Afghanistan Peace Campaign 
The subject of this report, coming after AAN’s previous study of the Khost Rebellion that took place a year earlier, should not surprise readers. The point contended here is not that the interest in the legacy of the Amani era consists mostly of studying the causes for revolts and the way these were dealt with, but rather that rebellions, as traumatic events, often constitute recorded moments in the otherwise ‘invisible’ history of marginal areas, and thus provide rare glimpses of the material and intellectual life of non-elites in a country’s history, including of subaltern groups such as the Afghan Ismailis.[2] Also, a rebellion in Shughnan can be seen as coming from an unexpected direction, especially in light of the population’s later political and social orientation, which was markedly progressive and pro-government.
Despite being peripheral inside Afghanistan at both the political and economic levels, Shughnan and its adjoining districts were important in their own right to international observers because of their border with Russian-held territories. After the formation of the Soviet Union, previous British concerns about Tsarist Russia’s meddling in that region had turned into fears of communist propaganda spreading among Afghans.
Finally, in the light of what is happening to some border areas of Badakhshan province these days, a comparison can be made about the dynamics of communal mobilisation against a central government perceived as oppressive and unfairly appropriating local resources, although in the name of a better good such as increasing the state’s revenue (and arguably public services) through the exploitation of mines.
A note on methodology
The bulk of the report consists of a narrative of the events before, during and after the rebellion, as related by people in Shughnan to the author in 2009, contemporary diplomatic material coming mostly from British archival sources and the few academic studies that take into account the impact of Amanullah’s reforms on the region and on the Shughnan rebellion, in particular.
Oral traditions such as those revolving around the Shughnan rebellion of 1925 present some fixed features (words, themes) which are literally handed down through generations of tellers and re-tellers and act as backbones to the narrative, exemplifying its chief meanings and making it easier to remember. Over time, they also, inescapably, come to include broader perspectives, filtered through the later experience of local communities, which come into play in modern interpretations, to enhance or diminish certain aspects and leitmotifs.[3]
Written historical sources such as archival material left by colonial polities active in the areas surrounding Afghanistan have long been considered more authoritative, but come with the same risks of selective emphasis and blindness attached. ‘Hot border’ regions such as Shughnan, especially in times of heightened political tensions and polarisation, such as the advent of Soviet communism in the 1920s that gave a new spin to the Russian threat to British India, regularly increase this blur, requiring a cautious interpretation of even the most precise archival sources.
The peculiarities of a peripheral district
Nowadays, Shughnan is a district of Badakhshan province, fairly large in terms of area but with a population numbering only around 35,000, due to the high-altitude terrain that makes up most of it. The majority of the settlements are found along the Panj Valley, where the river forms the international border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, a situation common to the other districts of Badakhshan bordering Tajikistan, from Wakhan downstream all the way to Shahr-e Bozorg.
Before its definitive annexation to Afghanistan[4] in the 1880s, Shughnan had held a paramount position among the petty principalities of the upper reaches of the Panj and Kokcha river valleys, mostly inhabited by followers of the Ismaili Shia branch of Islam. The Ismailis inhabiting these high mountain areas at the feet of the inhospitable Pamirs were usually comparatively poor and vulnerable communities, their heterodox faith exposing them moreover to the risk of being carried off to the Central Asian slave markets by their Sunni neighbours.[5] The mirs of Shughnan, however, did manage to keep a dignified status in the closed-doors dynastic game of the ruling potentates of the area. They claimed descent from Alexander the Great and intermarried on a regular basis with the (Sunni Muslim) rulers of Faizabad. The latter were the nominal lieges, but the Shughni mirs often intervened in the affairs of Faizabad from a prominent position and their Ismaili faith – the same as their subjects’ – did not seem to have posed a major hurdle to their political and commercial relations with the Sunni-inhabited areas of central Badakhshan.
Things, however, changed with the incorporation of Shughnan into Afghanistan. The last Shughni mir was deposed in 1883, and by the 1920s, the traditional feudal leadership structure of Shughnan had long gone. The Afghan governors of Badakhshan, after an initial soft approach, more in line with pre-existing forms of indirect political control and allegiance, had sought to change local leaders deemed untrustworthy and uncooperative and replace them with their own appointees. Increasingly, these were Muhammadzai Pashtuns or anyway, individuals from outside the region and closely linked to the court in Kabul. This trend accelerated after 1888, when the amir, Abdul Rahman Khan, began to suspect that many northern notables had either conspired with his cousin Ishaq Khan, who that year had staged a revolt against him, or were in communication with Russia and its protectorate in Bukhara, which was then competing with Kabul for influence over Badakhshan and other northern provinces. A new dynamic set in: state repression was now able to reach not only the old ruling families, who were arrested or deported away from their former turfs, but also a broader class of local headmen, called aqsaqal and arbab,[6] or indeed anybody suspected of wielding dangerous influence over the local populations.
