his father Mahomed Amin was most friendly to my father at the time of his residence at Balkh, and he thanked God that we had met. He offered me two of the seven cities now under his rule, and at any time I chose to go to Balkh, he would lend me 100,000 sowars and footmen, who would conquer the city for me, so that we might remain friends and neighbors.^[25]

In analyzing this scene, it is useful to point out that in traditional Afghan society there are a limited number of relational frames which can be used to structure encounters between unfamiliar people, and of those frames that are available the one most frequently called upon is that of kinship. Time and again I have observed that when first introduced, Afghans will question one another in order to find a prior connection between them. The questioning continues as long as it takes to discover a point of reference: an uncle of one of the two men whose cousin had married a relative of the other man's, an elder brother of one of the men who had been a classmate of the other's, and so on. Once a connection has been uncovered, the two men greet each other all over again, familiarly hugging each other and reciting the litany of salutations appropriate to their newly discovered relationship. From that moment on, they will address each other with such terms as are appropriate to that relationship.

Although the meeting between the Khan of Khiva and Abdur Rahman occurred more than a century ago and in a different world, it appears that a similar dynamic is going on as the Khan declares Abdur Rahman to be his “elder brother” because Abdur Rahman's father had long ago played host to his father. In modeling their own relationship on the earlier one of their fathers, the Khan of Khiva not only provides a set of protocols for their interaction but also imparts dignity to his guest, who is, as they both recognize, in a dependent and highly vulnerable situation.

If the khan of Khiva is the epitome of the noble and generous king, the antithesis of this ideal can be seen in his neighbor, the king of Bokhara, who was renowned not only for his cruelty (evidence of which was shown in the last section) but also for his decadence and incivility. In keeping with this reputation, the first meeting between Abdur Rahman and the Bokharan ruler is notable for its cynical manipulation of ritual to gain advantage. Thus, before he has even greeted Abdur Rahman (whose father, as governor of Afghan Turkistan, was well known to him), the king feasts Abdur Rahman and his retainers for nine days and sends them expensive gifts. The generosity of their host is much admired until, at the conclusion of the feast, a messenger arrives to inform Abdur Rahman that he is expected to reciprocate in kind. Never one to be caught unawares, Abdur Rahman has brought sufficient valuables with him to meet the king's demand for tribute, but Abdur Rahman is less forthcoming when he is told by the king's doorkeeper that before entering the royal sanctum, he should stoop over so that the coins which he intends to present the king can be placed on his back. Abdur Rahman's curt response to this demand (“I am created by God, and shall kneel to no one but Him”) annoys the doorkeeper, “who had never heard such a reply from any one before” and is disinclined to allow him entrance. However, another courtier intervenes, and Abdur Rahman is at last allowed to meet his royal host.

Instead of bowing to his host, Abdur Rahman says, “in the ordinary way, `Salam Aleikum' (`Peace be on you').” Not appearing to mind the informality of the greeting, the king chats amicably for some minutes but after that single meeting ignores his guest until some two months have passed. Finally, the king dispatches one of his servants to inform Abdur Rahman that he is kindly disposed toward him and “therefore it was advisable that I should give him 1000 sovereigns and three handsome page-boys” as a sign of good faith. Abdur Rahman refuses this extortion, replying, “These boys are to me as sons. To give gold away is the part of sovereigns. I gave to the king presents, according to the custom, and now I expect gifts and grants from him in return.” Ten days after this exchange, the same servant returns, this time to offer Abdur Rahman a position as a court official. Abdur Rahman is once again outraged by his host's behavior, and he signals his displeasure with a declaration of his independence and equal standing: “ `Neither is a camel's load on my back, or am I on a camel's back,' i.e., `Neither the king of subjects, [n]or a subject of the king.' ”^[26]

For the king of Bokhara, there is apparently no basis for relationship except the hierarchical one of master and servant, and in his hands this relationship is an exploitative and estranging one. Abdur Rahman, however, expresses a contrary notion of the master-servant relationship that highlights the naturalness and mutual benefit animating this bond. This ideal is evident throughout the proclamation that begins this chapter, one of the main themes of which is that God has determined that mankind should be divided into ranks, that certain men should occupy superior positions, and that others should serve and obey them. While this relationship undoubtedly has the potential for exploitation, the proclamation translated at the beginning of the chapter indicates that the wise ruler will prevent this from happening by treating his subjects with paternal concern and benevolence: “Whatever money and goods I, the king of Afghanistan, take from the people is spent every month for you the people of the army. … It is as if [the people's] own money is spent by their own government for their own brothers and sons.”

