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IN THE NAME OF A LAW: ISLAMIC LEGAL MODERNISM AND THE MAKING OF AFGHANISTAN'S 1923 CONSTITUTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2016
Abstract
In 1919, a new amir in Afghanistan named Aman Allah Khan launched an ambitious campaign to reorder his government into a constitutional monarchy. By 1923, Afghanistan had ratified its first constitution, supplemented by scores of legal and administrative codes. Whereas the latter have long been attributed to European borrowings or Kemalist imitation, this article uncovers two neglected features of Aman Allah's reformist project to argue that the making of Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution presents a distinctive path of state building in the region: Islamic legal modernism. First, by upholding the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence as the basis of Afghan substantive law, Amir Aman Allah sought a cohesive national judiciary through the codification of fiqh, not European civil law. Second, by synthesizing the expertise of a diverse cast of Muslim scholars and professionals—from Afghan clerics to Ottoman and Indian technocrats recruited to Kabul—he attempted to avert a rift between “Islamic” and “secular” lawmaking.
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Author's note: This article grew out of the guidance and inquiring spirits of Laura Nader, Wali Ahmadi, Beshara Doumani, Huri İslamoğlu, Rebecca McLennan, Recep Çelik, and Mike Vorenberg. It was made possible by research grants from the Empirical Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, the Social Science Research Council, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. I am also grateful to Jeffrey Culang, Akram Khater, and the anonymous readers at IJMES for their discerning comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I owe special thanks to Robert McChesney and the staff at the Afghanistan Digital Library Project for establishing an invaluable resource that will benefit Afghan historiography for generations to come.
1 Adamec, Ludwig W., Afghanistan, 1900–1923 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967), 111 Google Scholar.
2 Poullada, Leon, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan: King Aman-Allah's Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 99–104 Google Scholar; Gregorian, Vartan, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 1880–1946 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), 239–43Google Scholar; Saikal, Amin, Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 74–77 Google Scholar.
3 See, for example, Poullada, Reform and Rebellion, 93–94, 109; Gregorian, Emergence, 273; and Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Amanullah Khan,” accessed 20 June 2016, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/18453/Amanullah-Khan. For popular media representations reflecting these themes from Afghanistan to the United States, see, for example, Karim Amini, “A Glimpse into the Life of King Amanullah Khan,” Tolo (Kabul), 19 August 2015, accessed 20 June 2016, www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/20983-a-glimpse-into-the-life-of-king-amanullah-khan; and Michael Hughes, “No Peace without Justice and Equality in Afghanistan,” Huffington Post, 1 November 2010, accessed 20 June 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-hughes/no-peace-without-justice_b_776810.html.
4 This article defines shariʿa as the entirety of laws, ethics, devotional practices, principles of jurisprudence, and associated methodologies of interpretation derived from or inspired by the Qurʾan and Prophetic example. See also n. 7. A derivative concept relevant to this study, siyāsa sharʿiyya, signals the de facto power of Muslim political authorities to produce legislative enactments of an administrative nature known as qānūns or niẓāmnāmihs (codes, regulations, ordinances). Per the doctrine of siyāsa sharʿiyya, the niẓāmnāmihs of a Muslim ruler carry the weight of enforceable law.
5 Articles 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 21, 72, Qanun-i Asasi-i Dawlat-i ʿAliyyih-i Afghanistan (1923). Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution was published in both Persian (Dari) and Pashtu. For an original copy of the Persian version, see ADL-0076 (Nizamnamih-i Asasi-i Dawlat-i ʿAliyyih-i Afghanistan. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1923). For the Pashtu version, see ADL-0676 (Asasi Nizamnamih Dalur Dawlat da Afghanistan. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1923).
6 See, for example, Dupree, Louis, Afghanistan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 451 Google ScholarPubMed; Saikal, Amin, “Kemalism: Its Influence on Iran and Afghanistan,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1982): 25–32 Google Scholar; Adamec, Ludwig W., Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 28 Google Scholar; and Atabaki, Touraj and Zürcher, Erik J., Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 225 Google Scholar. We might also consider the “peripheral” status accorded to Afghanistan in the Middle East to be a contributing factor in such representations.
