St Petersburg International Conference of Afghan Studies

84 Санкт-Петербургская международная конференция по афганистике Секция 5. Паттерны политической жизни Афганистана и трансграничных регионов... revered tribal Shaykh Rahmkar in 1653, the Khattak stāna had been consistently at odds with the khānkhel about the distribution of power. In the Khattaks’ chronicle written by Khushhal Khan (d. 1689) and his grandsonAfzal Khan (d. circa 1740/41) the earliest accounts of this conflict go back to 1672, though a tribal folklore story, recorded in the end of the 19th century, tells of even earlier confrontations between the two subdivisions. The conflict reached its peak in 1724 when a routine financial disagreement about road tolls developed into a full-scale war for power. A detailed if patchy and unfinished account of these events makes up the final section of the Khattaks’ chron- icle, included byAfzal Khan, the head of a conflicting party, in his historiographical compilation in Pashto Tārīkh-i Mura ṣṣaʿ . Despite being for clear reasons tendentious and ideologically biased, Afzal’s account provides a unique first-hand description of almost all componenets of the conflict: 1) individual and collective participants (key actors, associates, military allies, interested parties, those on the wings, potential arbitrators or mediators); 2) their motives, interests, objectives (financial and political); 3) the conflict dynamics (the conflict phases, demarcated by a one-month period in February-March when, legitimized by a jirga ’s convention, the sheikhs exercised supreme administrative power); 4) forms (diplomacy, military pressure, open warfare); 5) instruments (oral negotiations, correspondences, declarative petitions for adjudication, even within the Shariʿa jurisdiction, alliance making); 6) ways of settlement (legal reconciliation via tribal customary regulations or official arbitration by imperial authorities, “supra-legal” suppression by force). Strict temporal and spatial localization of narrated events pertaining to this partic- ular conflict well places it in the broader context of the Pashtun and regional history. The case recorded by Afzal Khan Khattak in 1724 provides a close insight into the historical realities of the evolution of the so-called Pashtun tribal Islam, and may serve as a definite pattern for comparative research of similar phenomena as well as of other conflict lines in the Pashtun tribal society. Florence Shahabi (SOAS, University of London, London, UK) Afghan Intellectuals and the writing of the 1964 Constitution Afghanistan’s 1964 constitution marked the start of its ‘decade of democracy,’ and the launch of what was thought to be a new kind of government and an era of socio-economic modernization. Afigure at one remove from the constitution was the Kabul University professor of Western philosophy, Baha’ al-Din Majruh. Celebrated as the author of the literary masterpiece, Azhdaha-ye Khodi, his academic writing and later resistance reportage from Peshawar often goes unmentioned. Along with