Mariam & Ashraf Ghani E-Book

Ashraf Ghani

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: E-Books
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 110

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In the form of a lexicon, artist Mariam Ghani describes, together with her father, the renowned anthropologist and political scientist Ashraf Ghani, the cycle of repeated collapse and recovery that Afghanistan has undergone over the course of the twentieth century. The lexicon comprises seventy-one mostly illustrated terms that include central figures and places, words that carry a specific (political) meaning in the Afghan context, and entries on recurring events and defining themes. The notebook's point of departure is a detailed reflection on the reign of King Amanullah Khan (1919–29), whose successes and failures yielded a model for reformers who succeeded him. These thoughts are followed by a series of terms related to, among other things, Dar ul-Aman Palace, now a ruin, which was part of Amanullah's design for a "new city," and which characterized—as a space of exception, a center of conflict, a prototype for future plans, and a symbol of past failures—twentieth-century Afghan planning policy. Mariam Ghani (*1978) is an artist based in New York and Kabul. Ashraf Ghani (*1949), author of Fixing Failed States (in English) and A Window to a Just Order (in Dari and Pashtu), lives in Kabul.   Language: English

Leseprobe

100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken

Nº029: Mariam & Ashraf Ghani

Afghanistan: A Lexicon

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012

Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Member of Core Agent Group, Head of Department /

Mitglied der Agenten-Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez

Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke

Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer

Editorial Assistant / Redaktionsassistentin: Cordelia Marten

English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Melissa Larner

English Proofreading / Englisches Korrektorat: Sam Frank

Graphic Design / Grafische Gestaltung: Leftloft

Production / Verlagsherstellung: Christine Emter

E-Book Implementation / E-Book-Produktion: LVD GmbH, Berlin

© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;

Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Ashraf Ghani; Mariam Ghani

Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Dar ul-Aman Palace, 2010 (detail / Detail), © Mariam Ghani; all other images: see image credits p. 47 / alle anderen Abbildungen: siehe Bildnachweis S. 47

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ISBN 978-3-7757-3058-7 (E-Book)

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Mariam & Ashraf GhaniAfghanistan: A Lexicon*

(*selective; associative; may include myth, speculation, and rumor as well as facts)

Afghanistan: A Lexicon* uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries. The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, likebi-tarafi,jirga, andnizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” andspetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, like constitutions, coup d’état, exile, fire, invasion, opposites, reform, unfinished, and vanishing. The lexicon begins with a close reading of the reign of King Amanullah (1919–29), whose successes and failures set the pattern for subsequent Afghan reformers. Amanullah’s influence is followed through, among other things, a series of entries linked to his Dar ul-Aman Palace and the larger plan for a “new city” of which it was a part, tracing how Dar ul-Aman shapes the spatial politics of the twentieth century—as space of exception, site of contention, prototype for future plans, and symbol of past failures.

Amanullah

Amanullah ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, first as amir and then, after he changed his own title, as king. During his brief reign, Amanullah launched an ambitious program of modernization from above, which was cut off prematurely by a revolt from below. After inheriting autocratic power built through immense repression by his grandfather Abdur Rahman, who had reigned from 1880 to 1901, and his father, Habibullah, who had ruled from 1901 to 1919, he attempted to turn that power toward transforming the organization of both state and society. His manyreformsincluded promulgating rule of law through Afghanistan’s firstconstitutionand the wide-ranging regulations of thenizamnamah; investing in education through literacy programs, study abroad, and the building of primary, secondary, and technical schools; promoting unveiling and the end of purdah (the separation of women from society); encouraging intellectual exchange by fostering an active press, literary societies, and archaeological missions; transforming the traditional institution of theLoyaJirga,or Grand Council, into a mechanism for public consultation; winning Afghanistan’sindependencefrom Britain, and forging new relationships with Europe and the Soviet Union; and large-scale urbanplanning, represented in theory by the regulations for Laghman, Paghman, andDar ul-Amanand in practice by the partial completion of the “new city” of Dar ul-Aman, just to the west of Kabul.