7 In light of spiraling academic debates on the meaning of “the Islamic tradition,” some clarification of this article's use of terms is in order. Following Talal Asad, this study defines the Islamic legal tradition not as a fixed or homogenous body of laws, nor as a foil to modernity, but as a set of historically evolving arguments and institutional practices in Muslim communities—especially those articulated by persons broadly recognized as qualified scholars (ʿulamaʾ) of Islam, and specifically its legists (fuqahāʾ). Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 205–56Google Scholar. For a sensitive application of Asad's conception of Islam (including the shariʿa) as a discursive tradition and “a framework of inquiry rather than a set of unchanging doctrines or culturally specific mandates,” see Haj, Samira, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 4–5 Google Scholar. While adopting Haj's eloquent and lucid definition of the Islamic tradition, this article departs from her study by focusing on a qualitatively different genre of Muslim jurists than those represented by ʿAbduh, Rida, or other modern Salafist thinkers. Here, Aman Allah's jurists remained faithful to a single school of Islamic jurisprudence—the Hanafiyya—reflecting the normative precedent-based and cumulative approach to Islamic knowledge known as taqlīd. On modern Salafists’ juristic eclecticism and anti-taqlīd approaches to the law (also known as takhayyur and talfīq), see Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition, 142–43, 150. For a more detailed treatment of the emergence of takhayyur and talfīq within and beyond the four Sunni schools of law, see Ibrahim, Ahmed Fekry, Pragmatism in Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
8 On the long shadow these thinkers continue to cast on the study of Islamic modernism sui generis, see, for example, Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1839 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Kerr, Malcolm H., Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad ʿAbduh and Rashid Rida (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition; and Lauzière, Henri, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 This also serves to distinguish Islamic legal modernism as the work of Muslim jurists on behalf of sovereign Muslim governments from colonial codes such as the Anglo-Muhammadan Law or Le droit musulman-algérien. For a succinct overview of European projects to codify Islamic law as a strategy of imperial rule, see Hallaq, Wael B., An Introduction to Islamic Law(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 85–93, 110–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Images of the original Aman Allah Codes, including the 1923 Constitution, can be found in the spectacular collections of the Afghanistan Digital Library (hereafter ADL), available at http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/index.html. For a list of niẓāmnāmihs promulgated during Aman Allah's reign, see Poullada, Reform and Rebellion, 99–103.
11 For sample codes regulating Afghan state officials, see ADL-0609 (Kitabchih-i Qanun-i Karguzari-i Hukkam. Kabul: Dar al-Saltanih, 1298/1919–20); ADL-0600 (Kitabchih-i Dastur al-ʿAmal-i Mahsul-i Tujjaran. Kabul: Dar al-Saltanih, 1298/1919–20); ADL-0064 (Nizamnamih-i Baladiyyih. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1924); and ADL-0671 (Nizamnamih-i Usul-i Muhakamat-i Jazaʾiyyih-i Maʾmurin Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Shirkat-i Rafiq, 1305/1926).
12 Adamec, Historical Dictionary, 58.
13 Article 41. Procedures for the election of State Council members as well as local officials are detailed in a separate code, Law of Basic Governmental Organization (Nizamnamih-i Tashkilat-i Asasiyyih), also promulgated in 1923. ADL-0075 (Nizamnamih-i Tashkilat-i Asasiyyih. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1923).
14 Articles 21, 33–34, 50–57.
15 On the influence of constitutional revolutions in Turkey and Iran in Afghanistan, see Tarzi, Amin, “Islam and Constitutionalism in Afghanistan,” Journal of Persianate Studies 5 (2012): 205–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nawid, Senzil K., Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan, 1919–29 (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 44–49 Google Scholar; and Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 41–49.
16 For an alternative perspective on the 1923 Constitution’s prominent features, see Chishti, Nighat, Constitutional Development in Afghanistan (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1998), 22–23 Google Scholar.
17 On “customary law” in Afghanistan, see Ahmed, Faiz, “Shariʿa, Custom, and Statutory Law: Comparing State Approaches to Islamic Jurisprudence, Tribal Autonomy, and Legal Development in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Global Jurist 7 (2007): 1–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Here, the Aman Allah Codes present intriguing parallels and contrasts with the British Raj's Frontier Crimes Regulation. Issued in 1872, the latter was designed to exclude frontier tribes from the imperial judiciary, while managing them through similar notions of fixed “tradition.” See Hopkins, Benjamin D., “The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality,” Journal of Asian Studies 74 (2015): 369–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 See, for example, Poullada, Reform and Rebellion, 93–94 (“Amanullah employed some French advisers in his legislative program”); Chishti, Constitutional Development, 21 (“Amanullah Khan employed some French Advisors to help him in his legislative programme”); and Daniel Balland, “Afghanistan, Political History,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, 22 July 2011, accessed 20 June 2016, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/afghanistan-x-political-history (“With the aid of French and Turkish experts, more than seventy ordinances [neẓām-nāma] were published”). Although Gregorian mentions the founding of the binational archaeological mission Delegation Archeologique Française en Afghanistan in 1922, and the presence of five French teachers at Kabul's Lycée Istiqlal, no legal connections are made. Gregorian, Emergence, 239.