In a world of contending dynastic rivals with no strong central government, troops were quick to change sides if they felt it was in their interest to do so, and kinship was one of the few idioms a leader had at his disposal to bind men to his cause. This is readily apparent in the proclamation and throughout the life history as well. One typical example from the latter work is provided below. The scene takes place in northern Afghanistan where Abdur Rahman's father is governor. Although still a young man, Abdur Rahman has just been appointed commander-in-chief of his father's army, and he is meeting his troops for the first time: “I found the army of Kataghan very pleased to see me, and I conveyed to the soldiers a message from my father, that he looked upon them all as sons, and felt the same fatherly affection for them as he felt for me, Abdur Rahman. At this they cried out with joy, saying, `Every one of us will sacrifice his life for our father, Sirdar Mahomed Afzul Khan.' ”^[27]

Kinship is the bedrock of traditional Afghan social relations, of course, but it is important to realize that its appropriation in a context like this one can also alter its meaning in fundamental ways. For an officer in command of an army—or a ruler governing a nation—the expression of a kinship relationship between himself and those under him is an explicitly metaphoric act, which says, in effect, “I am like unto you as a father to his children.” Such a statement is expansive and potentially far-reaching in its consequences, for the man who utters these words is not simply trying to ingratiate himself with those beneath him. He is also attempting to transform their relationship in such a way that he can expect the same devotion from men who are in effect strangers that a father can expect from his sons.

For the tribe, on the other hand, kinship is a more rigidly applied idiom of relationship that has the effect of dividing groups from one another and making them more self-reliant. Tribesmen are also capable of using kinship metaphorically and of referring to non-kin acquaintances by kin terms, but the application of kinship categories to non-kin is generally interjected as a temporary measure to solidify a relationship until such time as actual marital ties can be established to make it substantial. Thus, kinship in tribal culture tends always toward the real. Fictive uses blur discrepancies and gaps, but only so as to preserve the integrity of the original frame, which remains inviolate and unbreachable. Kinship, in this sense, serves as a barrier to the world beyond the tribe, for so long as individuals remember who their kin are and honor their obligations to them, the distinction between insider and outsider can be upheld, and the world beyond the tribal homeland can be better kept at bay.

Gratitude and Ingratitude

In Islam, the relationship between ruler and ruled is premised on the belief that mankind stands in a covenantal relationship with God and that all worldly pacts partake of the moral force of the divine covenant binding mankind to God. As Roy Mottahedeh points out in his study of kingship in eleventh-century Buyid Iran, “In the Koran, benefits that God has granted to men, for which men are repeatedly urged to be `grateful,' extend from the very substances of life and the beauty of creation to the blessing of revelation and the Koran itself.…The Koran repeatedly emphasizes that the Believer is `thankful' (shâkir) for these countless benefits; and that gratitude is one of the basic spiritual qualities that accompanies true belief.”^[28]

The proclamation that introduces this chapter extends the Qur’anic principle of gratitude binding believer to God to include the relationship between subject and king. Thus, the proclamation informs us that positions and salaries received from the state cannot be looked upon merely as compensation for work performed; rather, they are the divinely sanctioned gifts of God, and those persons who have the temerity to bemoan their rank or to complain about the size of their portion demonstrate ingratitude not just to their king but also to God. Calculations of a material nature are clearly inappropriate within the domain of the state, and those who view the king simply as their employer debase the spiritual foundation of kingship and undermine their own position in this world and in the hereafter.