When in 1893, the northeastern border in its Shughnan section was finally demarcated following the course of the River Panj, Shughnan lost half its population and most of its territory to Russia. Against the backdrop of general waning local autonomy, the district’s relevance and political weight was particularly diminished. The local leadership void would, in the next few decades, be gradually filled by religious networks composed of pirs (spiritual leaders) and khalifas (their local representatives), who played a major role in organising society, eventually in cooperation with the transnational institutions led by the paramount Ismaili leader, the Aga Khan. Much later, after 1940, Shughnan’s population embraced teaching as a survival strategy and attained high standards of education and the political consciousness that went with it. That contributed to emancipating the people from their district’s poverty and marginality (AAN). In 1925, however, the situation was bleak and, furthermore, the capacity, locally, to lobby Afghan state actors was at a minimum.
Shughnan and the other Ismaili districts in Badakhshan were never able to exploit their arguably strategic location on the border to their advantage. That could, to some extent, have made up for the trauma caused by colonial border-making or even improved their standing and importance at the national level, as some Pashtun tribes along the Durand Line managed to do.[7] Contrary to the broad ‘Frontier’ buffer separating Afghanistan from the settled areas of British India, the border with Russia was not a particularly porous one that easily allowed local communities to benefit from smuggling, raiding or abetting escapees from the other side. Indeed, its demarcation along the Panj River was actually a tragedy for local communities, which saw themselves torn apart, their social connections and viable economies destroyed. However, the demarcation proved rather practical for the purposes of state control. The difference between the two border areas was augmented by the different attitude and balance of power in the Afghan state: the heavily-armed border Pashtun tribes on the one hand and the tiny, poor and vulnerable – from both military and religious perspectives – minorities living along the Panj, on the other.
Who pays for the reforms?
Amanullah is often remembered and celebrated as the king who secured Afghanistan’s complete independence by wresting it from the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919), or, as Afghans more aptly call it, the War of Independence (AAN). Beyond the fanfare of military glory and diplomatic activism, however, the real meaning of Afghan independence was that, for the first time in forty years, and possibly for the longest span over a much longer period, both before or after Amanullah, the Afghan king, and the state he managed, had to do without a foreign subsidy that guaranteed them a minimum of military superiority over possible rivals or rebels and partially freed them from the need to seriously tax subjects in order to have a budget.
Public finances were not the only revolutionary aspect of Amanullah’s reign. From progressive ideals to his ambition to achieve the fast modernisation, technical and cultural, of a ‘backward’ country, many aspects of his reign aimed to be revolutionary. However, the big changes in store were thus to be financed only through taxation, and direct taxation on agricultural produce was to be the pivotal part of that. There were attempts to revive international trade and, with it, one of the traditionally major sources of income for the Afghan rulers – transit fees and customs. Even so, at least two-thirds of the revenue paid to the Afghan state under Amanullah was derived from taxes on farmers.
It has been estimated that between 1919 and 1929, Amanullah’s decade in power, the tax rate on land increased fourfold and on livestock fivefold, and that up to 45 per cent of the value of the harvest was taken from farmers.[8] Furthermore, contrary to what had happened in the past, payments were to be made largely in cash and not in agricultural products, which entailed greater difficulties and, for the inhabitants of areas with virtually no monetary economy, such as the Ismaili districts of Badakhshan, the frightening risk for farmers of going into debt.
Statistics for 1923 published by the Afghan newspaper Ittihad-e Mashriqi give an idea of the scale of tax revenues in a poor region such as Badakhshan: even excluding Crown lands, out of a total revenue of 1,293,000 rupees, 1,020,000 came from taxes on agriculture and livestock. That sum had increased by 211,000 rupees compared to the previous year, an increase of a sixth. Furthermore, the proportion of taxes paid in cash had already reached almost three to one compared with taxes paid in goods.[9]
Within all peripheral areas, there are different layers of marginality. Some of the residents of central Shughnan, or at least some of those from the district centre of Qalah-e Bar Panj, had in due time been able to forge some relationships with their new Afghan masters. Provision of lodgings, government employment, trade ventures and the occasional intermarriage had contributed to create a minimum of common interests that ran above qawmi divisions.[10] Even though these interests were diluted by those of language and confession, they still proved sufficient to shield a group of local residents from the worst aspects of state power. The degree of such commonality grew thinner as an individual lived further away from the centre of the district. Remote areas may have enjoyed greater quiet due to their isolation in normal times, but would face the brunt of state impositions, entirely unprotected, once these were unleashed.