20 It is important to note that some niẓāmnāmihs also bypass secondary Islamic legal sources to quote the Qurʾan directly, as in Article 1 of the 1920 Marriage Code (citing 4:3 to restrict polygamy).
21 For example, as I explore later in this article, it is possible that the committee's work was divided among different classes of jurists within the lawmaking commission—some codes delegated to clerics working squarely within a Hanafi fiqh interpretive tradition, and others to courtiers and bureaucrats drawing from more mundane and eclectic sources, such as the administrative codes or municipal ordinances of other states.
22 ADL-0518 (Nizamnamih-i ʿArusi, Nikah, wa-Khatnasuri. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1923).
23 See definitions of these terms in n. 4.
24 The synthesis of national sovereignty, general will, and an emphatic commitment to upholding the shariʿa is a notable parallel between the Ottoman (1876, 1908) and Afghan Constitutions. On Young Ottoman and Young Turk constitutionalism, see, respectively, Mardin, Şerif, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Sohrabi, Nader, Revolution and Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For similar hybridity in Afghanistan's 1923 Constitution, see Articles 3–4, 41–42, and 72.
25 On the Young Afghan movement, see Nawid, Religious Response, 44–46, 146–47; and Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 41–48. For relatively more detailed scholarship in Persian, see ʿAbd al-Hay Habibi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat dar Afghanistan (Kabul: Ihsani, 1346/1967–68); Puhanyar, Masʿud, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat wa-Qurbaniyan-i Istibdad dar Afghanistan (Peshawar: Saba Kitabkhanih, 1375/1996–97)Google Scholar; and Hashimi, Sayyid Saʿd al-Din, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat-khwahi dar Afghanistan (Kabul: Shura-yi Farhangi-i Afghanistan, 2001)Google Scholar.
26 Fufalzai, ʿAziz al-Din, Dar al-Qazaʾ dar Afghanistan (Kabul: Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i ʿUlum-i Islami, 1369/1990–91)Google Scholar.
27 Fufalzai, Dar al-Qazaʾ, 518–19. The committee is also synonymously described in official records from Aman Allah's reign and in the historiography as the Advisory Council (Majlis-i Shura/Hayʾat-i Shura), the Legislative Council (Mahfil-i Qanun), the Administrative Law Forum (Markaz-i Qanunguzari), and the National Council (Shura-yi Milli). Saikal, Modern Afghanistan, 73; Puhanyar, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat, 245; Nawid, Religious Response, 79. While Fufalzai bases his list on a rare manuscript of 1920, Tarikh-i Qazaʾ dar Afghanistan, this article corroborates and adds to his list by cross-checking it with declassified sources from Afghan, British Indian, and Ottoman archives.
28 The Islamic Scholars Division was also known as the Mahfil-i Shura-yi ʿUlum (Islamic Sciences Council). Nawid, Religious Response, 79.
29 Comparable “repugnancy clauses” are employed in the Constitutions of Pakistan (1973) and Iran (1979, 1989). Pakistan's Federal Shariʿa Court and Iran's Council of Guardians are empowered to strike down legislation deemed to contravene shariʿa. Article 227, Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (1973), accessed 6 July 2016, http://www.na.gov.pk/uploads/documents/1333523681_951.pdf; Articles 4, 72, 91–99, and 112, Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1989), in Papan-Matin, Firoozeh, trans., “The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1989 edition),” Iranian Studies 47 (2014): 159–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Unlike in Afghanistan, however, in Pakistan and Iran shariʿa tribunals review legislation after bills are ratified by their national parliaments, rather than before.
30 Puhanyar, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat, 53; Nawid, Religious Response, 36–37. On the cross-border ties between Kabul's Madrasa-i Shahi and the Dar al-ʿUlum seminary in Deoband, India, where a number of Afghan ulema and students were trained beginning in the late 19th century, see, Roy, Olivier, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58 Google Scholar.
