Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2011
In October 1933, two motorcars drove out of Peshawar towards the Khyber Pass carrying a small delegation of Indian Muslims summoned to meet the Afghan ruler Nadir Shah in Kabul. While Nadir Shah had officially invited the travelers to discuss the expansion of the fledgling university founded a year earlier in Kabul, the Indians brought with them a wealth of experience of the wider world and a vision of the leading role within it of Muslim modernists freed of Western dominance. Small as it was, the delegation could hardly have been more distinguished: it comprised Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), the celebrated philosopher and poet; Sir Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937), the former director of public instruction in Hyderabad and vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University; and Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi (1884–1953), the distinguished biographer and director of the Dar al-Musannifin academy at Azamgarh. The three were traveling to Kabul at the peak of their fame; they were not only famous in individual terms but also represented India's major Muslim movements and institutions of the previous and present generations. Ross Mas‘ud, grandson of the great Muslim modernist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), had fifteen years earlier been the impresario behind the foundation of Osmania University in the princely state of Hyderabad. A decade earlier, Sulayman Nadwi, the heir of the reformist principal of the North Indian Nadwat al-‘Ulama madrasa Shibli Nu‘mani (1857–1914), had been among the leading figures of the pan-Islamist, Khilafat struggle to save the Ottoman caliphate. And eighteen months earlier, Muhammad Iqbal had represented India's Muslims at the Round Table Conference in London that would shape India's route to independence.
1 Repr. in Khān, Sar Sayyid Ahmad, Maktūbāt-e Sar Sayyid, Pānīpatī, Shaykh Muhammad Ismā‘īl, ed. (Lahore: Majlis-e Taraqqī-e Adab, 1959), 39–127Google Scholar.
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5 These reports have been drawn together in the modern account of Jinnah's frontier visits: Jāwīd, ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, Qā’id-e ‘Azam aur Sarhad (Peshawar: Idārah-e Tahqīq wa Tasnīf, 1976)Google Scholar.
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17 Examples of such Urdu gazetteer and historical texts on Afghanistan include the anonymously authored Afghānistān kē Tab‘ī, Jughrāfīyā’ī, Tārīkhī aur Tamadunī Hālāt (Lahore: Khādim al-Ta‘līm Stīm Prēs, 1909)Google Scholar; and Husayn, Mawlwī Sayyid Muhammad, Nayrang-e Afghān (Lucknow: Matba‘ā-e Shām-e Awadh, 1904)Google Scholar.
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20 The fullest account of Tarzi's career is Sīstānī, Muhammad ‘Azam, ‘Allāma Mahmūd Tarzī, Shāh Amān Allāh wa Rūhāniyat-e Mutanaffiz (Peshawar: Kitābkhāna-ye Dānish, 2004), 15–79Google Scholar.
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24 Nizāmī, Khwāja Hasan, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān (Lahore: Ātash Fishān, 2007, repr.)Google Scholar; all subsequent references are to this edition. The text was originally published in journal serial form and in Dihlawī and Shāh, Qadīm ō Jadīd.
25 A short version of the travelogue was first published in volume 10 of the Urdu journal Ma‘ārif (Dec. 1933); and reprinted in Nadwī, Shāh Mu‘īn al-Dīn Ahmad, Hayāt-e Sulaymān: ya‘nī Dāktar ‘Alāma Sayyid Sulaymān Nadwī (rahmatullāh ‘alai-hi) kē Sawānih Hayāt aur ‘Ilmī Kārnāma (Azamgarh: Matba‘a-e Ma‘ārif, 1393/1973), 407–23Google Scholar; and Nawāz, Siyāhat-e Iqbāl, 207–34. Revised in 1944, the complete 140-page travelogue has been republished as: Nadwī, Sayyid Sulaymān, Sayr-e Afghānistān (Lahore: Sang-e Mīl, 2008)Google Scholar. The following discussions draw on this complete edition.
26 Khāksār Nādir ‘Alī, Al-Habīb; and Mawlānā Zāhid al-Qādirī, A‘lā-Hazrat. For further discussion, see Green, “The Afghan Afterlife.”
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29 These are official estimates of numbers, cited in Reetz, Hijrat, 52.
30 Sindhī, Sāt Sāl Kābul men, 37–38, 40.
31 Ibid., 96–102.
32 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 21–23.
33 Ibid., 21.
34 Ibid., 27.
35 Ibid., 21. On these figures, see Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs, 124–25, 234–35.
36 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 41–43.
37 Ibid., 42.
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39 On Kabul's Hindu merchants and older Hindu history, see Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 45–47, 58–59.
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57 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 34.
58 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 32.
59 Sindhī, Sāt Sāl Kābul men, 39.
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61 Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 37.
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72 Ibid., 79–87, 97–98, 99–100, 104–7.
73 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 37.
74 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 64–66; Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 38–43. The school was also known as the Dar al-‘Ulum-e Islami.
75 Nawid, Religious Response, 62–69.
76 The ruling was outlined in the royal proclamation, Beh Millat-e ‘Azīzam (Kabul, n.d. [1928]), 7.
77 Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 41.
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86 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 55.
87 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 68–69.
88 Ibid., 69–70; and Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 55. The Massachusetts-born Daniel Treadwell (1791–1872) was a pioneer of industrialized printing: see Green, Ralph, “Early American Power Printing Presses,” Studies in Bibliography 4 (1951/1952): 143–53Google Scholar. However, Nadwi and Nizami seem to have used his name for the generic type of electrically powered press they saw rather than any particular brand. On the role of imported presses in the beginnings of printing in Iran, see Green, Nile, “Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism and the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, 2 (2010): 473–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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99 Ibid., 70–73.
100 Nizāmī, Safarnāma-ye Afghānistān, 34, 54.
101 Ibid., 36, 38.
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106 Ibid., 73.
107 Ibid., 41.
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109 Jewett, An American Engineer, 25.
110 Kābul (Dec. 1933); Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 43–49.
111 Introduction, in Green and Arbabzadah, Afghanistan in Ink.
112 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 43; Shams al-Dīn, Siyāhat-e Afghānistān, 34.
113 Nadwī, Sayr-e Afghānistān, 78.
114 Ibid., 47–48; also Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs, 62.
115 Ibid., 49–50.
116 Ibid., 50–54.
117 Ibid., 54–56.
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123 Ibid., 41.