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# A Son of Two Soils
- URL: https://www.kasurian.com/jadids-afghanistan/
- Published: 2026-10-04T12:08:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-04T12:08:46.000Z
- Description: The story of how Ottoman reformers and Jadid intellectuals like Hashim Shayeq tried to help build a modern state and literary culture in Afghanistan.
- Author: Kasurian
- Tags: Younus Ejazi, Autumn 2026, History

At the turn of the 20th century, a young Bukharan student named Hashim Shayeq Afandi joined [the Jadid reform movement that was stirring through Central Asia](https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-reform/), then under Russian imperial rule. The Jadids believed Islamic renewal would come through the pursuit of knowledge: reforming schools, reviving the press, and mastering the new sciences, so Muslim societies could shape this new, industrial civilisation from within and secure their sovereignty. Within decades, their ideas would spread from the Ferghana Valley to Istanbul and, in Shayeq's case, from Bukhara to Kabul.

Kabul offered Shayeq an opportunity to put his Jadid education to work for a reforming Muslim state. Afghanistan lay beyond the movement's principal centres, but its court had already begun drawing on teachers, writers, and technical specialists from elsewhere in the Muslim world. Between the Russian and British empires, Afghan rulers sought to preserve their autonomy while acquiring the knowledge and institutions needed to strengthen the country.

The revolutions of 1917 and the upheavals that followed changed the political world in which the Jadids worked. Some entered new governments and Soviet institutions, hoping to advance their educational and cultural programmes. Their room for independent action subsequently narrowed, and many were eventually imprisoned or killed in the Stalinist purges. Afghanistan followed a different course after securing control over its foreign affairs in 1919\. Its reformers developed a constitutional framework, expanded modern schooling, and recruited expertise from abroad. Kabul became a meeting place for exiled intellectuals, Ottoman officers, and others displaced by collapsing empires.

Shayeq was one of the intellectuals who helped shape this changing Afghanistan. Trained in Bukhara’s *madrasas* and Istanbul’s institutions of higher education, he came to Kabul as a diplomat and stayed to work in education, editing, and literature. In 1932, he published *Panzdah Sal Qabl*, an early work of modern Afghan short fiction.

## Early Formation: From Bukhara to Istanbul

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-d6089a18-6179-4aaf-8d6c-972955537ae1-1-1.jpeg)

Hashim Shayeq Afandi in his younger years.

Born Muhammad Hashim in Marghilan in 1886, Shayeq was the son of *Damla* Muhammad Yaqub Mukhlis. His family moved to Bukhara while he was young, where he studied at the Divan Begi and Mir Arab *madrasas*; the latter had been a centre of Islamic learning since its construction in the 1530s under the Uzbek Khan Ubaydullah Khan Shaybani. There, Shayeq studied Arabic, Persian, Islamic jurisprudence (*fiqh*), logic, and theology, and became a *hafiz* (memoriser) of the Quran.

It was in Bukhara that the Jadid movement, which spread rapidly through Turkestan under the influence of Ismail Gasprinsky's *Usul-i Jadid* (‘The New Method’) and local reformers like Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy and Munavvar Qori, reached him. Gasprinsky’s new method became the intellectual spine of an entire generation's ambitions: the conviction that Islamic civilisation could renew itself only through reformed schooling, a living press, and a literature that spoke to the present rather than only the past. In Bukhara, Behbudiy's publication *Ayina*, published out of Samarkand, was the movement's sharpest voice, circulating through Turkestan as both journal and manifesto. Shayeq was among its readers and correspondents. In issue 12 of 1913, on the final pages of the magazine, a published reply appears, headed *Javob Buxoroda janob Shoiqqa!*, meaning "Reply to Shayeq in Bukhara!", responding to his complaint that his copies and books had not been reaching him. Behbudiy's editorial office answered with characteristic directness, suggesting that someone along the postal route might have been helping himself to what was not his. 

It is a small exchange, almost comic in its mundanity, but it places Shayeq squarely inside the Jadid network, not as a sympathiser at the margins but as someone whose name was already known to the editors of the movement's principal journal, and to whom books were being dispatched as a matter of course.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-f6f76068-f317-4256-ac69-f656e3313df8-2-1.jpeg)

The reply to Shayeq in Bukhara, published in **Ayina* magazine, issue 12, 1913\. Alisher Navoi Library, Tashkent.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-68af6a69-233e-4170-88e4-6a6f6528e764-1.jpeg)

An article with a portrait sketch of Hashim Shayeq Afandi, titled **Ikki Mamlakatning Farzandi* (Son of Two Nations), published in **Gulistan* magazine, Tashkent, 1998.