31 Habibi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat, 54–55. For samples of his publications, see ADL-0318 (Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wasiʿ Qandahari. ʿUnwan-i Asasi Diniyat dar Mazmun-i Taʿlimi Falsafih-i Islami Qurʾani wa-Hikmat-i Yamani Imani. Kabul: Dar al-Saltanih, 1300/1921); ADL-0319 (Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wasiʿ Qandahari. Kulliyat wa-Istillihat Fiqhiyya. Kabul: Dar al-Saltanih, 1300/1922); and ADL-0332 (Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wasiʿ Qandahari. Yuzani Pashtu/Khas-i Afghani. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Wizarat-i Jalilih-i Maʿarif, 1301/1922–23).
32 Puhanyar, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat, 53–75; Habibi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat, 276–77.
33 Habibi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat, 52. As Wali Ahmadi, Nushin Arbabzadah, and others have shown, associates of the Kabul court read Muslim modernist periodicals in Persian not only from Iran but also from as far as Calcutta and Constantinople, such as Habl al-Matin and Akhtar-i Istanbul. Access to foreign news in a familiar vernacular enabled Afghan constitutionalists to closely follow revolutionary events in Iran and the Ottoman Empire between 1905 and 1909, and protests in British Bengal around the same time, while shaping a distinctive national literature and politics of their own. Ahmadi, Wali, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (New York: Routledge, 2008), 47–48 Google Scholar; Arbabzadah, Nushin, “Modernizing, Nationalizing, Internationalizing: How Mahmud Tarzi's Hybrid Identity Transformed Afghan Literature,” in Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between Diaspora and Nation, ed. Green, Nile and Arbabzadah, Nushin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 31–66 Google Scholar; James M. Caron, “Cultural Histories of Pashtun Nationalism, Public Participation, and Social Inequality in Monarchic Afghanistan, 1905–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Department of South Asia Studies, 2009), 26. Beyond these privileges, the more elite members of the Young Afghan movement often benefitted from political protection not available to their less connected associates.
34 See, for example, ADL-0642 (Nizamnamih-i Jaza-yi ʿUmumi. Kabul: Matbaʿ-i Daʾirih-i Tahrirat-i Majlis-i ʿAliyyih-i Vuzaraʾ, 1302/1923).
35 Hashimi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat-khwahi, 276.
36 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul, Turkey (hereafter BOA)-DH.SAİDd 110/493 (1298 Z 29); BOA-İ.AZN 72/1325Ca-28 (1325 Ca 15); BOA-EV.VKF 4/12 (1313 Z 29).
37 On the rise of the late Ottoman Nizamiye (civil law) courts where Bedri Bey served the majority of his posts in Istanbul, see Rubin, Avi, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 BOA-DH.SAİDd 110/493. Additional insights into Bedri Bey's educational and professional history not found in the Siccil-i Umumi are in BOA-İ.DUİT 39/55 (1334 B 09); BOA-İ.DUİT 40/36 (1334 B 11); BOA-İ.DUİT 40/39 (1336 Ra 05); BOA-İ.AZN 72/1325Ca-28; BOA-İ.AZN 106/1330Ca-15 (1330 Ca 12); and BOA-DH.HMŞ 3/1-112 (1337 C 01).
39 On Cemal's mission to Kabul and Enver's related activities in Turkistan, see Yamauchi, Masayuki, The Green Crescent under the Red Star: Enver Pasha in Soviet Russia (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1991)Google Scholar; Saray, Mehmet, Afganistan ve Türkler (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1987)Google Scholar; and Çavdar, Ayşe, “Türk Paşası Afganistan'da,” Atlas 115 (2002): 138–50Google Scholar.
40 According to most sources, Bedri Bey held the most prominent rank on the committee, serving as director/president (raʾīs). There is minor disagreement over his exact title. Fufalzai, the only author to describe him in a deputy position, states that Bedri Bey was “vice-president and member of this commission” (nāʾib-i raʾ īs wa ʿazū-i īn mahfil).
41 Who's Who in Afghanistan (Simla: General Staff of India, 1920), 47; Hashimi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat-khwahi, 274. It is likely that ʿAbd al-Ghani acquired Persian and English here in addition to his native Urdu and Punjabi. On the survival of Persian learning (after a precipitous 19th-century decline) and the role of Urdu as a lingua franca for Afghans and Indian Muslims, see Green, Nile, “The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian ‘Urdusphere,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 479–508 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 Who's Who in Afghanistan (1920), 47.
43 Adamec, Historical Dictionary, 7; Hashimi, Junbish-i Mashrutiyat-khwahi, 274–76; Puhanyar, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat, 106–10.
