Mahmud Beg Tarzi, was the main figure responsible for the modernisation of Afghanistan in the first two decades
of the 20th century.

One of the exiles Habibullah welcomed was the writer, translator, and constitutionalist Mahmud Beg Tarzi, who had spent his youth in Damascus and would become the main figure responsible for modernizing Afghanistan in the first two decades of the 20th century, Ahmed-Ghosh, Dupree, and Ghafour note.

Mahmud Tarzi. He was revered as “Afghanistan’s greatest intellectual,” and served as ambassador, foreign minister, and war minister. Wikimedia Commons.

“Influenced by the Young Turk Movement, which was then discussing the idea of women’s emancipation and participation in public life, Tarzi entered Kabul with his Syrian wife, Asma, around 1904 and immediately began to advocate for education and job opportunities for women,” Dupree reports. For Tarzi, Ahmed-Ghosh adds, “women deserved full citizenship and were an asset to future generations.” Before him, “no one had ever uttered the words ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ or ‘school.’” Hamida Ghafour describes him as “a nationalist” who attributes the decline of the Muslim world “not to Islam, but to what believers did to it.”Tarzi, revered as “Afghanistan’s greatest intellectual,” served as ambassador, foreign minister, and war minister. Two of his daughters married Habibullah’s sons. “These wives were fashion-conscious and dressed exclusively in Western style,” Nancy Dupree says. From 1906 onward, this style “became the symbol of women’s education and emancipation.”The marriage of Khayriya, Tarzi’s daughter, to Inayatullah, Habibullah’s eldest son, was “a great event,” not so much because it began a new tradition – Afghan brides in the cities exchanged the colourful costumes of India and Pakistan for exquisite white European dresses – but because Khayriya and Inayatullah also introduced “the new concept of monogamy.”

Soraya Tarzi was the Queen of Afghanistan and the wife of King Amanullah Khan. She played a major part in the modernization reforms of Amanullah Khan, particularly regarding the emancipation of women. Wikimedia Commons.

“The liberalization of the nation through education and the modernization of a ‘small elite’ generated enormous opposition,” Ahmed-Ghosh points out. Habibullah’s assassination in 1919 was partly due to the fact, that “women’s education and state interference in marriage institutions challenged tribal powers and their patrilineal and patrilocal kinship systems.” Abidullah was succeeded by her third child, Amanullah. The constitution she passed in 1919 granted women the right to vote. Amanullah married Soraya, Tarzi’s daughter, and the royal couple made choices that Dupree considers “quite revolutionary for the time”.
Soraya sponsored the first school for girls that opened in 1921 in Afghanistan. The first female students who graduated from there went on to study nursing in Turkey: “a very controversial decision, because if conservatives already thought it was bad to have a formal secular education, sending young people abroad without male guardians” was almost heresy. Soraya and Amanullah “practised what they preached” Dupree assures.  They did not believe that women should be confined to their homes, and the queen often spoke in public.
At a Loya Jirga (general meeting) in 1928, she addressed a mixed audience wearing a short skirt. Uneasy about appearing without anything covering her face before delegates from all over Afghanistan, she wore a very thin muslin veil attached to the brim of her elegant hat, but this diaphanous veil, journalists at the ceremony noted, proved far more provocative than no veil at all.

Between 1927 and 1928, King Amanullah and Soraya embarked on a long journey, visiting Europe, Iran and the Soviet Union. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1927-1928, Amanullah and Soraya undertook a long journey that took them to Europe, Iran and the Soviet Union. Foreigners were “fascinated by an exotic monarch and a charming queen consort,”
wrote Hamida Ghafour.
Italians decorated Amanullah; the British gave him a Rolls-Royce and Soraya an honorary degree from Oxford University. “On his return to Kabul, the king summoned a thousand tribal leaders to a meeting, demanding that they don jackets and ties. After criticizing his delay in modernizing the country and insisting on the urgency of renewal, he scandalized the public by removing the queen’s veil, saying: Here she is, now you can see my wife.” (Open Photo: Old map of Afghanistan. 123rf)

M.S.L.