In Tashkent, meanwhile, Munavvar Qori, whose reformist energy would later be channelled into building the foundations of modern Uzbek education, expressed the same urgency in a different register: plainer, more organisational, no less determined. In fact, archival materials in the Alisher Navoi Library in Tashkent confirm Shayeq's close correspondence with Behbudiy, one of the movement's foremost leaders. The Jadids regarded him as one of their own trained cadres and, in 1911, the Jadid society chapter *Tarbiyayi Atfol* selected him specifically for advanced study in Istanbul, a selection that was less a scholarship than a commission, an investment the movement fully intended to reclaim.

## Between Istanbul and the Caucasus

When Hashim Shayeq arrived in Istanbul in 1911, the city was still being reshaped by the constitutional revolution of 1908, in which the Committee of Union and Progress had played a leading role. The committee’s influence grew amid political conflict, and it consolidated its hold on government in 1913\. After seven years of education at the higher Pedagogical Institute in Istanbul, he returned through the Caucasus in 1918, as the First World War was coming to an end.

On that journey, Hashim Shayeq spent time in Baku at the request of local notables, where he taught the children of the elite, bought the 400 volumes that became his first library, and quietly started a family. There, as in Afghanistan, the Jadid movement [tried to build a modern state in Azerbaijan](https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-azerbaijan-republic/). The Jadids in Bukhara, however, insisted on his eventual return, since they had sent him to Turkey to gain a higher education for exactly that purpose. Naturally indebted to them for his schooling, he obeyed their call, but it also meant he would never return to Baku for his first wife, his young daughter Fayeqa Yaqubzada, or his books, as the movement did not want him to leave Bukhara again. They could not let their investment in him be lost, and this familial separation would shape much of his inner life. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-abad5e09-34a5-49e3-94f3-83869b9bc9c1.jpeg)

Amanullah Khan alongside Amir Alim Khan of Bukhara and members of the Afghan royal family, circa early 1920s.

In September 1920, the Red Army took Bukhara after shelling its historic citadel. The last Bukharan *amir*, Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, fled east and reached Afghanistan in 1921, where King Amanullah Khan gave him refuge. In October 1920, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was proclaimed, and Jadid reformers entered its government.

The Jadids, sensing an opportunity, set about to form a government in the new Bukhara People’s Soviet Republic, believing compromise with the Communists was possible—at least to buy time. Shayeq would serve briefly as its Minister of Foreign Affairs and acting Minister of Education. In the breathing space of that fragile new state, itself in spirit a Jadid project, Shayeq had formally asked Turkey for military instructors for the new state’s officers and army, and had opened his house to various Muslim reformers passing through the city. Munavvar Qori had stayed several days to draw on his judgement as a pedagogy specialist, wanting to know how the new method might be carried across the schools of Turkestan. 

The young republic would not have time to see his plans take root.

In the autumn of 1921, in what proved to be his last months in the city, a notable visitor arrived at his Bukhara home. Enver Pasha, the Young Turk commander and former Ottoman Minister of War, arrived via Baku and Ashgabat with a few of his old Union and Progress companions. Ottoman instructors had been drilling the troops of Amir Habibullah, Amanullah's father, since 1912; an Ottoman colonel ran the war college in Kabul, and from 1909 the Afghan army had been reorganised along visibly Ottoman lines. Enver stayed for 10 days in Shayeq's home before crossing into eastern Bukhara to join the Basmachi resistance against the Bolsheviks. Their weapons came from King Amanullah, whom Enver meant to install at the head of a confederation of Chinese Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Turkey as part of his pan-Turkic and Islamic ambitions.

That same year Shayeq was sent to Kabul as the plenipotentiary minister and ambassador extraordinary of Bukhara, becoming the last independent diplomatic voice of his country on Afghan soil. There he rejoined Muhammad Sharif Khoja, an old friend from his Bukhara *madrasa* days and his student years in Istanbul, who served as consul. The Kabul to which he had been posted was less a foreign capital than the southern terminus of the intellectual world he had spent his life within.

For more than a decade before his arrival, the Afghan court had quietly been receiving men of Shayeq’s milieu. One such reformer was Mahmud Tarzi, who would later become Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister and was widely remembered as the ‘father of Afghan journalism’. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had driven Tarzi’s family into exile in the 1880s. Tarzi returned to Afghanistan in the early 1900s, after more than two decades abroad, bringing experience of the intellectual and political life of the Ottoman world.