While he accomplished a remarkable amount during his ten years in power, Amanullah did not succeed in permanently changing Afghanistan, since his ultimate failure to forge a broad political consensus for his reforms left him vulnerable to rural rebellion. After returning from a prolonged European tour, he attempted to speed up modernization by arguing for more radical reforms in a marathon speech at a 1928Loya Jirga, after which his previous base of support among the elite was fractured, fragmented, and finally weakened beyond repair. In 1929, a relatively minor revolt (possibly fomented by British agents and factions of the divided elite) forced Amanullah out of the capital and ultimately intoexile, and put into power a newdynastythat reversed many of his most innovative initiatives. Amanullah spent the rest of his life in Europe, where he brooded over what had gone wrong. Both his reforms and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan modernizers, who have returned again and again to hisunfinishedproject, only to succumb to their own blind spots and collapse in their own ways.

Arg

In the revolt of 1929, much of the fighting took place around the Arg, the palace built byAmanullah’s grandfather Abdur Rahman after the fall of theBala Hissar. When Habibullah Kalakani and his rebels took Kabul from Amanullah and when Habibullah was overthrown, scant months later, by Nadir Khan and his Musahiban brothers, the scenes of conflict centered around theArg. Amanullah’s new city ofDar ul-Amanand its new royal palace were (perhaps because they were situated outside the city center) left out of the conflict entirely. When Nadir became the new king, Amanullah’splansto move into the new city and the never-quite-completedTajbeg, or Queen’s Palace, were scrapped, and the royal family retreated behind the walls and gates of the Arg. Today, the president occupies the Arg, and its gates are further reinforced by a system of concrete blocks and barricades, checkpoints, and scanners. The Arg is in one of contemporary Kabul’s no-photo zones, the military and diplomatic quarters where no camera can go, so we must look at it instead as it was in the 1960s, when Zahir Shah was king.

Bacha-i-Saqqao

Habibullah Kalakani or Ghazi, the Tajik who led the rural revolt againstAmanullah, is colloquially known as Bacha-i-Saqqao, or the “son of the water carrier.” Depending on who uses this epithet, it may be meant as an insult or as the title of a folk hero. The distinction may be drawn from the alignment each speaker chooses relative to the photograph shown to the right. Would he have sympathized with the rebels executed by hanging in a public square, or would he have been in the crowd of watchers, applauding with sangfroidor schadenfreudeas the temporary king and his entourage met their deaths?

Bala Hissar

A fortress marks boundaries of exclusion through its walls, gates, and parapets. Both theArgand the Bala Hissar are, to different degrees, fortresses. To reach the actual building inside the boundaries, you must pass through a series of walls with ceremonial gates, while simultaneously traversing a ladder of hierarchies. In the Bala Hissar, these layers of hierarchy were further reinforced by its strategic position on top of the “emerald mountain,” which physically dominates the landscape of the city of Kabul. It was built to withstandsiegesand to support an entirekhanadan, a household or retinue, in the feudal sense—everyone from the lowest to the highest, every hour of the day. The Bala Hissar construes a holder of power who is outside and above the daily affairs of the state, but also confined to the space of the fortress and contracted to its defense. Because the fortress is closed, as a space of power or politics it cannot support a social contract in any modern sense; it implies a legitimacy secured by other means. The fortress itself seems to have beenconstructedand reconstructed through a process of accretion; no exact dates mark the beginnings or stages of its usage. The photograph you see here was taken by John Burke as he accompanied Anglo-Indian army columns deployed in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), during which the Bala Hissar was first occupied and then destroyed by the British.

