The Genesis of the Afghan Mashrūṭah Movement

Abstract

This article studies the global and transnational history of the Afghan constitutionalist (mashrūṭah) movement in the early twentieth century. It aims to contribute to the intellectual history of Afghanistan and examine it within the history of modernity, Islam, and reforms in the region, particularly in the late Ottoman Empire. It rejects the notion that the Afghan mashrūṭah movement was an indistinct group of people with a unitary ideology and argues that the Afghan mashrūṭah was an intellectually, socially, ethnically, politically diverse and complex movement, the product of intellectual, political, religious, and economic interactions of Afghans with multifaceted global ideologies such as colonialism, nationalism, Ittihad-i Islam, and top-down modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.