In the context of the state apparatus’s renewed efforts to expand into rural areas under Amanullah, it is no surprise that the area of Shughnan that fared the worst would be Roshan, the northernmost and most remote part of the district. It was from Roshan – a toponym which carries the ancient Persian root connected to ‘lightening’ or ‘brightening’ – that the spark of the rebellion would ignite.
The rebellion of Mahram Beg
Let us first introduce the eponymous hero of the rebellion. Mahram Beg, hailing from Robat village, the last village of Roshan before Shughnan proper, was in his forties and a man of some local importance. He was already listed among the notables of Roshan by the Afghan functionary and writer Burhanuddin Kushkaki in 1923, and had been appointed around that time an arbab in a village a short distance downstream from his own village, Chasnud-e Payan. There, an alaqadar, a sub-district state official appointed by the central administration and often coming from outside, had been posted, arguably, for the first time. Local oral sources claim this particular official was originally from Wardak.[11] His character plays a major part in the oral history of the rebellion, triggering the action in the first place. In the oral narrative handed down among locals, the mere burden of heavy taxes was not considered a sufficient explanation for the revolt. Rather, the abuse of power by the state was coupled with other types of abuse and oppression couched in terms of immorality, as was relayed to the author:
At the time of Mahram Beg, there was such oppression that he was forced to make the people revolt. He went down to Chasnud-e Payan, where an alaqadar had arrived. The alaqadar exercised power with such tyranny that his men were snatching bread from people’s ovens: “Bring forth the butter!” they would shout, while, meanwhile, they helped themselves, picking the loaf of bread of their choice. Such was the level of tyranny. Then, one evening the alaqadar said to Mahram, who was arbab there, to bring him a woman. Mahram was flustered, he said: “Why, how could I bring you a woman?! You yourself must have nang, some namus [honour] of yours – a sister, your mother…” But the other insisted, adamant: “These arguments don’t touch me.”
Mahram Beg (or his contemporary impersonator) is here trying to reason with the Pashtun official by playing up specific concepts — namus and nang — that he hopes he may value. The Arabic-origin word namus connects mostly to honour in terms of one’s family’s reputation through the respectability (henceforth seclusion) of its female members. Nang(coming from Middle Persian but quite obsolete in modern Iranian Farsi), refers to honour as well, but more with the nuance of individual pride. Both terms are widely used in Afghan Dari, the language in which the related conversation arguably took place, but hold a special conceptual centrality for Pashtuns as enshrined in Pashtunwali (about which, read this AAN paper). Having failed to connect with his interlocutor on these terms, Mahram feigned compliance:
So, one day Mahram told the alaqadar he was leaving; he was travelling down the valley to get women for him. But instead, he went to a village downstream and sat in an assembly with people whom he had secretly gathered and told them: “Look, that’s how bad things are, how oppressed we are. But now you can decide to help me rebel. If you are with me, we take over Shughnan.
Those gathered agreed to stage a revolt and Mahram toured nearby villages to enlist men for the action. Wherever there was an arbab he trusted, he would task him with selecting a man and sending him to Chasnud-e Payan, disguised as a woman under a full chador. Then, when he had thus managed to assemble his strike force unnoticed:
[T]hat night, when required to, Mahram introduced fifteen men thus disguised into the alaqadar’s guesthouse for his after-dinner programme, and told them “Go get him and give him a beating.” The alaqadar cried, “What are you doing?!” but those men, burqa-clad as they were, jumped on him and thrashed him with sticks. Then they dragged him outside, put an old furry coat and hat on him, forced him to wear a pair of coarse homespun trousers, tied him to a tree and left him there until morning. The next morning, they strapped him onto an ass, a black ass, and paraded him around.
The use of a chador as a disguise by warriors is a common expedient in the so-called ayyar literature, once widespread, mostly through oral transmission, across India, Iran and Central Asia.[12] As such, it will return later in the same narrative. However, here it also serves the purpose of making the retribution meted out to the villain, whose chief crime was to threaten the honour of women, more fitting. The theme of the disguise takes on another level of meaning immediately afterwards: the ordeal to which the alaqadar is subjected includes nullifying his exalted status as a state official – likely conveyed by clothes of a different style or superior quality – by having him dressed as a commoner in coarse local fabric. The symbolic reversal of roles and the exposure to public mockery, in many parts of the world, a cliché of peasant rebellions vis-à-vis the powers governing them, is completed by a parody of another major status symbol of the powerful, the mount.
After this early success, with the critical adhesion of some local hunters who provided the only firearms to the war party, Mahram set to conquer, or better, to free Shughnan, the centre of his people’s universe and the logical ultimate target of their action.