Bi-tarafi

The foundation of classical Afghan politics,bi-taraficould be translated as “non-aligned,” or as “playing both sides against the middle” in order to gain the greatest advantage or maintain the mostindependence. Afghanistan’sbi-tarafistance in the nineteenth century was derived from its position as the Central Asian buffer state between two imperial powers in the GreatGameof the British and RussianEmpires.Bi-tarafiwas revived in the twentieth century as Afghanistan, particularly under Prime MinisterDaoud, used Cold War competition to bring flows of aid into the country from both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The climax ofbi-tarafimay have been reached when Afghanistan maneuvered the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. into de facto cooperation to build a highway system. The U.S.S.R. built the northern sections, the U.S.A. the southern sections, and they met in the middle. (The Soviets later used the system they built to send tanks south to Kabul in 1979; the tunnels, bridges, androadswere all built to the precise specifications of the Soviet military machine.) Some Afghans believe that Afghanistan was lost at the moment it abandonedbi-tarafi.However, they rarely agree on precisely when that occurred.

Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie, in Afghanistan, has never really overlapped with the “middle class” in any traditional sense, perhaps because Afghanistan still does not really have a middle class. In Afghanistan, the bourgeoisie was not a merchant class that emerged between the aristocracy and the peasantry. Instead, it was a cultural category that emanated fromAmanullah’s royal palace and from the households of the Mohammadzai royal lineage, some of whom had experienced long periods ofexilein India or the OttomanEmpire. Within these households, first men and then women adopted Western dress and what they thought were modern manners. When Amanullah modernized education and professionalized governmentbureaucracy, these styles and habits expanded beyond the original bourgeoisie, theroyal family, to the growing civil service. The bazaar and its merchants, however, largely retained their own cultural forms. One side effect of this condition is that Afghanistan did not have an avant-garde who tried toépater la bourgeoisie, but rather abourgeoisiewho usually managed toépatereveryone else.

Bureaucracy

While theBala Hissartakes advantage of its position overlooking the city to construct itself as a space of domination and hierarchy, theDar ul-AmanPalace is deliberately constructed as a space of intersection and connection. Fourroadslead to the palace, which is slightly elevated on an artificial mound, but whose position is not marked by major natural barriers or hills. Dar ul-Aman’s hierarchy is not based on physical domination; instead, it derives from and depends on bureaucracy. The spatialplanof the building—for example, the separation of rooms by governmental function—is delineated by a series of rules, just asAmanullah’s larger vision for Afghanistan was governed by the rules and procedures of thenizamnamah.Similarly, Dar ul-Aman projects its authority into the open space surrounding it through the contractual order of urban planning rather than the physical fact of fortification. Randomness is removed from the new city, which is made up of straight lines and geometric forms, because themapof this new space precedes its physicalconstruction, and its regulations prohibit deviations from the plans embodied in that map. As both the civil service and the educational systems were modernized and expanded under Amanullah, his regulations simultaneously created the class of bureaucrats that would fill the spaces of the bureaucratic order.

Communists

Just asAmanullahhad an image of the West derived from books and short visits, the Afghan Communists had a bookish vision of Communism mediated through the writings of the Iranian Tudeh Party and the Indian Communists, and expressed through their literary journals,Khalq(The People) andParcham(TheFlag). Both journals died quick deaths under the ambiguously written and ambivalently enforced “Free Press Law” of the 1960s, but bequeathed their names to the two wings of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Their internal rivalry both before and especially after taking power in the “Saur Revolution” of 1978 (named after the month in which it took place) became the driver for a series of bloody assassinations,coups, and purges. Political parties grew in strange ways in twentieth-century Afghanistan, perhaps because they were only ever officially legalized in one-party systems—not unlike the experience of the Soviets who wouldinvadein 1979, carrying their party cards (whose childhood photographs bore mute witness to mandated registration) in their army backpacks.

Constitutions

A constitution, defined as a set of written rules that defines the order of a society, is an idea formulated in eighteenth-century Europe and the U.S. During the twentieth century, this Western idea became nearly universal. In Afghanistan,Amanullah