Given the importance of the military to the stability of the throne and given the fact that the army was originally composed to a large degree of tribal levies and recruits whose loyalty to the king was often questionable, it is not surprising that Abdur Rahman refers specifically to his army in the proclamation and that he cautions them in several places against invidious comparisons with those who have a higher position or larger salary than themselves. As I discussed in the last chapter, the ethos of tribal culture is one that accentuates rivalry by encouraging individuals to uphold their own rights to preeminence in the face of self-assertions by others. The functional result of this imperative in the tribal context is to limit the development of social stratification as successful individuals attract an ever-increasing number of rivals and are ultimately forced to rely on the assistance of a corresponding number of allies to protect themselves from assault and offense.

Abdur Rahman seems to have recognized the fundamental tension that existed between the egalitarian ethos animating tribal contests of valor and supremacy and the hierarchical ethos on which a successful army depended. If the proclamation is any indication, it would also appear that the Amir realized that, when transplanted to the ranks of the army, the tribal ethos of rivalrous comparison and continual self-assertion represented a serious challenge to the government's authority and his own particular efforts to institutionalize an army based on ordered ranks in which those lower in the hierarchy obeyed those higher up.^[29]

Past rulers had been content to rely on the fealty of retainers and soldiers whose personal loyalty was ensured through their receipt of favors, positions, and booty. But Abdur Rahman's own experience indicated the fickleness of such loyalty, and he sought to break with this tradition in his plan to create a more rationalized army and impersonal government bureaucracy. This ambition to alter the way in which people viewed their personal circumstances is seen in the proclamation in which he informs those who serve him to evaluate their worldly fortunes not—as in the case of Sultan Muhammad—by “what people say,” but by the objective measure of their “progress in rank.” The status of the individual should not be judged in relation to the position (or wealth or success) of a rival individual, but rather by the rank which the individual has achieved. Accordingly, if one wants to best a rival, the proper strategy is not to attack him directly but rather to be a better soldier than he and thereby gain advancement above him in the ranks.

The fact that a soldier (or other employee of the state) focuses his ambition on promotion reflects his obedience to the king and his gratitude for the position he enjoys in the world. Contrarily, disobedience to those above one in rank and an unwillingness to fully accept one's position in the hierarchy reflect the fundamental ingratitude of an individual. Frequently in Afghan history, disobedience to the king has been justified as obedience to God, but Abdur Rahman speaks out in the proclamation against those who preface their own acts of disobedience to the state by “taking refuge in God.” Recitation of the phrase “I take refuge in God” is a means by which an individual indicates his indifference to state sanctions and his obedience to God as the final arbiter of human actions. Those who “take refuge in God” indicate their readiness to defy the ruler's anger and risk punishment in order to carry out what they take to be a proper and justified action. Abdur Rahman, however, cautions those who might contemplate disobedience to his orders that such disobedience will be harshly judged not only by the state but also by God who has designated the Amir as his sovereign authority in temporal affairs.

Disobedience to the state and coveting the position of superiors in the administrative and military hierarchy are both examples of ingratitude, and Abdur Rahman demonstrates the seriousness with which he views these sins by the amount of space that he devotes to cautioning those who might contemplate either path of action. The ultimate sanction, of course, is that God will judge the individual harshly and send him to Hell. Abdur Rahman invokes this penalty in the proclamation, but he pays far more attention to those penalties that he himself is in a position to administer and that he knows have a particular resonance in Afghan culture. Thus, the Amir promises those who are ungrateful that not only will they lose their position and the privileges associated with their positions, but also they will suffer shame and humiliation: “When you lose your position, you will be walking down a street in a state of disgrace (be abru) and dishonor (be ghairat). No one will even mention your name. You will be forgotten. If they mention your name, they will curse you. You will become famous for being foolish and ignorant.”

This, of course, is language we have encountered before. Abdur Rahman's threats are ones that derive ultimately from the tribal lexicon of honor and that presumably would work especially well among the deracinated tribesmen who serve in his army. At any rate, the fact that he feels the need to invoke such threats here indicates that, however much progress he may have made in transforming and modernizing the apparatus of rule, he recognizes both the danger which the ethos of honor still represents to the state and its potential utility if its injunctions can be harnessed to the interests of state rule.

