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M Jamil Hanifi is an Afghan anthropologist that is well known for his academic work on Afghanistan:
http://afghanistan-analyst.org/mjhanifi.aspx
He wrote this explosive and well cited article on the history of the loya jirga and actually provides some interesting information about the Ahmad Shah Abdali loya jirga. Needless to say, in light of Karzai Bibi's recent jirga, its worth a read. It was written well before this recent jirga
http://zeroanthropology.net/all-post...n-afghanistan/
I think Dr. Hanifi's work here is original and well referenced. However, it must be admitted for the sake of honesty that Dr. Hanifi was found guilty of plagiarism by the University in Illinoise where he was poised to become a Chairman decades ago. This led to his resignation and a subsequent course case.
However, recent court cases involving nearly the exact same infractions done by a professor Poshard makes one wonder about what criteria the university utilized to dismiss Hanifi, but let Poshard off the hook?:
http://rankingwatch.blogspot.com/200...1_archive.html
Moreover, this current essay under discussion is well referenced to the primary persian sources.
Here is the paragraph I found the most interesting in light of history from the article under discussion:
"To critically understand the origin and dynamics of the Loya Jerga it is first necessary to address how European writers, and the Afghan intellectual elite and monarchy during the past two centuries, have located the Afghan state and its founder in one 1747 historical event. That event is widely viewed as the model for the structure and conduct of the Loya Jerga at the disposal of the Afghan government at times of major crises. Essentially, the Loya Jerga is a framework in which the Afghan state has adopted distortions of Western ideas of popular representation in the government and have attached to them Paxtu labels. The Loya Jerga has functioned to confirm the legitimacy of the ruler, his government, and their policies and actions. In reality, little about the Afghan monarchy was tribal or Paxtun, and nothing about the Loya Jerga was meaningfully representative of the people of Afghanistan or of free, open, and uninhibited debate about the issues facing the state. Since 1922 there have been eleven Loya Jergas convoked in Afghanistan and all nine constitutions of the country during this period have been produced by these assemblies. Only the 1924 assembly has left us a published and relatively comprehensive record of its proceedings.(8) This essay will provide a critical discussion of this record followed by an overview of how the Afghan state has continued to reinforce, promote, and manipulate this hegemonic apparatus over the last 85 years in the absence of free and democratically elected parliamentary institutions. But first, let us briefly address the ethnographic meaning and location of Jerga, the local Paxtun sodality for conflict resolution, from which the concept Loya Jerga is adapted."
He goes on to note:
" However, Afghan nationalist writers like Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar18 and Mohammad ’Alam Faiz-zad.(19) insist that the Loya Jerga, as a feature of central government in Afghanistan, dates back to pre-Islamic times. An intellectual of the Afghan diaspora in North America claims that a “great Afghan Loya Jirga [was] convened by EmperorKanishka a little less than two thousand years ago.”(20) There is no historical or archaeological evidence in support of these claims, however. There is no record of assemblies or councils or other specifically named representative bodies that the government convened or with which the rulers of Afghanistan consulted prior to 1922. Ghobar, the most prominent twentieth-century Afghan historian, writes that Amir Sher Ali (r.1863–1866 and 1868–1879) convened a “Loya Jerga”21 in 1866. But the source he quotes mentions a “majles” (gathering),(22) not a Jerga or a Loya Jerga. And Hasan Kawun Kakar, a British-trained Afghan historian of nineteenth-century Afghanistan writes of the convening of three Loya Jergas during the reign of Amir ’Abd al-Rahman (r.1880–1901).(23) He offers no documentation in support of this claim. Likewise, Louis Dupree claims that ’Abd al-Rahman “appointed a General Assembly (Loya Jirgah) which included three groups of the Afghan citizens: certain Sardars (princes) of the royal family; important khans or khawanin-i mulki in the rural power elite, from different parts of the country; the religious leaders from whom, however, he brooked no opposition.”(24) Like Kakar, Dupree does not offer any evidence in support of this important assertion
In regard to the founder stories that were written in the back of all our parent's textbooks:
"The label Loya Jerga as invented by the governments of Afghanistan in 1922 is derived from the colonial reconstruction of events in 1747 surrounding the rise of Ahmad Khan Abdali (r. 1747–1772) to political prominence–the foundational moment of the Afghan monarchy. These events are originally variously described in several local Persian chronicles of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Ahmad Khan was a former officer in the court of Nader Shah Afshar, who, subsequent to the latter’s assassination, found himself ruler of an extensive territory from which Afghanistan was later carved out in the late nineteenth century. A succession of lineal and collateral descendants of Ahmad Khan governed Afghanistan until 1978.