Then Mahram and his men marched towards Shughnan. They went to Yarkh and then to Chawid and so on and everywhere people would join them. For weapons, they had only some siahkaman (matchlocks) and the rest had spades and forks. At the time, guns and ammo, nobody had it, only the security forces. So when the rebels reached the district centre of Shughnan, the local garrison and the border guards barricaded themselves into the government fortress, sealing the doors and windows. Mahram told his followers: “Do not attack them now, they’ll eventually surrender, let’s not damage both sides with a fight.” Then, he positioned his men on the hilltop where nowadays the district office is located.
The stalemate lasted over a week. The few hunting rifles that Mahram’s men had at their disposal were totally ineffective against the stone and mud walls of the government compound. Besides, they lacked any ammunition reserves and had to rely mostly on dry beans as bullets. Mahram not only prevented them from launching a risky attack, but he also sought to keep those inside the fort in check and prevent sallies from their part. He had water boiled over a fire beyond the hilltop, and by heating spades that they would then hit with stones, his men produced loud bangs which sounded a bit like the voice of artillery, which scared the besieged garrison into inaction. With water running scarce, it was a matter of days before they surrendered. Meanwhile, news of the revolt had reached Faizabad, and a military force had been dispatched to suppress the revolt. Probably, this news began to cool local enthusiasm for the revolt, as some residents of central Shughnan who suspected the rebellion could not resist state power indefinitely came to fear the reprisals they would face once government control was re-established[13]
News came that an army was coming from the way of Ishkashim. Mahram asked the people “And what do we do with those?” and they replied “Well, you should go meet them.” “Very well” he said, “I’ll go to Gharan. If I manage, I’ll crush those soldiers. You stay here and do not attack. If the government forces surrender, take them prisoner, but don’t expose yourself in the open.” Then he went to Gharan and selected a narrow spot to set an ambush. When the troops arrived, his men suddenly opened fire and forced them to retreat, they ran back to Ishkashim.
After the successful ambush,[14] prospects for the rebels were looking more favourable, but treachery was to undo Mahram’s military success. While he was away, says the oral history, a local resident, a man from Bashohr,[15] managed to slip into the government fort at night.
He told the government forces there: “Those people don’t have rifles, they’ve got nothing. Mahram has left for Gharan and they only make the sound of guns, don’t let yourself be fooled.” When they did not believe him, he added, “Ok, I’ll have you sent women’s clothes, a chador, right? One of you can put it on and go have a look at how things are.” So, the next day one of the soldiers disguised himself as a woman and went around Mahram’s camp. He saw that the situation was exactly as reported: they had no weapons and only made the sound of a gun from time to time. He went back and reported to his commander, and the next day at dawn, those in the fort rushed out and attacked the camp of the rebels.
Without weapons, how could they resist? They fled, half towards Gharan, to Mahram, and half towards Roshan. The government troops arrived in Bashohr and let their 303. rifles do the talking. They did not make distinctions between those who had fought with Mahram and those who had not. They killed, they arrested, they looted. Then those who had fled towards Mahram ran into him at the springs near Darmarakht. He asked them, “How come you are here?” and they said “We narrowly escaped from their clutches” and they told him what had happened. “Very well” said he. “All that has happened has been out of the will of those people who don’t need freedom, those who don’t cherish freedom. Now it’s up to you. Do as you wish. I jump to the other side. I can’t stay here, there’s no place left for me to go, I’ll cross to the Soviet side of the river.” And then, near Wyar, he jumped into the water and reached the other bank. Many of those who had fled, men and women, followed him: the lucky ones made it, others vanished in the river.
Exit Mahram, pursued by the Russian bear. Detained by the suspicious Soviet authorities for around three years, the unlucky leader of the short-lived revolt would never see his homeland again. Well, not quite literally, as from Khorog, the Russian-held Shughni town just across the Panj, where he was settled for some time, he would be able to do so every day, but he never set foot again on Afghan soil and was eventually given a place of residence in central Tajikistan by the Soviet authorities.
