PART TWO: How the top hat kept Afghanistan in the dark

Drawing from newspaper reports in 1928, Part Two explores what happened when King Amanullah attempted to pull his change-resistant country out of the past

Afghan King Amanullah with French President Gaston Doumergue in Paris 1928. (Wikimedia Commons).

Looking back at what happened that strange summer 95 years ago, it appears that the monarchs of Afghanistan had forgotten exactly which country they were ruling.

When King Abdullah and Queen Soraya left their palace outside of Kabul in December 1927, Afghanistan was traditional, conservative, tribal, and Islamic, a land where women were covered head to toe, harsh Sharia law was enforced, and only 3% of the population could read.

When they returned in July 1928, Afghanistan was exactly the same.

But its monarchs weren’t.

Seven months of travel across Europe and beyond — seven months of being feted and toasted and treated like demigods, seven months of drinking in the most stirring art, of witnessing displays of frightening weapons, seven months of observing the cutting edges of transportation, technology, medicine, urban planning, and fashion — well, after seven months of that, the monarchs were all the more sold on the need for rapid modernization at home, a goal they’d been pushing since Amanullah stepped into power in 1919, although the wheels had turned slowly.