Background: First published in 1967, Afghanistan in the Course of History was written by Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar, a historian, journalist, and political activist who played a leading role in the country’s democratic movement.
The famous historical work that Mir Gholam Mohammad Ghobar wrote has been contested since it was first published in 1967. Broadly speaking, three groups have spoken out against Ghobar’s account of Afghanistan’s political history.
First, there are those who consider the concentration of power and authoritarian rule necessary — at least for a transitional period. During Ghobar’s lifetime, this group imprisoned, tortured, and exiled him, while preventing the publication of his ideas. After his death, they made sustained efforts to discredit the history he wrote.
Second, there are the feudal aristocracy and ethnic nationalists. This group has treated Ghobar’s History opportunistically. At certain moments, when they themselves were marginalized or under pressure, they used Ghobar’s History as a propaganda tool against those in power. Yet, when faced with national and democratic efforts, they turned against Ghobar and his narrative, attacking him from ethnic, regional, and cultural positions.
Third, there are the religious conservatives and the mujahedeen. They, too, have been hostile toward Ghobar’s History. During the years of jihad, some individuals and factions within the mujahedeen did read Ghobar’s work, searching within it for arguments to justify the chaos and jihadist violence they generated. They relied on Ghobar’s writings to explain the causes of state collapse and the supposed necessity of armed struggle. Because the mujahedeen and religious conservatives were politically and economically aligned with ethnic nationalists, the feudal aristocracy, and opponents of civil transformation, they ultimately viewed Ghobar as alien to their idea of Afghanistan — and as an enemy.
Despite this, all political currents have taken Ghobar’s History seriously. A number of intellectuals across a diverse range of political camps have attempted to declare either their alignment with it or their opposition to it. However, after the mujahideen’s victory in 1992, the study of history and a critical, analytical engagement with the past faded. During the two decades of the Islamic Republic, which marked the return to power of all three groups opposed to Ghobar’s History — authoritarians and feudal and ethnic elites, and the mujahedeen and commanders — critical and analytical approaches to history were falling out of favour in official circles and among political and cultural elites. Instead, the educated class became preoccupied with searching for their own tribal, regional, and factional histories in interviews, newspapers, speeches, and the memoirs of ethnic leaders and local narrators.
Although the Islamic Republic provided a relatively open and semi-democratic space in Kabul and some other areas for segments of society, it was largely an alliance of mujahedeen, ethnic nationalists, and authoritarian forces. Progressive forces — those who sought fundamental change in economic, cultural, and political relations in favor of building a democratic and secular society — were pushed to the margins and denied real opportunities to act. As a result, the progressive movement that had taken shape during the first half of the twentieth century in our country was forgotten by the final third of that century, swept away by the whirlwind of the Taliban’s primitive rule and the formalism of the Islamic Republic.
Now, the Taliban have returned to power. As non-Taliban political and cultural circles once again intensely debate the experience of a century of state-building and governance, the substance of Ghobar’s History has regained renewed relevance. Some see his analysis of the earliest efforts to form a national state as illuminating and instructive. Others accuse him of supporting “Afghanization,” aligning with the dominant current of nationalism, ignoring national oppression, and even being “complicit” with authoritarian rulers.
In this essay, I do not address the validity of these accusations. Yet the very existence of such charges attests to the importance of Ghobar’s History and demonstrates that his work has been influential: At every moment when the formation of a national government becomes a pressing issue, both his supporters and his critics are reminded of him and his most famous work.
What is Ghobar’s History?
The formal title of what is commonly known as Ghobar’s History is Afghanistan in the Course of History. As the title suggests, Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar sought to trace the political history of the land now called Afghanistan from antiquity to the end of the first half of the twentieth century. At the time, a modern approach to historiography—what Ghobar himself called analysis and causation—had become prevalent. Historians were no longer content with providing encyclopedic information alone; they also aimed to examine the factors and causes behind historical events.
In the introduction he wrote in June 1967 for the first volume of Afghanistan in the Course of History, Ghobar referred to transformations in the “method of writing history,” stating that “the agent of history is the human being, and the human being is shaped by his or her social conditions.” While welcoming new developments in historiography, he also pointed to a major weakness, arguing that the triumph of militaristic and exploitative systems in the modern era had “cast its shadow over human life, art, history, and literature,” giving history a new appearance and turning it into a commercial product. In this sense, Ghobar wrote the political history of Afghanistan using an analytical and causal method, but deliberately kept it non-commercial and free from the influence of exploiters and militarists.
Although Ghobar briefly described the social and cultural conditions of the people of Afghanistan in different periods, he emphasized that his work should be read as a political history of Afghanistan rather than a social one. According to him, the social history of Afghanistan could not be written separately from the “social history of Central Asia (Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, northern India, and others),” and the “current political trajectory and nationalistic fanaticisms — legacies of the nineteenth century — prevent such an undertaking.” He expressed hope that “one day, through the efforts of the true representatives of these great masses — Aryans, Turks, Mongols, and others — who collectively have played a prominent role in the history of world civilization, such obstacles will be disregarded, and that by compiling the social history of the peoples of Central Asia, the path toward writing the history of the Asian continent as a whole will be paved.”