Different was the fate of those who had followed him into exile. Their number is unclear. Boyko, on account of a petition sent to the Soviet authorities by the refugees themselves, gives the staggering number of eight thousand. That would have amounted to virtually all the inhabitants of Shughnan and Roshan put together, according to the data collected by Kushkaki in 1923. The desertion of an entire district constituted a significant problem for the state, especially in a border area, where it could exacerbate political differences or result in external interference, and all the more so in a territory that, because of the extreme environmental conditions, would prove nearly impossible to repopulate. Already, one month after the revolt, Amanullah had issued a general pardon and an invitation to those who had fled to return. According to Soviet sources, some accepted, but it seems not too many, as in the next few months, several Afghan officials travelled to the Soviet side to try and persuade the remaining refugees to return. Even if not comprising the total population, the exodus must have been massive, as it stirred diplomatic activities across the Panj. It is well remembered by people nowadays and forms part of the oral narrative of events connected to the rebellion:
[After the revolt] on this side of the river, nobody was left. Those people remained over there [on the Soviet side] for nine months. To all the government people who went there to look for them, they would say: “No, we don’t come back.” Eventually, there came a person called Mir-e Muqil, he was an arbab in Shiduwj village. So, this man went to the other side and the commanders, the Soviets, they told him: “The people don’t accept it, they won’t come back to your side.” He said: “Well, gather them so that I can speak to them. If it works, fine, otherwise it’s over.” Then all the refugees gathered there, in Khorog. And the Soviet official questioned them: “People, are you going to Afghanistan or are you staying?” And they answered: “With him, we shall go, without him, we won’t.” And the Soviet officer would go like: “How come? Until now, you were saying that you’ll never go back there, that you’d rather be killed here and that this was the place you belonged to!” And so they told him: “This man has done many good services for us back there, he helped us a lot. In Afghanistan, in Shughnan, he is a civil servant, a good man. With him, we can face everything: be it water or fire.” All those people were saying thus. Then they started back with that man; they came back to this side.
The interpretations of events internationally and locally
The Shughnan rebellion of 1925, together with the temporary occupation by Soviet troops of the river island of Urta Tagai later that year, was one major development in the Great Game along the northern Afghan border. For decades, British and Russian agents had been spying on each other’s moves or absence thereof, and after the variation in the game brought about by the 1917 October Revolution and takeover of Central Asian territories by the Soviets, it had developed new categories to interpret old patterns.
The British were, for example, convinced that all unrest inside Afghanistan could be put down to foreign (ie Russian) hidden hands. “During April a local insurrection took place in Badakhshan… It is possible that Russian agents may have been in part responsible for the outbreak,” was the laconic comment by the British envoy in Kabul.[16]
By the mid-1920s, moreover, they had become convinced that the Soviets were actively spreading Marxist propaganda into Amanullah’s kingdom and that the Ismailis, with their seeming absence of religious fanaticism, had easily fallen prey to communist doctrine: “The area affected seems to be in the part of Afghanistan marked for corruption and penetration by the ethnologically-allied Tazik [sic] province recently established on the Russian side.”
From the cold welcome they offered to Marham, we may instead assume that the Soviet authorities, although newcomers to the Great Game, likely followed in the footsteps of their predecessors in most everyday decisions and were equally suspicious of all local leading men, irrespective of which side of the border they came from.
Throughout the 1920s, the Soviets became increasingly suspicious of the links maintained by the Ismaili religious leaders, the pirs, and their representatives, the khalifas. Given that their devotees could often be found in faraway villages, they were at the centre of networks through which money and information travelled. The authorities concluded that these were being actively used by British intelligence through the good services of the Ismaili spiritual leader and British subject, the Aga Khan. Oppression of Ismaili pirs and khalifas had already started in the early 1920s and would increase in intensity towards the end of the decade, both to satisfy the hostility of Soviet authorities towards religious leadership, indeed, any leadership rival to their own and to frustrate the ‘machinations of Western capitalism’, to the point that several Ismaili religious leaders would be forced, in turn, to take shelter on the Afghan side to escape arrest by Soviet authorities. “The Sayid inhabitants of Russian Wakhan are alleged to be very badly treated by the Bolsheviks authorities,” said one report of the British political agent in Gilgit in his Diary for September-October 1922. “Their property is being confiscated and distributed among the lay public” (L/P&S/10/973). Another report, from the Intelligence Bureau North-Western Frontier Province n° 14 (week ending 16.07.1928) said: “There has been much religious oppression in Shighnan [sic] and Russian Wakhan and the people, while secretly retaining their Maulai [Ismaili] faith, have been forced to become overt converts to Bolshevism.”
Leaving aside the foreign and often flawed takes on the rebellion, it may also be useful to contrast the oral narrative as told by local people in Shughnan with the official account of the incident given by a state-controlled newspaper, Tulu-e Afghan:[17]
At the beginning of the current year, the inhabitants of Shughnan fell out with the alaqadar of that place regarding the payment of poor-rate on their cattle. At the instigation of certain malefactors, they resisted the payment of the poor-rate. When the local ruler came out to realise that tax and applied force upon the inhabitants, they flatly disobeyed his order, congregated in one place and demonstrated against the civil and military officials of that place. On this occasion, it was the day of the month of Hamal (20th April) that the report on this event was received through the proper channel by Muhammad Suleiman Khan, Naib ul-Hakuma of the Province of Qataghan and Badakhshan. The Governor, who is a perfect man and a true servant to the state, despatched forthwith to Shughnan a committee, composed of certain experienced and influential personages with full instructions to enquire into the causes of the disturbance and to make every effort for its removal. Also he gave orders to the force at Badakhshan to hold themselves in readiness for the march. As soon as the committee in question reached Shughnan, crowds of inhabitants who had besieged the local Government Departments after exchanging shots with the local military dispersed and the malefactors who were the cause and instigators of this trouble fled. To sum all up, the enquiry committee brought necessary arrangements into force. The deserters returned to their place, the quarrel and dispute came to an end and all submitted to Government. Peace and order began to reign supreme on every side and the matter was settled without any further trouble and loss of life and property.