Ahmad Khan, the legendary founder of the Afghan state, was allegedly elected by consensus and crowned king of Afghanistan in 1747, according to texts produced by the Afghan government and intellectuals and popular ideas about the tribal assembly in which the event occurred. These accounts are inspired by various whimsical European representations of local Persian chronicles. The earliest and most comprehensive pre-colonial account of Ahmad Khan’s rise to political power is provided in a chronicle written during 1753–1774 by Mahmud al-Hosaini al-Munshi ibn Ibrahem al-Jami, the court historian of Ahmad Khan Abdali.(28) This account makes no mention of an organized assembly in which the election and coronation of Ahmad Khan took place. Nor is there any mention of the acts of election or coronation per se. Hosaini’s narrative clearly states that during a gathering in Qandahar in 1747, Saber, a mendicant, placed blades of green grass, giyah-e sabz(29) on Ahmad Khan’s cap and proclaimed him king. This mendicant had earlier foretold that Ahmad Khan would become king after Nader Shah Afshar’s death. Hosaini writes, not of consensus, but of much violence surrounding the accession of Ahmad Khan including armed conflict between his supporters and opponents and the trampling to death by elephants of his major detractors.(30) There are several variations of Hosaini’s account of Ahmad Khan’s rise to political leadership in late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century chronicles. Like Hosaini’s narrative, these accounts do not mention coronation, election, consensus, Afghanistan, Paxtuns, or Loya Jerga.(31)
As mentioned above, European colonial writers have converted these local narratives of the event of Ahmad Khan’s accession to power into a variety of whimsical, orientalist portrayals. Here are a few samples of these representations. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the earliest of these colonial authors, writes that “[I]n October 1747 [Ahmad Khan] was crowned: Dooraunee, Kuzzulbaush, Beloches, and Hazaurah chiefs are mentioned as assisting at the coronation.”(32) Writing in 1852 James Fraser repeats Elphinstone’s distortion: “Ahmed . . . assumed the ensigns of royalty at Candahar, in the month of October, 1747, the Dooranee, Kuzzilbash, Beloches, and Hazara chiefs assisting in his coronation.”(33) Joseph Pierre Ferrier, a French traveler who visited Afghanistan during 1844–1845 states that the mendicant “took a handful of barley from an adjoining field, and having formed it into a wreath, placed it on the head of Ahmed Khan, adding, ‘and may this serve as your diadem’ . . . Ahmed Khan, who took the title of Shah, was crowned in the mosque at Kandahar towards the end of 1747. The ceremony of his coronation was of the most simple kind: the Mollah of the highest rank poured a measure of wheat on the head of the new monarch, announcing to the assembled Afghans that he was the chosen of God and the nation.”(34) Henry George Raverty, the most prolific English colonial writer on Afghanistan, confirms what his predecessor’s have invented: “In October of the same year (1747), Ahmad, . . . assumed the title of Shah or King of Afghanistan, and was crowned at Kandahar, with great pomp, the different chiefs of the various Afghan tribes, with but few exceptions, and the Kazalbashes, Baluchis, and Hazarahs, assisting.”(35) Other European colonial writers have followed suit: Ahmad Khan was “crowned King of the Afghans at Kandahar in October 1747”;(36) the mendicant produced “a tiny sheaf of wheat, and placing it in..
“The ‘founder’ of the country, Ahmad Shah Abdali, took a religious title after he was ‘crowned’ amir by a notable religious authority, and every other ruler after him similarly claimed a special Islamic title (at least until 1973).”(46)
"This version of the accession of Ahmad Khan to the kingship of Afghanistan was included in many government cultural productions including the history textbook written by M. Osman Sedqi for grade 12 of Afghan high schools.(93) The Persian language textbook was first published in 1949 and was in use, at least through 1954, when I graduated from Ghazi High School. Sedqi was a member of Anjuman-e Tarikh (Persian: Historical Society), one of two successors."
and last but not least:
"The prospects of a stable, independent, and democratically reconstituted Afghan state depend on how successfully loyal and devoted daughters and sons of Afghanistan can dissociate its architecture from the falsehood of its democratic past. The Afghan people need to be informed about the reality of the colonial construction of their political past and the hegemonic device of the Loya Jerga with which their consent was extorted from them by the Kabul government. They need to become conscious of the fact that their rulers have been the facilitators of the profound dependence of their country on others. Foremost, Afghans need to know that they have inherited a past that has been heavily edited by colonial ink and capital. The fragility of the Afghan state is directly related to its dependence on outside resources, the whimsical portrayals of others, and to the way Afghans themselves have been deluded by these fabricated representations. The twelve Loya Jergas and nine different constitutions over the last 85 years are symptoms of extreme instability. Outsiders have played a profound role in the construction of the Afghan state. They have constructed the very labels “Afghan” and “Afghanistan”; in essence, the Loya Jerga is a colonial and neocolonial construct imposed on the people of Afghanistan by rulers who were and continue to be undisputed puppets of outsiders."
http://afghanistan-analyst.org/mjhanifi.aspx
He wrote this explosive and well cited article on the history of the loya jirga and actually provides some interesting information about the Ahmad Shah Abdali loya jirga. Needless to say, in light of Karzai Bibi's recent jirga, its worth a read. It was written well before this recent jirga
http://zeroanthropology.net/all-post...n-afghanistan/
I think Dr. Hanifi's work here is original and well referenced. However, it must be admitted for the sake of honesty that Dr. Hanifi was found guilty of plagiarism by the University in Illinoise where he was poised to become a Chairman decades ago. This led to his resignation and a subsequent course case.