For decades, Tarzi had encouraged skilled Ottoman exiles, especially those in Egypt, to immigrate to help reform Afghanistan. His ceaseless activism helped to draw printers, military instructors, doctors, engineers, and scholars to the city. By the time Shayeq arrived in 1921, some three dozen Ottoman technocrats had passed through Kabul; several remained to serve the kingdom. Shayeq entered the capital at an auspicious time, when his education and network had immediate value.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-9963098f-a853-4fe5-9503-f9c98b4d1566.jpeg)

Mahmud Tarzi working on **Siraj Al-Akhbar*, the "Lamp of the News," Kabul.

The Afghan state that received these reformers was still being consolidated. Amir Abdur Rahman Khan had reigned from 1880 to 1901 and had spent two decades welding a scatter of tribal and regional powers into a single centralised state. He installed governors who answered to Kabul rather than lineage, built the first ministries and a standing army, and brought religious endowments under state control to curb the clergy's independent power. The state Abdur Rahman strengthened was coercive, but his reign substantially extended Kabul’s authority over regional and tribal powers and laid the foundations his successors would build on.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-11ba13e2-1d21-4b51-a191-6d316a9edc36-1.jpeg)

Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the Iron **Amir* of Afghanistan, 1880–1901.

His elder son, Habibullah Khan, succeeded him in 1901 and governed with a lighter hand, opening cautious windows onto the modern world: in 1903 he founded the country's first modern secondary school, the *Lycée* *Habibia*, modelled on the Aligarh College of British India and staffed in its early years by Indian and Ottoman teachers, a school in whose classrooms Shayeq would one day teach.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-b0719fa1-b7ed-4e8b-9b53-8415fac9ae0d-1.jpeg)

Amir Habibullah Khan at an art school in Kabul; under his reign, Tarzi's press and the **Lycée Habibia* were established.

The Ottoman influx had been in the making for a long time. Nasrullah Khan, Habibullah's younger brother, is often remembered as a conservative opponent of reform, but on the Ottoman question he was one of Tarzi's steadier allies at court. Tarzi had sought to recruit Ottoman experts since his return to Afghanistan, but his early approaches met with little success; when his letter finally reached then-CUP exiles in Cairo (at the time, as opponents of then-Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II), Habibullah's long stay in India delayed the answer. It was Nasrullah, deputising for his brother in the winter of 1907, who took it up and backed it, and Tarzi wrote to Cairo that the vice-regent believed no nation but the Ottomans could help Afghanistan in its ascent and progress. 

## Consolidating Power

In February 1919, Habibullah was assassinated, and Nasrullah was declared the new emir of Afghanistan at Jalalabad. His reign lasted a mere week. Habibullah's son Amanullah launched a coup against his uncle, secured Kabul, the treasury, and the army, and took the crown. Nasrullah was arrested and died in prison the following year.

Amanullah inherited educational initiatives begun under Habibullah and sought to expand them after taking power in 1919\. Under Habibullah, the court had supported both the *Habibia* and religious institutions, including *madrasas* drawing on scholars associated with Deoband. These approaches placed different emphasis on religious learning, modern subjects, and the organisation of schooling. Their coexistence in Kabul created opportunities for education, but also disagreements over its purposes and direction.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-3819d70e-b2fc-4cd1-bc1b-670cf4da4960-1-1-2-1.jpeg)

King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan.

Within months of his accession, Amanullah had fought the British Empire to a standstill in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, and, by the treaty signed at Rawalpindi in the summer of 1919, won the right to conduct his own foreign affairs. By November 1921, when Shayeq presented his credentials in Kabul, the British were about to formally seal the deal with a ‘treaty of friendship’, signed in the small palace of Otaq-e Zarnegar, on the edge of the old Murad Khani quarter. The 1919 settlement restored Afghanistan’s full control over its foreign affairs; the Anglo-Afghan treaty of 1921 reaffirmed its independence and established a new basis for relations with Britain. Earlier that same year, in Moscow, Afghanistan also concluded its first treaty with Mustafa Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement, formalising a relationship Tarzi's circle had quietly cultivated for 15 years. The Bukharan-Afghan tie that Shayeq represented was a third axis of an emerging post-imperial constellation of Muslim states.

Bukhara’s new republic offered the Jadids a brief chance to govern, but their room to act narrowed under Soviet control. The Soviets removed many Jadid officials in 1923, and dissolved the republic in 1924\. Shayeq’s diplomatic career in Kabul gave way to a longer career in Afghan education, where he was working by 1923\. Biographical accounts describe him considering a move to Turkey and Amanullah asking him to remain because Afghanistan needed his knowledge and experience. Kabul became his new home.