Turning to the autobiographical narrative, we see that if there is a single thread running throughout this work, it is this same theme of gratitude and obedience that is so evident in the proclamation. Whenever Abdur Rahman introduces an individual into his narrative, the reader quickly discovers whether that individual was loyal or disloyal to the author. Likewise, virtually all of the misfortunes that befall Abdur Rahman in the course of his journey to the throne of Kabul come about because of the treachery of one or another individual who chooses to act out of self-interest rather than gratitude for his benefactor and rightful ruler.

Given the many misfortunes detailed in the autobiography, it is not surprising that in this document we find many more examples of ingratitude than of fidelity, but the latter do exist and are instructive. One such example is in the actions of a servant named Parawana Khan, who accompanied Abdur Rahman through both of his periods of exile and remained “the most beloved” of the Amir's subjects “up to the last moment of his life.”^[30] The extent of this man's loyalty can be gauged by the fact that he allowed himself to be sold into slavery on at least three occasions when Abdur Rahman needed money. Each time, he remained in bondage until his patron could secure the funds to redeem him. A second case of abiding loyalty is provided by the story of an unnamed servant of Abdur Rahim, one of Abdur Rahman's close companions, who accompanied the Amir during his several exiles:

Imagine our gratitude when a servant of Abdur Rahim came from Kabul on foot to bring us 2000 sovereigns. The man had formerly been Abdur Rahim's treasurer, and having no shoes, had bound up his feet (which were torn and bleeding) with bits of carpet. He asked leave to return to Kabul to look after the family of Abdur Rahim, and also to execute further commissions for us. I gave him permission to return, also offering him a horse, which he refused, preferring to go on foot in case we might need the horse for our own use.^[31]

As exemplary as these stories are, the most telling case is that of Abdur Rahman himself who encounters tremendous hardships in his early life due to the loyalty that he displays to those in power over him. The most dramatic demonstration of Abdur Rahman's constancy comes in his relationship with his uncle, Muhammad Azam, who repeatedly ignores the sage advice of his nephew in favor of the self-interested counsel of his courtiers. One instance of this occurs shortly after his uncle's assumption of power following the death of Abdur Rahman's father. At the time, Muhammad Azam's younger brother and perennial rival, Sher ‘Ali, remained in the field, and Abdur Rahman wanted to stay in Kabul to help defend the capital in case of attack. Not trusting his nephew, however, Muhammad Azam sends Abdur Rahman to conduct operations in the north where he could be of no assistance if an attack on Kabul were undertaken: “My uncle would not heed any of my advice, writing that if I was his friend I would go; if I was not, I could do as I chose. I was much disappointed, and felt inclined to write: `If I am not afraid of Shere Ali's enmity, I am not afraid of yours.' But, on second thoughts, I desisted, considering that as I had put him on the throne, I ought to uphold him in everything.”^[32] One mistake follows another until Sher ‘Ali takes control of Kabul. When Abdur Rahman sends a letter to military officers who had defected to Sher ‘Ali's side, he receives the reply that “they hated my uncle, and being tired of his cruelties, had joined Shere Ali; also adding that, if my uncle were not with me, they would submit to me.”^[33] Not heeding these requests, Abdur Rahman remains loyal to his uncle, the result of which is continued defeat and the liquidation of his once considerable treasuries.