However, recent court cases involving nearly the exact same infractions done by a professor Poshard makes one wonder about what criteria the university utilized to dismiss Hanifi, but let Poshard off the hook?:
http://rankingwatch.blogspot.com/200...1_archive.html
Moreover, this current essay under discussion is well referenced to the primary persian sources.
Here is the paragraph I found the most interesting in light of history from the article under discussion:
"To critically understand the origin and dynamics of the Loya Jerga it is first necessary to address how European writers, and the Afghan intellectual elite and monarchy during the past two centuries, have located the Afghan state and its founder in one 1747 historical event. That event is widely viewed as the model for the structure and conduct of the Loya Jerga at the disposal of the Afghan government at times of major crises. Essentially, the Loya Jerga is a framework in which the Afghan state has adopted distortions of Western ideas of popular representation in the government and have attached to them Paxtu labels. The Loya Jerga has functioned to confirm the legitimacy of the ruler, his government, and their policies and actions. In reality, little about the Afghan monarchy was tribal or Paxtun, and nothing about the Loya Jerga was meaningfully representative of the people of Afghanistan or of free, open, and uninhibited debate about the issues facing the state. Since 1922 there have been eleven Loya Jergas convoked in Afghanistan and all nine constitutions of the country during this period have been produced by these assemblies. Only the 1924 assembly has left us a published and relatively comprehensive record of its proceedings.(8) This essay will provide a critical discussion of this record followed by an overview of how the Afghan state has continued to reinforce, promote, and manipulate this hegemonic apparatus over the last 85 years in the absence of free and democratically elected parliamentary institutions. But first, let us briefly address the ethnographic meaning and location of Jerga, the local Paxtun sodality for conflict resolution, from which the concept Loya Jerga is adapted."
He goes on to note:
" However, Afghan nationalist writers like Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar18 and Mohammad ’Alam Faiz-zad.(19) insist that the Loya Jerga, as a feature of central government in Afghanistan, dates back to pre-Islamic times. An intellectual of the Afghan diaspora in North America claims that a “great Afghan Loya Jirga [was] convened by EmperorKanishka a little less than two thousand years ago.”(20) There is no historical or archaeological evidence in support of these claims, however. There is no record of assemblies or councils or other specifically named representative bodies that the government convened or with which the rulers of Afghanistan consulted prior to 1922. Ghobar, the most prominent twentieth-century Afghan historian, writes that Amir Sher Ali (r.1863–1866 and 1868–1879) convened a “Loya Jerga”21 in 1866. But the source he quotes mentions a “majles” (gathering),(22) not a Jerga or a Loya Jerga. And Hasan Kawun Kakar, a British-trained Afghan historian of nineteenth-century Afghanistan writes of the convening of three Loya Jergas during the reign of Amir ’Abd al-Rahman (r.1880–1901).(23) He offers no documentation in support of this claim. Likewise, Louis Dupree claims that ’Abd al-Rahman “appointed a General Assembly (Loya Jirgah) which included three groups of the Afghan citizens: certain Sardars (princes) of the royal family; important khans or khawanin-i mulki in the rural power elite, from different parts of the country; the religious leaders from whom, however, he brooked no opposition.”(24) Like Kakar, Dupree does not offer any evidence in support of this important assertion
In regard to the founder stories that were written in the back of all our parent's textbooks:
"The label Loya Jerga as invented by the governments of Afghanistan in 1922 is derived from the colonial reconstruction of events in 1747 surrounding the rise of Ahmad Khan Abdali (r. 1747–1772) to political prominence–the foundational moment of the Afghan monarchy. These events are originally variously described in several local Persian chronicles of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Ahmad Khan was a former officer in the court of Nader Shah Afshar, who, subsequent to the latter’s assassination, found himself ruler of an extensive territory from which Afghanistan was later carved out in the late nineteenth century. A succession of lineal and collateral descendants of Ahmad Khan governed Afghanistan until 1978.