Both narratives recognise one common key point – the role of the local authorities. The role they played in unfolding of events, however, is told very differently by the Kabul newspaper and local people. They are mirror opposites of the other. The weak link where the chain of social peace in Shughnan was broken in that April of 1925 lay precisely in the part taken by the Afghan provincial authorities. The new tax burden fell heavily on rural areas, but even more so, it disrupted social customs. The dependence on taxes collected from rural areas and the drive for modernisation inherent in Amanullah’s political project led him to reform the district administration at the same time as he launched his tax reforms. In 1921-22, a travelling commission had mapped the entire national territory to establish new tax rates based on products and soil type. Until then, this had been the prerogative, at the local level, of the old aqsaqal class, who, deprived of their role as village administrators, nevertheless retained the informal role of providing the provincial governor with tax data on their territories, agreeing on the quotas that individual families had to pay and supervising the delivery of the tribute.[18]
This function, which the aqsaqals, as members of the old local elites, carried out in a manner that was as conciliatory as possible with the needs of what ultimately remained their patronage network, was taken over at the sub-district level by the alaqadars, the state officials appointed by the central administration, who were also often outsiders. The loss of control over local relations with the state apparatus, previously managed through traditional, albeit hierarchical, mechanisms via the mediation of the aqsaqals, was as intolerable to the peasants as the increased tax burden itself, to which it was, in fact, closely linked. This was probably one of the underlying reasons for the Shughnan uprising in 1925. The presence of ‘foreign’ district authorities was not entirely new, nor was it a characteristic only of Amanullah’s reign. Certainly, their predatory behaviour towards the population could have justified an even earlier violent reaction, but as long as they had been assisted by local figures in the exercise of power, abuses had been, if not avoided, at least mitigated.
Things would actually worsen for Shughnan in the years following the reform. In the words of an Indian Muslim, a Shia doctor from Calcutta who visited the region a few months after the rebellion: “All officials are Kabulis. No official knows when he may be ‘axed’, consequently bribery and extortion are relied on to bring in as much money in as short a time as possible. Taxes are very heavy. Every tree, animal and field is taxed twice a year. Any criminal can escape punishment by payment. Only the poor are punished.”
The importance of residents having the possibility to access and connect with local authorities to shield their households from excessive burdens and survive becomes apparent from some of the leitmotifs in the history of the revolt of Mahram Beg, as related across Shughnan. Unlike the state media, which sought to highlight the loyalty, efficiency and generosity of the provincial officials appointed by the government, people in Shughnan chose to remember those arbabs, that is, intermediaries whom they had chosen or who, anyway, had come from among their ranks, who would stand up and risk everything to try and shield them from state oppression.
With the elimination of the residual role held by the aqsaqals in assessing taxes, the last vestiges of the social structure of the indigenous elites in Shughnan had disappeared. Only the arbabs remained as potential leaders around whom to rally. Their status was hardly exalted or idealised. Their tasks, in fact, consisted mainly of organising the accommodation and meals of visiting state officials or military personnel, and representing the village before the institutions. This association with the state could bring small economic benefits if one sought them, but not necessarily respectability within the community, as it often led to accusations of corruption and partiality. Hence, the people’s choice of remembering those arbabs who did what they were expected to do, honestly, or who had played an outstanding role – one by starting a rebellion against external officials who transgressed social norms and decency and another by successfully mediating the homecoming of the exiled Shughni people.
Conclusions
Among the modern public of Shughnan, well-educated and (although it took longer than British colonial officials presumed) often left-oriented, today’s re-telling of the 2025 revolt causes a curious series of re-positionings. There is but little sympathy or nostalgia for the autonomous Shughnan before the Afghan annexation, as that era is widely associated with the feudal rule of the mirs and thus viewed negatively from many perspectives. Moreover, Shughnis generally hold a high opinion of Amanullah and praised his reformist attempts and political ideals. However, the poverty and helplessness experienced by the local population at that time amply justify, in their eyes, the need for Mahram to revolt. More recent periods of oppression and destitution, especially during the early times of the mujahedin takeover after 1991, have, moreover, left an indelible mark on the collective memory of the population. For example, during discussions with the author, people in Shughnan sometimes linked the revolt of 1925, in spirit, to a series of revolts staged by local people in 1996-97. They were aimed at throwing off the yoke of the most predatory of the mujahedin commanders, who came from the Sunni central area of Badakhshan and had established themselves as authorities in the district: the parallels, from the Shughnis’ perspective, were clear.