Thus commences Abdur Rahman's second and longest exile from Afghanistan, and it is clear from his repeated descriptions of his uncle's mistakes in judgment, of his intransigence when confronted with his errors, and of his cruelty to his subjects that Abdur Rahman felt that the fate of defeat and exile would have been avoided if he had been ruler instead of his uncle. Nevertheless, the lesson we are to learn from this episode in his life is that once he made the decision to support his uncle's claim to the kingship and took the oath of allegiance, he never wavered in his loyalty, continuing to accompany him as they searched for a place of refuge and even to minister to him when he was stricken with illness. As he self-righteously notes at one point in the narrative of their exile in central Asia, “I was more fond of him than his own son was, for during his illness, which lasted forty days, Sarwar had only called twice to inquire after his father's health, occupying himself instead with private business.”^[34]

Far more plentiful than depictions of loyalty are illustrations of disloyalty, particularly of servants who fail to reciprocate the trust and care of their patron. One example occurs during Abdur Rahman's first exile in Bokhara when a number of his servants abandon him to work in the service of the king of Bokhara. Given what we come to know of this particular king, we are perhaps intended to draw the conclusion that a king such as this deserves servants such as these, but Abdur Rahman is nevertheless greatly offended when, on encountering these same servants in the court of the Bokharan king, they “ignored me, not even salaaming.”^[35] Even greater outrage is expressed when disloyalty comes from men of noble birth and station who have benefited from the kindness and friendship of Abdur Rahman and his family in the past but then betray their benefactors. Such is the case with one Sultan Ahmad Khan, an officer in the army of Abdur Rahman's father, who was captured by Sher ‘Ali Khan at the battle of Herat. Muhammad Afzal had secured his release and appointed him as the governor of the central Hazarajat province, but he responded to this act of generosity on the part of Abdur Rahman's father by abandoning his post to join the ranks of his former tormentor, Sher ‘Ali Khan, who then made him the head of his cavalry. In this position, he later took up arms against the man who had once rescued him, an act that leads Abdur Rahman to the following rumination: “What can be thought of the character of one who fights against the man to whom he owes his freedom, and joins him who took him prisoner? An evil-minded man cannot be made good by culture. In gardens grow flowers, and in jungles grow thorns.”^[36]

While Abdur Rahman peppers his narrative with comments on this or that ingrate he has had the misfortune to encounter, he reserves some of his harshest denunciations for the ministers and officials who haunt the court. More consistently than any other class of people, it is these courtiers who bring grief to Abdur Rahman and his family. As we have seen, it was a court official who first caused the young Abdur Rahman to become estranged from his father when he convinced his father that he had begun drinking wine and smoking hashish, and it was in large part on the advice of his court officials that his father was led into the trap that resulted in his imprisonment. Abdur Rahman's uncle was equally prone to weakness in the face of his advisors' admonitions, and the Amir blamed courtly “mischief-makers” for bringing about his uncle's overthrow since it was they who “turned my uncle against me, persuading him that while I was in Kabul his influence was limited.”^[37]

Reading Abdur Rahman's fulminations against ministers of court, one is reminded of Sultan Muhammad's words concerning the danger of listening to the advice of women. Sultan Muhammad, it will be recalled, believed that female involvement in male affairs was necessarily deleterious to the interests of the male. A woman's perspective was simply not the same as a man's, and the interjection of women's concerns tended to confuse issues and weaken the ability and willingness of men to act in a manner appropriate to their station.

Advisors, it would appear, have a similar effect on kings; their perspective is also different and their interests do not always coincide with those of the ruler. Advisors, like women, have their place and their utility, but when the ruler allows them to get too close, he blurs the necessary distinction between ruler and ruled and encourages his subordinates to imagine that they are entitled to power and privileges to which they are by nature unsuited and undeserving. One imagines that Sultan Muhammad and Abdur Rahman would both have shared the opinion that any individual who allowed the difference between male and female, king and courtier to be transgressed deserved the fate he received, for it is in the nature of women and courtiers alike to act out of self-interest, and it is consequently the responsibility of the dominant party to control that self-interest and to keep their subordinates in their proper place.^[38]

