St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies 49 Panel Two. Written Traditions, Literature and Folklore of Afghanistan... official historical identity for Afghanistan based on its pre-Islamic past. This paper analyses this process by tracing the emergence of the new historiography through the career of its chief promoter, Ahmad ʿAli Kuhzad, as curator of the National Museum (founded in 1931) and director of the Afghan Historical Society (founded in 1942). Through placing Kuhzad in these official institutional settings and summarizing his major works, the paper shows how traditional Islamic historiography was challenged by an imported and amended version of world civilizational history. In the decades after independence in 1919, this new historical vision allowed the young Afghan nation-state to stake its civilizational claims on an international stage through the connection of the new historiography to Afghanistan’s diplomatic missions. The paper builds on the approach to Afghan Persian and Pashto historiography that was developed in my recent edited volume, Afghan History through Afghan Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2016). By examining a key and previously un-researched period in Afghan intellectual history, this paper brings to light the mid-century decades before the Taliban’s iconoclastic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas to reveal a period when the Buddhist and wider pre-Islamic past was celebrated as Afghanistan’s official history by state cultural institutions that re-definedAfghanistan as ‘Aryana’. Mateusz M. Kłagisz, Khalil Ahmad Arab (Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian Universty, Cracow, Poland) Education in the First Afghan Short Story Pānzdah sāl-e qabl by Moxles-Zādeh The firstAfghan short story Pānzdah sāl-e qabl ( Fifteen Years Ago ) byMoxles-Zādeh (the pen-name of Mohammad-Hāšem Šāyeq, 1264–1333/1885–1954) was published in 1311A.H. (A.D. 1932/3) in the Ma ǧ alle-ye erfān ( Erfān Magazine ) . It is narrated from the first person point of view in which the narrator recalls the time when he, as a small boy, faces a crucial changeover in his life, viz ., a pre-school education by a local mullah. We accompany the protagonist as he is sent to the mosque to learn. He is afraid of being punished by the mullah for nothing, keen on learning of the alphabet and reading some passages of the Qur ʼ an . Later on, he is enrolled in a school, then chosen along with other students to attend the Habibiyyah High School in Kabul and finally becomes a civil servant. From a literarily perspective, this 15 page novelette is following short story’s pattern, demonstrates modern narrative techniques that help readers to use their imagination to visualize situations 1 . However, the Pānzdah sāl-e qabl ʼs schooling 1 Bižan F . Noxostin dāstānhā-ye moʼāsere-ye dari. Kābol, 1367; Mohammadi M.–H. Tārix-e tahlili-ye dāstānnevisi-ye Afqānestan. Tehrān, 1388.