Although their dreams for Bukhara were dashed, the Jadid circle that had emerged from that city did not stop working. In June 1923, one member, Zeki Velidi Togan, arrived in Kabul and immediately sought out his former colleagues: Shayeq, Osman Kocaoğlu, the former head of the Bukharan government, Mirza Husamuddin and others. Over three days at the end of June, they plotted together on how to take their work forward. They agreed that Mustafa Shokay would represent Turkestan in Europe and, if the Afghan government permitted, Shayeq would do so in Japan. Shokay, already living in France, continued campaigning for Turkestani independence. In December 1929, he began publishing the journal *Yash Turkistan* in Berlin. Shayeq remained in Kabul, where his proposed journey to Japan never took place.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-e9c6104c-a07c-4da8-929f-54cfb85c9831.jpeg)

Mustafa Shokay, the exiled Turkestani political leader who edited **Yash Turkistan*, published in Berlin from 1929.

Amanullah also helped arrange Shayeq’s marriage to Rabia Ziya’i, the daughter of his cousin Sardar Azizullah Khan Qatil, a poet and member of the royal family who also served as Afghan ambassador to Iran. The marriage connected Shayeq to the Afghan royal dynasty. He and Rabia would raise five daughters: Nafisa, Sajia, Nazifa, Saliqa and Khalida, and a son, Abdul Makin, who died in infancy.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/Sardar-Azizullah-Khan-Qatil.jpg)

Sardar Azizullah Khan Qatil, son of Nasrullah Khan, poet, and Afghan ambassador to Iran.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/Rabia-Zia-i--young-.jpg)

Rabia Ziya'i, daughter of Sardar Azizullah Khan Qatil, and wife of Hashim Shayeq Afandi.

## Afghanistan's Brief Moment in the Sun

By 1923, Kabul was feverishly building the institutional skeleton of a modern state, building on the prior decade's work and renewed by the influx of intellectual and technical talent from across the Muslim world. An Educational Council that included the Ottoman cartoonist Mehmed Fazli alongside Indian and Afghan members had drafted the first *Habibia* regulations in 1913, inaugurated five primary schools, and opened the country's first teacher-training college. The *Dar Al-Ta'lif*, the bureau of compilation and translation that Hashim Shayeq would soon head, was part of this Ottoman-influenced machine of educational reform. The pace of change would, however, prove to be too fast, and in some instances, too radical for either the conservative components of Afghanistan or even the Jadids themselves. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-1d99677b-6c0f-4dea-b3e4-77194e6b33fe.jpeg)

School inauguration in Logar province, reflecting the expansion of modern education in Afghanistan that Shayeq Afandi helped shape.

For the next three decades, Shayeq worked across Afghanistan’s educational institutions. He advised the Ministry of Education, led the *Dar Al-Ta’lif*, and held senior roles in education and pedagogy. He taught at the *Lycée Habibia*, Kabul University’s Faculty of Letters, and institutions for women’s higher education. Modern schooling in Afghanistan preceded his arrival, but he became an important contributor to its development, helping prepare curricula, train students, and bring modern pedagogical ideas into teaching.

In Afghanistan, Shayeq could pursue educational reform with state support. Many Jadids in Turkestan had worked under censorship and restrictions on their schools. Under Amanullah, reformers could instead put educational ideas into law. The Basic Codes of the High State of Afghanistan, issued in the early 1920s with Turkish assistance, described the structure of a constitutional monarchy and the rights and duties of its citizens. The government avoided calling it a constitution and being mistaken for a replacement for *sharia*, which would have provoked conservative opposition. 

The government also planned compulsory schooling for children aged six to 11 and sent promising students abroad to Europe, including female students. This became one of Amanullah's signature policies and drove later events. At the urging of Queen Soraya and her mother, Asma Rasmiya (Tarzi's wife and a tireless champion of women's education), two girls' schools were inaugurated in 1921 alone, three months apart, on opposite banks of the Kabul River. Amanullah also began building *Dar Al-Aman*, a new capital intended to give his programme an architectural form. These ambitions created the institutions in which Shayeq could work, though the state still had to negotiate religious opposition and limited resources.