While Abdur Rahman is consistently scathing in his comments on court officials, the tone of most of his statements tends to the sardonic and rueful rather than censorious and damning. Since they are not his equals, court officials are not as much to blame for their actions as those who empower, and thereby ruin, them. The same cannot be said of members of his own family who follow the path of self-interested treachery. Among this number the one who stands out is Abdur Rahman's paternal cousin—his tarbur—Ishaq Khan, whose rebellion in 1888 was the most serious challenge Abdur Rahman faced during his reign. As the story of Sultan Muhammad illustrated, paternal cousins are perennial rivals and, under the right circumstances, can become the most vicious of enemies. But because they are the closest of kin, they also share in one another's honor, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to Abdur Rahman's belittlement of his “disloyal and traitorous cousin” as “an illegitimate child of Mir Azim, my uncle, and his mother was an Armenian Christian girl, who was one of the women in the harem, and not one of my uncle's wives.”^[39] Following the traditional pattern of attributing the bad character of a rival to the defects of his parent, Abdur Rahman reminds his reader of the many services he had rendered for both his uncle and his cousin and then notes: “These kindnesses were all forgotten, and my readers can form their opinion of the ingratitude of Ishak. It must also be remembered that all the mischief caused in our family was from the hands of Mir Azim, who made my father and Shere Ali enemies to each other. The same love of mischief-making was in the nature of Azim's son, Ishak, and was sure to show itself sooner or later.”^[40]

The first of the cousin's sins is the betrayal of an oath (“signed and sealed by Mahomed Ishak” in a Qur’an) according to which he offered his cousin “loyalty, sincerity, and allegiance.”^[41] Trusting the veracity of this oath, the Amir placed complete trust in the younger cousin and, upon appointing him as his viceroy and governor in Turkistan, instructed his other governors and officers to “look upon Mahomed Ishak Khan at all times as my brother and son.” For his part, Ishaq Khan sent frequent missives to Kabul assuring the Amir of “his obedience and faithfulness” and always addressed his cousin “as a most sincere son and obedient servant would address his father and master. He signed his letters, `Your slave and humble servant, Mahomed Ishak.' ”^[42]

Abdur Rahman claims that throughout the period preceding Muhammad Ishaq's rebellion, he continued to supply his cousin with the best armaments available to help him defend the northern border and repeatedly dispatched additional funds to augment the revenues he obtained locally so that he would always be able to pay his troops and meet his other expenses. The son proved “as false as his father,” however, for all the while that he was receiving aid from Kabul, he was “collecting gold and guns, making secret preparations, and intriguing against me.”^[43] The ultimate sign of Ishaq's falsehood was his adoption of the guise of “a holy saint and a very virtuous strict Muslim” in order to lure the people of Turkistan to his cause:

He would get up early in the small hours of the morning to attend prayers in the mosque, a procedure which misled one portion of the Mahomedans, namely, the mullahs, who only care for those people who say long prayers and keep fasts without taking their actions into account.…The second deceit that Ishak practiced upon the uneducated Mahomedans was that in addition to being an ecclesiastical leader and mullah, he entered into the group of the disciples of one of the Dervishes of the Nakhshbandis.^[44]

According to Abdur Rahman, all of these exertions were no more than a ruse to entrap the gullible Turkman people into supporting Ishaq Khan's cause, but he went even further than this into the realm of blasphemy when, after the commencement of his revolt, he undertook to strike his own coins and placed upon them an invocation that placed himself in the syntactical position reserved for the Prophet Mohammad himself: “ `Lâ illah Amir Mahomed Ishak Khan' (There is no God but one, and Mahomed Ishak Khan is His Amir).”^[45] Through these various deceits, Ishaq Khan is able to field an army even greater than Abdur Rahman's own, but in the end, he is undone by his own cowardice and the will of God: “Though the enemy's forces were at first victorious, and my army was defeated, yet still, as it was the wish of God that I should continue to be the ruler of the flock of His creation—His people of Afghanistan—the enemy fled, and the victory was in my hands.”^[46] Thus ingratitude receives its just reward, thus the man of impure ancestry and improper ambition meets his preordained end.

