This paper examines cityscapes and built environments in early nineteenth-century Afghanistan through the reading of a rediscovered illustrated Persian chronicle of the Durrani Empire (1747-1842). The manuscript, titled Tazkirat al-Salatin (“Biographies of Sultans”), alternately Taza Akhbar (“Fresh News”), was completed in the month of Safar 1233 Hijri Qamari/December 1817 by an anonymous munshi writing at the behest of the British East India Company. Tazkirat al-Salatin / Taza Akhbar presents a history of the Afghan Durrani Kingdom from the aftermath of Nadir Shah Afshar’s Indo-Persian empire and the founding reign of Ahmad Shah Durrani to its waning years on the eve of entanglement with the East India Company. It chronicles the imperial formation of Durrani Afghanistan along the eastern borderlands of the Qajar Empire in Greater Khurasan. Through the prism of a rediscovered manuscript on the Durrani Kingdom and the face (surat) of its fortressed cityscapes and built environments, this paper explores the themes of imperial space and sovereignty in Afghanistan during the first decades of the nineteenth-century. The manuscript of Tazkirat al-Salatin / Taza Akhbar paints a view of the urban landscape and topography of Afghan cities – their ecologies, water systems, walls, gateways, monuments, neighborhoods, streets, hinterlands, and people – in relation to the sovereignty of the Durrani Empire. It depicts an array of urban spaces and independent city-states as they cohered, in turbulent times of war, into an interconnected landscape of Indo-Persian fortressed cities – Qandahar, Kabul, Ghazni, Herat – that became an Afghan empire. The history of nineteenth-century Afghanistan often lingers in the shadow of the “Great Game,” and much remains to be known about the Durrani Empire. In most studies of modern Afghanistan, the environment and landscape figure primarily as setting, a moment of staging before moving on to political, diplomatic, and religious analysis. By contrast, this paper explores the question of how the built environments and cityscapes of the Durrani Empire came to be mapped and inscribed.

The early Qajar period (1785–1848) and the rise of the Qajars remain sorely understudied in the scholarship on Iran. To the extent that the formation of Qajar Iran has received attention from scholars it has been treated in one of three ways. The first body of scholarship is that which treats the rise of the Qajars primarily as a tribal story: the Qajars had been one of the tribal groups who competed for political power in post-Safavid Iran, before eventually defeating their main rivals, the Afsharids and the Zands. A second body of scholarship tends to focus on the resuscitation by Qajar monarchs of what is sometimes called “Perso-Islamic” kingship: a form of monarchy that had its roots in both ancient Persian models of kingship as well as in Islamic concepts of just rule. Finally, there is the literature that presents the early Qajar period as, in effect, a prelude to the main story: the centralization and modernization efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper proposes an alternative path. It draws on a variety of sources, including traditionally-used sources like Qajar chronicles and foreign diplomatic reports, less frequently-used ones like visual sources, and most importantly, firmans (royal decrees), petitions, and correspondence, to analyze early Qajar political practices like gift giving, petitioning, and marriage alliances. What the paper hopes to demonstrate is that a detailed analysis of Qajar-era practices — how those practices functioned, who they drew in, and to what ends they were used — helps us understand the system of Qajar governance and the social ties that were necessary to sustain the Qajar government. More broadly, it forces us to reevaluate some of the assumptions about the nature of the Qajar state because, as this paper will show, gift giving, petitioning, and marriage alliances were imperial modes of governance, shared with tributary empires in other places and other times, that neither fit a “modern” nation-state nor a premodern tribal polity. Ultimately this paper argues that greater attention to the pattern of building ties — what might be described as a “socially-oriented political history” — enriches our understanding of Qajar and Iranian history. But by highlighting similarities and differences between Qajar Iran and other tributary empires, this paper also argues for the importance of a comparative approach to Iranian history.

Of all the cities within Iran, Qum has the curious distinction of being the favored resting place of shahs between the 17th-19th century. Early in his reign, Fath ‘Ali Shah cultivated a self-image as a Shi‘i patron of shrine cities, not only by paying for shrine renovations in Najaf and Karbala, but also in Mashhad and especially in Qum. By choosing the shrine of Fatimah Ma‘sumah in Qum as the site of his own resting place before his death, he further solidified the association between the shrine, the city, and the emerging Qajar Empire. In this paper, I use the shrine city of Qum as a vector through which to reconsider the relationship between the Qajar empire and law between the 1860s-1890s. In studies of Qajar-era law, the overall scholarly tendency has been to stress the role of the Shi’i mujtahids as the main legal actors. The imperial court and the government are typically either cast as executors of shari‘ah or as implementors of customary law (‘urf). Studies of petitions to the Qajar shah come closest to situating the Qajars within Islamicate imperial traditions of legal redress (mazalim). Building on this scholarship, I argue that the shrine of Fatimah Ma‘sumah, as a place of refuge (bast), was a space through which imperial law was articulated locally. I begin by considering the claim that the Shah was the ultimate guardian (mutivalli) of all shrines in Iran as having juridical import since this authority was understood to supersede that of the powerful head shrine guardian (mutivallibashi). I then shift focus to the efforts of local governors to sharply delineate the borders of Qum’s bast zone after a period in which this zone had ballooned to encompass half of the city. Since the bast zone functioned as a limit to imperial sovereignty, these efforts involved a clash between competing understandings of shari‘ah on the question of crime: should the implementation of shari‘ah punishments take precedence or respect for the sanctity of the shrine as an inviolable bast zone? Through a careful examination of Persian letters, reports, telegrams, and diaries, I examine actual cases involving those accused of theft, violence, and murder to tease out the overlapping and contested modes of imperial and shari‘ah rationales for allowing refugees to remain in asylum or forcing them out to face punishment.