Ghobar was not a proponent of narrow-minded nationalism. On the contrary, he critiqued what he called the “disease of nationalism,” and sought, within the constraints of the conditions of his time, to write a “concise and succinct” political history of the land of Afghanistan. He hoped that future generations would write a comprehensive history of our people within a broader civilizational and geographical framework. Another important point is that Ghobar understood himself to be an anti-colonial activist and wrote his book from that vantage point. He believed in freedom, independence, and justice. Ghobar viewed both colonial and nationalist historiography as a form of illness. In the introduction to his book, he wrote: “When the disease of European nationalism stood alongside capitalism, the political history of the world also took on a misleading form, and historians in each country attributed all virtues exclusively to their own nation and assigned all faults to their rivals.”
Which part of Ghobar’s History should one read today?
All chapters of Ghobar’s book are rich with lessons. His sociological perspective, extensive and up-to-date information, and rigorous research and analytical method have made Afghanistan in the Course of History a comprehensive educational work for readers interested in history, politics, and sociology. In the first chapter of the first volume, Ghobar provides a general introduction to Afghanistan in the 1960s, outlining the country’s geography, borders, population, demographic composition, and social conditions, as well as its cultural, health, and economic situation.
Chapters two through 11 are devoted to the period from antiquity to the early eighteenth century. Reading these sections is valuable for general knowledge. However, the story of our modern history, and what has made Afghanistan in the Course of History and Ghobar’s writing truly distinctive and enduring, begins with Chapter 12. It is here that Ghobar narrates the encounter of the people of Afghanistan with the phenomena of the modern age. He devoted more than half of the first volume to this one chapter, offering a relatively well-documented and in-depth analysis of the country’s political transformations from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century.
For this period, Ghobar had access to a greater number of documents and sources. He portrays the formation of our contemporary society as forged in the crucible of multifaceted transformations: the pressure of presence and invasion by colonial states, competition among feudal elites for power, and the struggle to establish a national state.
Readers with limited time who wish to move directly to the political history of Afghanistan from the emergence of the first centralized state — one that approximates the modern definition of statehood at the end of the nineteenth century — can begin reading from the seventh or eighth section of Chapter 12. More than 200 pages of the book are devoted to analyzing Afghanistan’s political history from the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan to the end of Amanullah Khan’s rule. Had Ghobar had access to today’s publishing resources, Afghanistan in the Course of History might well have been published in several volumes, with these 200 pages forming a separate volume of its own.
The second volume: Understanding today
Ghobar wrote Afghanistan in the Course of History under conditions of political persecution. Although he managed to publish the first volume of his book at the Public Printing House in Kabul in 1967, when Hashim Maiwandwal was prime minister, the state did not permit its distribution and confiscated copies immediately after their printing. Ghobar passed away on February 5, 1978, just months before the Saur coup. He did not live to see his book being circulated within Afghanistan. The confiscated edition was eventually released for sale in 1978 by the Khalq Party regime. According to a note appended to the second volume, the regime “realized the strong anti-foreign domination spirit of the book and sought to halt its distribution” three days after authorizing the sale. They were too late. Nearly all 3,000 printed copies had been purchased by the public, leaving nothing left to confiscate.
The second volume of Afghanistan in the Course of History was written in 1973 and published in the United States in 1999. After Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar’s death in 1978, responsibility for publishing and distributing his works fell to his son, Hashmat Khalil Ghobar.
Parts of Chapter Eight of the first volume and the entirety of the second volume are devoted to a period Ghobar himself lived through. In these sections, he offers a comprehensive and rare analysis of Afghanistan’s political transformations, candidly exposing domestic authoritarian figures and foreign interventions. The second volume begins with the “chaotic government of Habibullah Kalakani” and concludes with an analysis of the “changing social conditions and democratic and national political struggles” during the premiership of Shah Mahmud Khan.
A significant portion of the second volume is dedicated to political struggles against authoritarianism and to the organizational and party activities of that era. The book documents and analyzes our society’s earliest experiences with elections, councils, independent media, labor unions, demonstrations, and political organization. It ends with a sentence that painfully echoes our present condition: “After the end of this period of theatrical democracy — whose purpose was to discredit and doom democracy in Afghanistan — once again a single individual … openly resumed the former severe authoritarianism, and in the end the fate of the country, as before, remains uncertain, dark, and unknown.”
Reading Afghanistan in the Course of History, especially its second volume, helps us draw conclusions about the 20-year experience of the Islamic Republic, understand the causes of the failure of this “theatrical democracy,” and grasp the return of harsh authoritarian rule under the Taliban. If we seek to analyze our present condition in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, then we should all read Ghobar’s History.
Younus Negah is a researcher and writer from Afghanistan who is currently in exile in Turkey.