While all ingratitude is bound to receive the punishment it deserves, Abdur Rahman is quick to assume responsibility for expediting this process whenever possible—and in ways that ensure that others will take note. One such instance crops up early in the narrative and involves a group of bandits that had been posing as merchants so as to prey on traders traveling the road between Badakhshan and Kataghan:

On questioning these men, they owned they had acted as highwaymen for the past two years, owing to the contempt in which they held the Afghans, and although they offered 2000 rupees per head to purchase their lives, I ordered them all to be blown from the guns, as they had committed many crimes on my unoffending people. This punishment was carried out on market day, so that their flesh should be eaten by the dogs of the camp, and their bones remain lying about till the festival was over.^[47]

Blowing criminals from the mouths of cannons was a common form of execution under the Iron Amir. So too was the expedient of hanging highwaymen in cages by the side of the road so that their bleached bones would serve as a deterrent to all those who might consider banditry a desirable career path.^[48] On several occasions, the Amir also chose the less thunderous, but no less effective route of public humiliation, particularly with local potentates or religious leaders who chose to defy his authority. Such was the case of a Badakhshani chief who demanded that Abdur Rahman release the merchant/highwaymen who had been causing him so much trouble. Unbeknownst to the local chief, the bandits were already dead, but Abdur Rahman nevertheless decided to teach the chief a lesson through the instrument of his messenger: “Without further conversation I ordered my servants to pull out his beard and moustache, and to dye his eyebrows like a woman's. I then took him to the place where the remains of the merchants lay, and put his beard and moustache in a gold cloth, advising him to take it to his Mir, both as a caution, and as a reply to the letter he had written me.”^[49]

One of the more grandiloquent of the Amir's various punishments was the construction of towers made from the skulls of rebels who rose up against the government. On at least three such occasions, the Amir had towers built “to strike fear into the hearts of those still alive.”^[50] As dramatic as this gesture was, however, it was by no means extraordinary, for the Amir confessed without apparent compunction or compassion to having executed 120,000 people during his life. Those who were most likely to incur the Amir's wrath were, of course, those who rebelled against his authority, but even the most ordinary of criminal acts was viewed as treasonous and liable to exemplary, if not summary, justice. This can be seen in the following description penned by Lord Curzon after his visit to Kabul:

Crimes such as robbery or rape were punished with fiendish severity. Men were blown from guns, or thrown down a dark well, or beaten to death, or flayed alive, or tortured in the offending member. For instance, one of the favourite penalties for petty larceny was to amputate the hand at the wrist, the raw stump being then plunged into boiling oil. One official who had outraged a woman was stripped naked and placed in a hole dug for the purpose on the top of a high hill outside Kabul. It was in mid-winter; and water was then poured upon him until he was converted into an icicle and frozen alive. As the Amir sardonically remarked, “He would never be too hot again.”^[51]

British writers of the time (perhaps no more than those who quote them) were fond of citing examples of Oriental violence and cruelty, but Curzon at least was equally quick to rationalize this behavior in relation to the difficulty of exercising rule in this corner of the globe.^[52] The Afghan, Curzon wrote, is “one of the most turbulent people in the world by force alike of his character and of arms.” Whereas “no previous sovereign had ever ridden the wild Afghan steed with so cruel a bit, none had given so large a measure of unity to the kingdom” as had Abdur Rahman.^[53] In like manner, Abdur Rahman asked those who condemned the harshness of his rule to compare the state of the kingdom at the close of the nineteenth century with the situation that existed twenty years earlier when he took power or even with the situation that existed across the border in the British-controlled tribal districts, where “nobody can move a step without being protected by a strong body-guard.”^[54]

In Afghanistan, according to the Amir, “persons possessing great riches and wealth can travel safely throughout my dominions, by night as well as by day.” The hired robbers and thieves that had preyed on travelers in the past were gone. Merchants could pass unmolested on the roads, and in towns and villages throughout the country people could count on a degree of security and courts of redress to prevent the tyrannical excesses and lawlessness that had kept the country in a state of continuous alarm. Perhaps his was a reign of terror, but from Abdur Rahman's point of view the terror he directed was aimed solely at the ungrateful few—be they bandits, rebels, or local despots—who threatened the order and stability of the nation. Whatever their identity and whatever their crime, it was these criminals who disturbed the security of the realm and they alone who broke the covenant ordained by God and upheld by His Amir.