In May 1924, the Afghan Ministry of Education revived an earlier magazine titled *Ayna-i Irfan*, or “Mirror of Gnosis,” with Shayeq as publisher and editor. The periodical began in 1919 as *Mo’arref-e Ma’aref* and ceased publication in 1922\. Under Shayeq, its renewed pages brought readers work on science, philosophy, education, and literature. Readers were introduced to various scientific debates and ideas, philosophy, and literature; they discovered the work of thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, alongside writers such as Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens, many for the first time. At the head of every issue, he printed the same hemistich: "I press steel and turn it into mirrors." 

Many of his articles and translations appeared under pen names, most often Mukhlis-zada, a name derived from his father's honorific, and sometimes Sharif or Sharif Mukhlis-zada. He also revived the annual *Urs-i Bidil* gatherings honouring Mirza Abdul Qadir Bidil, the celebrated Indo-Persian poet of Mughal India, helping sustain a culture of poetry, literary discussion, and remembrance.

At his home, Shayeq hosted students and scholars for nights of reading, poetry, discussion, and dinners. His circle included the scholar and thinker Salahuddin Saljuqi, with whom he co-authored a book on literary rules; the poets *Malik Al-Shu'ara* (‘king of the poets’) Qari Abdullah and Ustad Abdul Haq Bitab; the painter and polymath Professor Ghulam Muhammad Maimanghi and Ustad Khalilullah Khalili, who became one of his closest friends. He also maintained warm scholarly ties with the Iranian literary scholars Said Nafisi and Ali Asghar Hekmat. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/First-Issue-of-Oyina--1913.jpg)

The first issue of Ayina, founded by Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy in Samarkand, 1913, the journal that shaped Hashim Shayeq's Jadid formation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/Ayna-Irfan-Page.jpg)

A page from Ayna-i Irfan, a scientific and literary journal revived under Hashim Shayeq Afandi's editorship in 1924.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-fe66d11f-88d3-42a7-9eb3-75bf79921c30.jpeg)

Hashim Shayeq Afandi in his Afghan years.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-2834629c-68a1-4bc2-9e9c-605ff09099df.jpeg)

Inauguration day at the Faculty of Letters, Kabul University, where Hashim Shayeq Afandi taught Persian literature, pedagogy, psychology, and history.

## Radicalism and Regression

Amanullah’s reform programme had expanded over much of the 1920s, including schools for girls and a constitutional framework for the state. After his tour of Europe and the Middle East between 1927 and 1928, he announced a more ambitious programme covering education, dress, marriage, and religious authority. Some measures were proposed or contested rather than fully implemented. The speed and symbolism of this new phase alarmed some advisers and opponents. 

The rebellion that followed cannot be explained by social reform alone. Tax collection, conscription, the loss of tribal subsidies, and the extension of central authority also threatened established interests. Religious and social objections became powerful arguments against the king, but the groups that rose against him were often more directly affected by these political and economic changes. His government could not hold together the support needed to carry its reforms through.

In November 1928, Shinwari Pashtun tribesmen rose against the government; rebels attacked Jalalabad and destroyed the royal palace there. Meanwhile, Habibullah Kalakani, a former soldier known as *Bacha-i Saqao*, advanced towards Kabul from the north. Amanullah began withdrawing reforms in January 1929, but could not recover sufficient support. On January 14, he abdicated in favour of his brother Inayatullah, whose reign lasted only three days before Kalakani took power in Kabul. Amanullah withdrew to Kandahar and later attempted to regain the throne. After that campaign failed, he crossed into British India on May 23, 1929 and subsequently settled in Italy.

Kalakani held Kabul for around nine months. Another aspirant to the throne, Nadir Khan, had served Amanullah as *Sipah-i-Salar*, commander of the armies, before falling out with the king's circle over the pace of reform and being sent (rather, exiled) to France as royal envoy. He returned in February 1929, gathered support from several tribes, and marched on Kabul in October. Kalakani was captured and executed, and Nadir took the throne. He then turned on leading figures from Amanullah’s government. Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi, the former vice-regent, and Mahmud Sami Beg, the Ottoman officer who had commanded the Kabul region, were accused of aiding Kalakani and tried for treason. Sami was executed; Darwazi’s death sentence was commuted to eight years’ imprisonment. Darwazi was subsequently executed in 1933.

Shayeq was summoned for interrogation, partly because of his close friendship with the former vice-regent Muhammad Wali Khan Darwazi, who had been charged with treason, and partly because he had attended a reception held in honour of Kalakani. Darwazi was an important connection to Amanullah’s court. In his memoirs, Zeki Velidi Togan recalled sending Shayeq an essay on social revolution in the East and subsequently giving a copy to Muhammad Wali Khan. The exchange places Shayeq within a network through which political ideas circulated between exiled Turkestani intellectuals and Afghan officials. Shayeq was interrogated by armed men and gave carefully written testimony, was eventually cleared, and escaped what could have been a fatal accusation.