The attention of a small community may be focused on extraordinary times of strife and activism and these events may be fixed in its collective memory. However, the long-term truth about Shughnan is that, like its neighbouring Ismaili districts, it has, since its annexation to Afghanistan and especially since its remarkable achievements in education, proved one of the most peaceful and law-abiding areas of the country. It continues to be so, even in the face of increasing difficulties, such as the restrictions on female education which have seriously damaged its teacher economy, and the growing reports of discrimination towards Ismailis by at least some among the IEA officials (Hasht-e Subh).
But beyond the heroes and symbols that are passed down through generations in a community’s oral history lie always the roots and material causes of the actions that immortalised them. Those very causes that spurred the people of Roshan and Shughnan to rebel a century ago, namely the oppressive behaviour of the authorities imposed from the outside and the lack of local lobbying power to negotiate with a seemingly all-powerful government, are today found in many parts of Afghanistan. Centralising attempts, pushed through with haste and force, can easily cause grave imbalances when, in many Afghan rural areas, the local balance of power and established relationships of reciprocity help people cope with fragile economic conditions. Not to stray away from the banks of the Panj, the continuing tensions and clashes (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) downstream of Shughnan in the gold-mining districts of Badakhshan and Takhar[19] are clear proof that Afghanistan’s central governments, even a hundred years later and no matter what common good or best ideal they claim has motivated their actions, are still unable to consider these border areas as anything but up for grabs.
Edited by Kate Clark and Jelena Bjelica
References
| ↑1 | AAN has published not only on Amanullah’s grand tour of Europe and the civil war that put an end to his reign, but also on Amanullah’s relations with Central Asian principalities, on the architectural heritage from that period and on some literary works produced in those years, both fiction and non-fiction. |
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| ↑2 | The term ‘subaltern’ can be broadly defined as indicating groups inside a polity which are relegated to an inferior status because of their ethnicity, religious affiliation, class or gender, and thus denied voice and agency in politics and society. First introduced by Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s, it has been popularised in historiography starting from the 1980s by a group of scholars mostly focusing on Indian colonial and post-colonial history. Despite the subsequent debate on the limits of its applicability, the author finds its use in relation to the Ismailis of the Pamir and the Hindu Kush as particularly fitting in the light of the politically and economically marginal areas they inhabit, their heterodox religious affiliation and the multiple cultural hegemonic centres (Sunni-dominated indigenous powers, British and Russian colonial officials, Western explorers) by which they have been objectified in the available historical sources – often following a centuries-old tradition portraying Ismailis in a highly-stereotyped fashion (on this, see Farhad Daftary, The Assassins Legend: Myths of the Ismailis, Tauris, 1995). |
| ↑3 | In the author’s experience, the obvious existence of such processes at play, at least in an educated and politically self-aware context such as today’s Shughnan, allowed for self-questioning and interpretation by the very interviewees and local fellow-listeners, rather than resulting in a mere alteration of the contents. |
| ↑4 | The principality of Badakhshan, and thus those connected to it by loose links of vassalage such as in Shughnan, had once already fallen under Afghan sovereignty when the troops of Ahmad Shah Durrani entered Faizabad in the early 1750s. The area had, however, slipped out of the control of Kabul a few decades later and had remained largely independent – despite suffering repeated raids from the Uzbek rulers of Kunduz – until the reign of Sher Ali (1869-79). After 1873, the rulers of Faizabad were replaced by an Afghan governor, but it took until the reign of Abdul Rahman (1880-1901) for the change to be applied to the Ismaili principalities too. |
| ↑5 | From a doctrinal point of view, enslaving fellow Muslims was prohibited, hence the preference by Sunni raiders for targeting if not non-Muslim, at least heterodox communities such as the Ismailis. However, even marginal Sunni communities such as the Kirghiz of the Pamirs or the Chitralis were at risk of kidnap and being ‘marketed’ as Siahposh Kafirs (the then not-yet converted inhabitants of today’s Nuristan). The mirs of Shughnan themselves occasionally engaged in selling slaves, Ismaili, Sunni and non-Muslim. |
| ↑6 | Although the Uzbek-origin term aqsaqal (white beard) is identical with its Pashto (spingir) and Dari (rishsafed) counterparts, the role of such individuals had traditionally represented in Badakhshan a more formalised position, that of a village administrator on behalf of the local ruler, compared to that of spingiri or rishsafedan in many other parts of Afghanistan, where the terms more often refer just to senior members of the local council. Arbab is also used in many parts of Afghanistan and more closely refers to individuals agreed upon by the community and the state to act as representatives and middlemen. |
