The conquest of Balkh in 708–9 marked the beginning of the Umayyad caliphate’s control over the lands that are today Afghanistan.¹ Some of the people of Afghanistan rebelled against the new Damascus-based overlords. Others joined the militias that in 749 enabled the rival ‘Abbasid caliphs to take over from the Umayyads. By the ninth century, the city of Balkh was being canonized as the Dome of Islam and its Muslim intellectuals memorialized as saints with sanctuaries deeply intertwined with the Islamic identity of their city of burial. How could the Islamic caliphate become so firmly embedded in classical and...

This chapter sheds light on the foundational Timurid period in Afghan history during the fifteenth century, which saw important and enduring religious institutions founded in the capital city of Herat and other urban centers.¹ The chapter focuses on how Timurid women of the ruling class patronized religious architecture with their own private funds. The most audacious of these female patrons was Queen Gawhar Shad, the wife and consort of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405–47), who spent a decade as de-facto ruler of the Timurid Empire after arranging the coronation of her young grandson upon her husband’s death in...

Timurid rule in Herat spans the fifteenth century.¹ From the time of Shahrukh ibn Timur (r. 1405–47) onward, the city was the capital of an empire that comprised large parts of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Although under Husayn Bayqara (r. 1470–1506) toward the end of the century, Timurid territory shrank considerably, Bayqara still ruled over Khurasan and some adjacent regions. Two more Timurid sultans must be mentioned from the start: Abu’l-Qasim Babur (d. 1457), who succeeded in winning the wars beginning after Shahrukh’s demise, and Abu Sa‘id (d. 1469) who ascended the throne, again, after some years...

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like other periods in Islamic history, were critical to the promotion, preservation, and advancement of Islamic culture in Central Asia. This chapter provides an overview of the process of transmitting and transforming religious culture during this period, with emphasis on how the material aspects were organized and exploited. The chapter draws on a sample of contemporary works that focus on the lives of notable individuals who contributed to the process of advancing the Islamic tradition—absorbing it, studying it, teaching it, and trying to earn a living from it. These works are more or less...

The Durrani period, between 1747 and 1823, is often discounted as an ephemeral Afghan imperial interregnum. Yet it had a decisive impact on shaping the intellectual and sacred landscape of South and Central Asia. As cities such as Kabul and Peshawar were revitalized by Durrani rule in the mid-eighteenth century, Hindustan’s centers of commercial and intellectual gravity gradually shifted westward.¹ These burgeoning Afghan imperial capitals attracted Sufis and‘ulamafrom Hindustan, eventually becoming fulcrums of reoriented intellectual-exchange circuits. The khanaqahs, shrines, and madrasas that made up these circuits provided instruction in an ensemble of esoteric and exoteric Islamic sciences.² These...

In July 1880, ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880–1901) became the new amir of Afghanistan thanks to his own resourcefulness, some measure of luck, and the assistance of both the Russian and the British empires. His life experience had prepared him for the “Great Game” that he was entering, and the new amir seems to have fully understood the position of the political entity he was ruling over. ‘Abd al-Rahman’s Afghanistan was to serve as a buffer, or in the amir’s own terminology, “a curtain,” between the Asiatic colonies of Britain and Russia.¹ As an active player in the Anglo-Russian...

In 1914, Husayn Ahmad Madani (1879–1957) and ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi (1872–1944), two members of the Dar al-‘Ulum madrasa, at Deoband, in northern India, proposed that the Pashtun tribe represented the ideal of a Muslim society and could steer the fate of the Indian Muslim nation. They called for ajihadin the Indian northwest supported both by nationalist Indians and members of the Afghan court. Although it received a great deal of attention from the colonial authorities, this short-lived movement failed to accomplish anything. Moreover, through attention to treatment of the principle of tribalism in other vernacular Urdu and...

Wish Zalmiyan, the “Awaken Youth” Party (AYP), was the first political party to operate openly in Afghanistan. Emerging in the late 1940s soon after World War II, it enjoyed support from the intelligentsia and the tacit approval of a monarchical regime hostile to any oppositional voice. The AYP’s emergence depicts the stage that political development had reached in Afghanistan, as well as the political rhetoric of the opposition and the government between 1947 and 1953. Nationalism and constitutionalism made up the backbone of the AYP’s ideology. The AYP was the first political party to openly advocate these goals. Although they...

The Afghanjihadof the 1980s and early 1990s is often seen through the exclusive lens of geopolitical manipulation and shrewd strategic jockeying. The United States, European nations, and Saudi Arabia channeled massive funds and sophisticated military equipment to the Afghan theater of war in order to secure their specific and not necessarily overlapping agendas. Pakistan also pursued its own goals by recognizing only certain supposedly official Afghan parties and by schooling a generation ofmujahidinaround Peshawar and the country’s tribal areas.¹ Amid all these machinations, it seems, the leaders of the Afghan groups (many of whom were trained...

By both the local population and in Afghanistan more widely, northern Afghanistan is considered the “holiest soil on Earth.” Not only are the famous seventy-twoMasha’ikh-i Balkh(Shaykhs of Balkh) interred there. So are thousands of other saintly persons who lived and died in the area over the centuries in a process of regional sanctification whose earliest stages are described in Arezou Azad’s chapter in this volume. Any study of the particularities of a given sanctuary reduces the research gap concerning “spatially distinctive cultural traditions of Islamic populations” in local contexts of saint cult and pilgrimage (as opposed to the...

Thekhana-yi aman, often translated as “shelter” or literally “home of peace,” is a form of safe house in Afghanistan that was instituted to host women who are undergoing criminal trials for sexual transgressions or moral misconducts and who are on their way to or from prison. Thekhana-yi amanis one of the first institutions in post-Taliban Afghanistan to allow women to access the public without a male supporter and to register their protests without the threat of immediate retaliation. It is an exceptional space where women designated as promiscuous or adulterous wait to die or to be circulated...