Nadir Khan kept the girls' schools shut, but allowed male education to continue—albeit under the control of a clerical body of his choosing. He saw the value of a modern education, but was wary of keeping conservatives on his side to secure his grip on power. This, however, meant Shayeq could continue his educational activities in Afghanistan, with some restrictions. He would do so for another 25 years.

Years earlier, in *Siraj Al-Akhbar*, Tarzi had argued for learning from European science and technology while considering how they could take root in Afghanistan. His distinction between useful knowledge and imitation of outward appearances offers one way to assess Amanullah’s later programme: adopting European dress and public habits could not, by itself, create the institutions that sustained them. Measured against that, much of what came in 1928 was exactly that: symbols of progress, a cinema in the capital and the fixation on dress, which took the efforts and resources that the country's economic development did not. Fyodor Raskolnikov, the Soviet envoy to Afghanistan, concluded that the programme's fundamental flaw was that it had been built without an economic basis. 

Mustafa Shokay, whom the Kabul meeting of 1923 had sent to represent Turkestan in Europe, also wrote that Amanullah had chosen to follow in the footsteps of Mustafa Kemal and forgotten that the Turks had been in contact with Europe for centuries and their governing class Europeanised long since, that Turkey had known no tribal regime but a reasonably ordered apparatus of power, and that Kemal had an army loyal to him, none of which Afghanistan possessed at that time. On one side, Shokay wrote, stood a king-reformer who took the Afghans for a single political organism; on the other stood tribes who could comprehend the state only through tribal interest, defended in the name of the sacred Sharia. Kemal himself, according to the British minister in Kabul, agreed with this analysis.

Schools, books, and the press were central to the Jadid project, but the movement did not follow a single political path. Some reformers concentrated on teaching and cultural renewal; others, particularly after 1917, pursued revolutionary politics and sought to remake institutions through government. Afghanistan offered Shayeq a setting where he could continue his educational work, even as reform's fortunes depended on the state’s ability to sustain political support.

## From Statesman to a Pioneer of Afghan Letters

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/09/data-src-image-fe31084f-0106-4c1a-9943-d5eaa722b4c7.jpeg)

A self-portrait of Hashim Shayeq Afandi.

After surviving the political upheaval of 1928, Shayeq continued to work in education, and *Ayna-i Irfan* also gave him a place in Afghan literature. Jadid ambitions for modernisation were compelled to retreat to the sequestered realm of poetry and ideas, rather than a political programme of modernisation. 

In 1932, under the pen name Mukhlis-zada, he published the short story *Panzdah Sal Qabl*, which translates as "Fifteen Years Ago," in *Ayna-i Irfan*. This work is widely recognised as the first modern short story in Afghan literature, a pioneering piece of realistic prose that blended personal memory, social observation, and psychological insight. He later wrote two other short stories, *Bist-u-Siwwum-i Mizan* and the unfinished *Khiyal*, as well as the earlier story-like piece *Natija-yi Tahsil*, published under the same pen name.

The story opens on a tender spring morning with the courtyard still bearing traces of winter snow and a young boy sharing breakfast with his mother by the *orsi* (window). She sighs, gives him money for bread and raisins, and announces she is sending him to study with the mullah. The boy's mix of confusion, childish resistance, fleeting daydreams of himself in a white turban and fine black chapan like the students he had seen in the lane, and his eventual acceptance, unfolds with gentle humour and emotional depth. Through elegant, restrained first-person prose, Shayeq captured the bittersweet passage from innocence into the world of knowledge, themes rooted deeply in his own Jadid formation.

Shayeq was also the first writer in Afghanistan to write literary criticism in the modern sense. His essay *Munaqqid kist, intiqad chist?*, which translates as "Who is the Critic and What is Criticism?" and which was published in the fourth issue of *Ayna-i Irfan*, opened a tradition of scholarly literary debate that Afghan letters had not previously known.

## A Life and Legacy

Shayeq died in Kabul on September 16, 1954, after an illness involving liver disease and high blood pressure. His student Muhammad Rahim Ilham recalled that he continued preparing lectures even during his final illness. The poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili sat beside him in his last days. Shayeq asked Khalili to inscribe his tombstone and bury him at Qol-e Abchakan, on the northern side of Koh-e Asmai above Kabul. Asked why, he said the air from Bukhara would reach him there sooner. 