| ↑7 | The Pashtun tribes living on the border with British India (which was then progressively encroaching on former Afghan territories) suffered heavily throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century – militarily, economically and socially. They bore the brunt of colonial wars and reprisals, seeing their normal trade and pastoralist routes disrupted and being left with an increasingly polarised, militant and underdeveloped society as a result of the constant state of conflict and of colonial policies that prioritised security and containment. If communities from both sides of the Durand Line suffered from the violence that this process engendered (the long-term results of which are still haunting the region), some tribes from the Afghan side were eventually able to extract some benefits from the Afghan state by virtue of their special position as keepers of the border, such as being exempt from taxes and compulsory military service. |
| ↑8 | Amin Saikal, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival, Bloomsbury Academic, 2004, p278. |
| ↑9 | Diaries of the Kabul military attaché WAK Fraser, 1922-24 (L/P&S/10/1085), India Office Record, British Library. |
| ↑10 | Qawm points on one hand to an immediate solidarity group often based on kinship (family, clan) and more rarely on other shared identities (professional guild, religious affiliation, village) not altogether unrelated to the practice of intermarriage; on the other, it can refer to a broader community based on regional or ethnolinguistic characters when at a more political or national level. |
| ↑11 | A scholar who researched the rebellion mostly drawing on Russian sources named the alaqadar as Tahir Muhammad Khan. Boyko, Vladimir, ‘On the Margins of Amanullah Era in Afghanistan: The Shughnan Rebellion of 1925’, International Journal of Central Asian Studies, vol 7,2002, p79. |
| ↑12 | Ayyars (robbers, rogues, considered by some scholars to approach in the popular conscience of Central Asia and Iran the idealisation of social ‘Robin Hood’ bandits in many European pre-modern societies) have become the unconventional heroes of many collections of tales, such as the Adventures of Amir Hamza. Standing beside – or confronting – more conventional heroes, such as the kings and their paladins borrowed from historical chronicles and epic lore, ayyars resort to a more down-to-earth type of tactics and weapons, way beyond the rules of honour and fair fight, thus playing a trickster role akin to that of ninjas in Japanese samurai literature. |
| ↑13 | There is hardly a division between Roshan and Shughnan proper that would have acted as a rationale for the failure of the rebellion in the district centre. In older times, Roshan had always been a constituent part of Shughnan, although usually it was administered by the eldest son of the mir, acting as viceroy, and allowed some degree of autonomy. People of the two areas speak the same language, hold the same religious tenets and devotional affiliations and most importantly, regularly intermarry. Any trace of such a divide would also probably have vanished in popular memory, given that later political vicissitudes and social transformations further strengthened the common identity between the two halves of Shughnan. The divide here is more one of proximity – in terms of allegiance but also of spatial location, to state power – with its pros and cons depending on their particular situation, something that is typical and very relevant across Afghanistan up to today. |
| ↑14 | The place of the ambush, Gharan, is the area that separates the southernmost villages of Shughnan from Ishkashim. It is only sparsely populated as, here, the Panj valley closely resembles a gorge, with very limited amounts of horizontal expanses before it widens up again before Ishkashim. The road on the left bank, the Afghan side, climbs up to mid-slope, away from the riverbed, and becomes at points a narrow path that a group of men can only cross in single line and with caution. The people of Shughnan used to call this passage ‘their father’ on account of the protection it offered from the danger of invading troops. |
| ↑15 | Bashohr, where the unnamed traitor lived, is one of the hamlets making up the district centre of Shughnan. As it commanded a good view over the besieged government buildings, it was the place that Mahram had selected to put up his camp. |
| ↑16 | Minister in Kabul’s Summary of Events from February to July 1925 (L/P&S/10/1051). |
| ↑17 | Translation of an article from the Tulu-i-Afghan n°40, 07-06-1925 (L/P&S/11/258), file 1667. |
| ↑18 | Holzwarth, Wolfgang, ‘Segmentation und Staatsbildung in Afghanistan: Traditionale sozio-politische Organisation in Badakhshan, Wakhan und Sheghnan’, in Grevemeyer and Greussing, Revolution in Iran und Afghanistan, 1980, pp179-181. |
| ↑19 | For recent reporting of clashes, see Abdul Hamid Hakimi, Taliban Gold Rush Turns Deadly, Putting Spotlight On Chinese-Backed Mining, Radio Azadi, 11 January 2026. For a comprehensive assessment of gold mining and its politics in Takhar and Badakhshan see Fabrizio Foschini, The Mining Sector in Afghanistan: A picture in black and gold, AAN, 30 August 2025. |