44 India Office Records, London, UK-R/12/LIB/107, 19.
45 Who's Who in Afghanistan (1920), 47; Puhanyar, Zuhur-i Mashrutiyat, 98, 106–10; Adamec, Historical Dictionary, 7. Publishing under the Anglicized “Abdul Ghani,” he also authored two works on contemporary political economy: A Review of the Political Situation in Central Asia (Lahore: Aziz Publishers, 1921); and The Punjab Industrial Labour (Lahore: Punjab Co-operative Printing Press, 1929).
46 It does not appear that the CLC included any Shiʿa within its ranks. In light of Afghanistan's substantial Shiʿi minority, this is undoubtedly a structural weakness in the constitution-making process. Following the violent outbreak of rebellion in Khost province in 1924 against Aman Allah's reforms, a powerful group of clerics upped the ante by clamoring for a constitutional amendment naming the Hanafi school as the official madhhab of Afghanistan. Their successful motion to pass the amendment at a 1924 Loya Jirga convened by Aman Allah served to check not only Shiʿi counterparts but also Salafi iconoclasts and other Sunni schools of law.
47 See n. 8. While not denying the profound impact of modern Salafi thinkers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh and Rashid Rida on the development of new religious and political ideologies based on Islam in the 20th century, this article argues that other strands of Islamic modernism—particularly among jurists and policymakers who opted to work within the four traditional schools of Sunni Islam—have not been given sufficient attention. For a notable exception, see Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
48 Moaddel, Mansoor, Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism: Episode and Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2 Google Scholar.
49 The most incisive articulation of this argument is found in Hallaq, Wael, Shariʿa: Theory, Practice, Transformations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 357–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 57–75 Google Scholar; Asad, Formations, 205–56; and most recently, Hussin, Iza, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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51 One might ask whether it was significant that the composition of Aman Allah's law commission was entirely Muslim in a predominantly Muslim country such as Afghanistan. (One might expect an English law commission to be significantly Anglican, for example). The significance of the confessional make up of the commission is that it contradicts historiographical claims—or presumptions, rather—that European advisors wrote the Nizamnamihha-yi Amaniyyih. In other words, that Aman Allah's law commission was comprised of Afghans, Turks, and Indian Muslims underscores that it was not European legal advisors who codified Afghanistan's laws (a practice followed to varying degrees in other Muslim states at the time). In this way the national composition of Aman Allah's lawmaking commission underscored his approach to lawmaking as a matter of intense national pride whereby the free, independent, and “Islamic” dimensions of the committee could not be compromised.
52 For Afghan and Indo-Muslim responses to the Turkish Grand Assembly's abolition of the caliphate, see Nawid, Religious Response, 127–30; Qureshi, M. Naeem, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 374–86Google Scholar; and Enayat, Hamid, Modern Islamic Political Thought (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2008), 51–61 Google Scholar.
53 The 1924 Khost Rebellion and 1928–29 revolts that toppled Aman Allah's government have been the subject of far more scholarly attention than the early years of Aman Allah's reign and will not be recounted here. See, for example, Nawid, Religious Response, 81–185; Poullada, Reform and Rebellion, 160–213; and Stewart, Rhea, Fire in Afghanistan 1914–1929 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), 251–85, 329–567.Google Scholar
54 On amendments to the most controversial niẓāmnāmihs passed at the 1924 Loya Jirga, and again in 1928–29, see Nawid, Religious Response, 106–13, 168–69.
55 Poullada, Reform and Rebellion, 92–93.
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57 Burak, Guy, The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), quote from Baki Tezcan on back coverCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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59 In the same genre as the Aman Allah Codes, therefore, are the Mecelle, the Ottoman Constitution of 1876, as well as the legal manuals and codes of Egyptian jurists Muhammad Qadri Pasha (1821–88) and ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (1895–1971). See, for example, Ayoub, Samy, “The Mecelle, Sharia, and the Ottoman State: Fashioning and Refashioning of Islamic Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2 (2015): 121–46Google Scholar; and Shalakany, Amr, “Between Identity and Redistribution: Sanhuri, Genealogy and the Will to Islamise,” Islamic Law and Society 8 (2001): 201–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 For a comparison to 19th-century codification projects in a non-Islamicate anticolonial context, see Minow, Matthew, “The Power of Codification in Latin America: Simon Bolivar and the Code Napoleon,” Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law 8 (2000): 83–116 Google Scholar.