When news of his death reached the Faculty of Letters, students walked to his house. An old man at the door called on them as Shayeq's "spiritual sons" to carry their teacher's coffin. Students, officials, scholars, and writers joined the procession to his grave.

Khalili composed a *marthiya* (a eulegic poem) for him, of which these are some lines:

> *Khufta injā Hāshim-i Shāyiq ki dar fazl u 'amal* 
> *Qarn-hā shud mādar-i gītī qarīn-i vay nazād* 
> *Khānqāh-i Mawlavī rā ākharīn sham'-i umīd* 
> *Darsgāh-i Bū 'Alī rā vāpasīn barq-i murād* 
> *Rāzdān-i Fakhr-i Rāzī dar umūr-i falsafa* 
> *Rah-shinās-i Bū Hanīfa dar maqām-i ijtihād* 
> *Az Bukhārā tā ba Kābul v-az Harī tā Kāshghar* 
> *Chashm-i arbāb-i nazar gardīd az ū rawshan savād…* 
>  
> *Here sleeps Hashim Shayeq, in knowledge and deed* 
> *For centuries the mother of the world bore none like him.* 
> *The last candle of hope in Mawlana's khanqah,* 
> *The final spark of desire in Bu Ali's school.* 
> *Knower of Razi's secrets in philosophy,* 
> *Guide on Abu Hanifa's path of ijtihad.* 
> *From Bukhara to Kabul, from Herat to Kashgar,* 
> *The eyes of the perceptive were illuminated by him*  
> (Translation by Younus Ejazi)

In the late 1960s, Shayeq's eldest daughter from his first marriage, Fayeqa Yaqubzada, travelled from Azerbaijan to Kabul and met her Afghan half-sisters for the first time. She had earned a doctorate in early childhood education. She brought a sketch her mother had drawn of Fayeqa's hands when she was one year old. The drawing preserved a link between the family in Baku and the life Shayeq built after he could not return.

The Jadid quest cost many of his closest companions their lives. His own younger brother Naim Yaqubzada, who had taken no part in politics and worked only as a merchant, was arrested in the Soviet purges and shot in Tashkent on September 26, 1937\. Their elderly mother spent the rest of her life writing to government offices, asking after a son who, she did not know, was already in the ground.

Shayeq's eldest Afghan daughter, Nafisa Shayeq Mobarez, who inherited her father's reformist spirit, founded the pioneering women's magazine *Mirman* (Pashto for Lady) and later served in senior government roles.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/35/87/35878ebe-21e5-436c-b09c-9c06d872878b/content/images/2026/10/data-src-image-ba7abfad-fd67-498b-9cf1-805f5240ff65-1.jpeg)

Fayeqa, alongside her Afghan half-sisters Nafisa and Nazifa, visiting her father's grave at the Qol-e Abchakan cemetery, Kabul.

Shayeq's journey from Bukhara through Istanbul to Kabul joined three kinds of work: teaching, editing, and writing. Exile brought him to Afghanistan, but the schools and journals he helped develop gave his Jadid education a new home. He spent decades preparing curricula, teaching students, publishing prose, and opening his house to others who came to learn. His legacy rests in those institutions and relationships, as well as in the stories and criticism he wrote. The young diplomat who could not return to Bukhara helped make Kabul a place where a new generation could study, argue, and write. At least, for a time.

His life also reveals the varied paths Muslim reformers took in the early twentieth century. Imperial domination, war, revolution, and exile altered both their opportunities and their methods. Educational reform could proceed through classrooms and journals, but its survival also depended on political alliances, institutional resources, and governments' changing priorities. Shayeq’s decades in Afghanistan show how that work could endure, even when the wider political ambitions surrounding it had been defeated.

This history has largely been lost, but [efforts have been ongoing](https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-reform/), especially in post-Soviet Central Asia, to [painstakingly bring together](https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-azerbaijan-republic/) the fragments that remain of this crucial history, to give us a truer insight into what happened, and why the world is as it is today. Perhaps, by remembering this history, we may also break out of many false dichotomies that have hindered reform and uncover new potential alternatives for the near future.

---

*Words: Younus Ejazi was raised in Kabul and is based in Germany, where he works as a software engineer on AI and cloud systems. He is also the great-grandson of Hashim Shayeq Afandi.* 

**Acknowledgements**

This essay was written with the assistance of archival and biographical materials consulted from the following sources:

• Dr Nilab Mobarez, Hashim Shayeq's granddaughter and the former Chairperson and Secretary General of the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) based in Kabul, for consultation and family recollections.