Ahmad Khan, the legendary founder of the Afghan state, was allegedly elected by consensus and crowned king of Afghanistan in 1747, according to texts produced by the Afghan government and intellectuals and popular ideas about the tribal assembly in which the event occurred. These accounts are inspired by various whimsical European representations of local Persian chronicles. The earliest and most comprehensive pre-colonial account of Ahmad Khan’s rise to political power is provided in a chronicle written during 1753–1774 by Mahmud al-Hosaini al-Munshi ibn Ibrahem al-Jami, the court historian of Ahmad Khan Abdali.(28) This account makes no mention of an organized assembly in which the election and coronation of Ahmad Khan took place. Nor is there any mention of the acts of election or coronation per se. Hosaini’s narrative clearly states that during a gathering in Qandahar in 1747, Saber, a mendicant, placed blades of green grass, giyah-e sabz(29) on Ahmad Khan’s cap and proclaimed him king. This mendicant had earlier foretold that Ahmad Khan would become king after Nader Shah Afshar’s death. Hosaini writes, not of consensus, but of much violence surrounding the accession of Ahmad Khan including armed conflict between his supporters and opponents and the trampling to death by elephants of his major detractors.(30) There are several variations of Hosaini’s account of Ahmad Khan’s rise to political leadership in late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century chronicles. Like Hosaini’s narrative, these accounts do not mention coronation, election, consensus, Afghanistan, Paxtuns, or Loya Jerga.(31)
As mentioned above, European colonial writers have converted these local narratives of the event of Ahmad Khan’s accession to power into a variety of whimsical, orientalist portrayals. Here are a few samples of these representations. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the earliest of these colonial authors, writes that “[I]n October 1747 [Ahmad Khan] was crowned: Dooraunee, Kuzzulbaush, Beloches, and Hazaurah chiefs are mentioned as assisting at the coronation.”(32) Writing in 1852 James Fraser repeats Elphinstone’s distortion: “Ahmed . . . assumed the ensigns of royalty at Candahar, in the month of October, 1747, the Dooranee, Kuzzilbash, Beloches, and Hazara chiefs assisting in his coronation.”(33) Joseph Pierre Ferrier, a French traveler who visited Afghanistan during 1844–1845 states that the mendicant “took a handful of barley from an adjoining field, and having formed it into a wreath, placed it on the head of Ahmed Khan, adding, ‘and may this serve as your diadem’ . . . Ahmed Khan, who took the title of Shah, was crowned in the mosque at Kandahar towards the end of 1747. The ceremony of his coronation was of the most simple kind: the Mollah of the highest rank poured a measure of wheat on the head of the new monarch, announcing to the assembled Afghans that he was the chosen of God and the nation.”(34) Henry George Raverty, the most prolific English colonial writer on Afghanistan, confirms what his predecessor’s have invented: “In October of the same year (1747), Ahmad, . . . assumed the title of Shah or King of Afghanistan, and was crowned at Kandahar, with great pomp, the different chiefs of the various Afghan tribes, with but few exceptions, and the Kazalbashes, Baluchis, and Hazarahs, assisting.”(35) Other European colonial writers have followed suit: Ahmad Khan was “crowned King of the Afghans at Kandahar in October 1747”;(36) the mendicant produced “a tiny sheaf of wheat, and placing it in..
“The ‘founder’ of the country, Ahmad Shah Abdali, took a religious title after he was ‘crowned’ amir by a notable religious authority, and every other ruler after him similarly claimed a special Islamic title (at least until 1973).”(46)
"This version of the accession of Ahmad Khan to the kingship of Afghanistan was included in many government cultural productions including the history textbook written by M. Osman Sedqi for grade 12 of Afghan high schools.(93) The Persian language textbook was first published in 1949 and was in use, at least through 1954, when I graduated from Ghazi High School. Sedqi was a member of Anjuman-e Tarikh (Persian: Historical Society), one of two successors."
and last but not least:
"The prospects of a stable, independent, and democratically reconstituted Afghan state depend on how successfully loyal and devoted daughters and sons of Afghanistan can dissociate its architecture from the falsehood of its democratic past. The Afghan people need to be informed about the reality of the colonial construction of their political past and the hegemonic device of the Loya Jerga with which their consent was extorted from them by the Kabul government. They need to become conscious of the fact that their rulers have been the facilitators of the profound dependence of their country on others. Foremost, Afghans need to know that they have inherited a past that has been heavily edited by colonial ink and capital. The fragility of the Afghan state is directly related to its dependence on outside resources, the whimsical portrayals of others, and to the way Afghans themselves have been deluded by these fabricated representations. The twelve Loya Jergas and nine different constitutions over the last 85 years are symptoms of extreme instability. Outsiders have played a profound role in the construction of the Afghan state. They have constructed the very labels “Afghan” and “Afghanistan”; in essence, the Loya Jerga is a colonial and neocolonial construct imposed on the people of Afghanistan by rulers who were and continue to be undisputed puppets of outsiders."
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