• Sayyid Abdul Hakim Shar'ee Jawzjani (one of Hashim Shayeq's last students), *Pages from the Life of the Great Scholar Ustad Hashim Shayeq Afandi*, translated from Uzbek into Dari by Rahim Ibrahim (Stockholm: Babur Cultural Society). Dari: *Safahātī az zindagī-yi 'allāma ustād Hāshim Shāyiq Afandī*

**Further Reading**

- Faiz Ahmed, [*Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires*](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv24w635x?ref=kasurian.com) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
- Wali Ahmadi, “[Fiction, ii(g): In Afghanistan](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fiction-iig-in-afghanistan/?ref=kasurian.com),” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1999 (updated 2013).
- Nile Green, ed., [*Afghanistan in Ink: Literature Between Diaspora and Nation*](https://hurstpublishers.com/book/afghanistan-in-ink/?ref=kasurian.com) (London: Hurst, 2012).
- Vartan Gregorian, [*The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946*](https://pahar.in/pahar/Books%20and%20Articles/Afghanistan/1969%20Emergence%20of%20Modern%20Afghanistan--politics%20of%20reform%20and%20modernization%201880-1946%20by%20Gregorian%20s.pdf?ref=kasurian.com) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969).
- Ahmed-Waleed Kakar, "[Afghanistan's Century of Politicised Education](https://afghaneye.net/2022/12/21/afghanistan-girls-education/?amp=1&ref=kasurian.com)," The Afghan Eye, 21 December 2022.
- M. Hasan Kakar, [*Government and Society in Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan*](https://utpdistribution.com/9780292729001/government-and-society-in-afghanistan/?ref=kasurian.com) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
- Adeeb Khalid, [*The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia*](https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/public/book/the-politics-of-muslim-cultural-reform-jadidism-in-central-asia.html?ref=kasurian.com) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
- Mohammad Hossein Mohammadi, “[Contemporary Fiction in Afghanistan](https://www.penopp.org/node/1241?language%5Fcontent%5Fentity=mul-rtl&ref=kasurian.com),” PEN/Opp, 8 June 2022.
- Senzil Nawid, [*Religious Response to Social Change in Afghanistan, 1919–29: King Aman-Allah and the Afghan ʿUlama*](https://www.mazdapublishers.com/book/religious-response-to-social-change-in-afghanistan-1919-29?ref=kasurian.com) (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1999).
- Michael B. O'Sullivan, "['The Little Brother of the Ottoman State': Ottoman Technocrats in Kabul and Afghanistan's Development in the Ottoman Imagination, 1908–23](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/abs/little-brother-of-the-ottoman-state-ottoman-technocrats-in-kabul-and-afghanistans-development-in-the-ottoman-imagination-190823/3B05E47B5688289096FD363FA340819C?ref=kasurian.com)," *Modern Asian Studies* 50, no. 6 (2016): 1846–1887.
- Leon B. Poullada, [*Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929*](https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/617913?ref=kasurian.com) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973).
- Thomas Ruttig and Andrei Plastun, "[A Garden and a Tomb in Kabul (2): The Fate of the Last Amir of Bukhara and His Country's Relations with Afghanistan](https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/regional-relations/a-garden-and-a-tomb-in-kabul-2-the-fate-of-the-last-amir-of-bukhara-and-his-countrys-relations-with-afghanistan/?ref=kasurian.com)," Afghanistan Analysts Network.
- Bilal Sabbagh, [*Oil Barons, Jadid Reformers, & the First Azerbaijan Republic*](https://www.kasurian.com/jadid-azerbaijan-republic/)*,* Kasurian.
- Amin Saikal, [*Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/modern-afghanistan-9781780761220/?ref=kasurian.com) (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
- May Schinasi, [*Afghanistan at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Nationalism and Journalism in Afghanistan*](https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/7282787?ref=kasurian.com) (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1979).
- May Schinasi (trans. R. D. McChesney), [*Kabul: A History 1773–1948*](https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9789004325326/html?lang=de&ref=kasurian.com) (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
- M. Mobin Shorish, “[Education, xxvii: In Afghanistan](https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/education-xxvii-in-afghanistan/?ref=kasurian.com),” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1997 (updated 2016).
- Yana Zurayeva, [*The Jadid's Quest for Reform*](https://www.kasurian.com/p/jadid-reform), Kasurian.