A guest post by Zohra Saed, a poet born in Afghanistan and raised in Brooklyn whose work explores decolonial memory, diaspora, and archives of Central and South Asia. She is currently a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY.
“The shadow of God is over the King.”
I often heard this phrase at picnics in the Afghan diaspora community in New York City where I grew up. Over black tea with cardamom, I’d listen as uncles and aunties shared stories of ali-Hazrat, “his majesty,” and the sayeh-ye khoda that guided him. Afghan monarchists were usually elites from Kabul who’d benefited from government posts and fellowship or diversity-driven academic programs. Most immigrated to New York, New Jersey, Virginia, or California. It was His Majesty’s benevolence that helped many secure passage out in the early years of the Soviet-Afghan war.
This was Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who reigned from 1933 to 1973. His photograph once hung in Afghan classrooms and government offices. In the diaspora, his calm visage decorated family living rooms.
In his portrait, I saw a clean-shaven man with a neatly trimmed mustache, hairline receding into a high forehead, and a calm, upward tilted expression meant to project aristocratic aloofness or stability. He was shown dressed in a dark green military suit with red epaulettes edged with gold trim.
Recently, another king has flooded my newsfeed, shared by my Iranian-American friends and held up high by diaspora protestors. At sixty, Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi’s face evokes his father, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution. The ornate military uniforms of his father are gone, replaced by Western suits. But pronounced dark eyebrows, bold nose, and swept back gray hair echo his father’s features, as does the Sun and Lion symbol on the flag behind him.
I am reminded of my father’s framed collection of Pahlavi-era Iranian banknotes and coins, collected during trips to Mashhad and Tehran, which covered a wall of our home alongside Afghan bills bearing Zahir Shah. These were portals leading back to collapsed worlds, turning monarchy into nostalgic myth.
The nostalgia for Zahir Shah in my home was a longing for a time of forty years of what in retrospect felt like uninterrupted peace and progress. During a vacation in Rome, Zahir Shah was ousted by his cousin, Daoud Khan, in the “Bloodless Coup” of 1973. His short-lived Republic of Afghanistan was toppled by the Communist Coup of 1978. Then the Soviets invaded in 1979. Afghanistan descended into decades of armed conflict from which it has yet to recover.
Today, when I hear members of the Iranian diaspora wax nostalgic about the Pahlavis, I sense a familiar ache. But I feel a deep discomfort because I know that royal nostalgia does not come in times of peace, but in moments of crisis.
Back in 2001, at the brink of America’s war with Afghanistan, Afghans in the diaspora were caught in a similar fantasy. Theirs was a dream of toppling the Taliban and restoring a king who symbolized a gentle and ordered past. This was a dream delivered by US missiles.
As I watch the surge of support for Reza Pahlavi in the Iranian diaspora, the political script is eerily similar. Zahir Shah, long exiled in Rome, was revived in the same way: funded by American interests and eagerly promoted by a diaspora longing for order and dignity in their homeland. The war against the Taliban received a progressive Afghan face, a symbolic bridge to a peaceful past.
Reza Pahlavi represents nostalgia for restoration, especially for those living far from the battlefield. In the aftermath of the Women, Life, Freedom movement and the violent suppression of young Iranians’ hopes for democratic change in repeated uprisings, the visuals of the Pahlavis offer a mirage.
Nostalgic images offer a numbness, a way of ignoring the casualties of a US and Israeli war on Iran that has killed thousands. But when political hopes are divorced from organized movements and instead pinned on fragile fantasies, they risk collapsing at their first encounter with reality. The Afghan diaspora learned this lesson the hard way.
The Dream of Return
In 2000, I was a youth delegate at the State of the World Forum in New York City, which convened global leaders near the United Nations Headquarters. Afghanistan was high on the agenda after highly-publicized laws restricting women were implemented by the Taliban the year before. The optimism of the late twentieth century was at the meeting’s core: the belief that the world could be reshaped through dialogue.
I met a blonde American businessman from Texas who told me he had a plan to get Zahir Shah back in power. This man, whom I’ll call Hank, told me that his father had worked as an oil engineer in Afghanistan in the 1960s. “Those were the glory days, when there was progress!” I was comfortable in this conversation. Hank’s words recalled my father’s stories of the years of progress and prosperity in Afghanistan.
Hank saw that I was Uzbek, a minority group excluded under the Taliban; his sales pitch for a future “progressive” Afghanistan was meant for me especially. The return of the king would mean equality for all Afghans, he said.
Hank told me he was helping finance a loya jirga, a Pashtu term meaning a traditional meeting of elders and representatives, that would bring back the king and his circle of progressive intellectuals. Hank promised that the diaspora could bring back the golden era of Afghanistan – and he would help pay for it.
The dream of a returning king and the invocation of native forms of governance like the loya jirga provided a counter-current to the Taliban even before the US invasion. Hank passed on a VHS tape of an earlier meeting with Zahir Shah from a loya jirga in Rome. Young Afghans were courted to launch this restoration initiative; another gathering took place in August 2001.
When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, the idea of the exiled King’s restoration gained traction. The presence of 87-year-old Zahir Shah would redirect the optics from Americans toppling a government to the US supporting Western-aligned Afghan technocrats confronting the Taliban. With the frail but potently symbolic face of Zahir Shah, this political transition would appear Afghan-led, dignified, and restorative.
At the Bonn Agreement which instituted the Afghan interim government in December 2001, the royalist project that circulated in exile seemed within reach. Afghan factions and diaspora figures embraced Zahir Shah as a unifying figure. But the American and NATO forces favored a republic led by Hamid Karzai. When Zahir Shah returned to Kabul in April 2002, he was given the title “Baba,” or the Father of the Nation, but no political authority.
Monarchists entered the 2002 Loya Jirga held in Afghanistan as the “Rome Group.” They held multiple seats that included women and ethnic minority representation. But after interim-leader Karzai was appointed, they were absorbed as members of parliament.
The new state would be shaped less by Afghan dreams and more by external design. The monarchist project was a mask for American interests in Afghanistan, a performance pitting a “civilized” former monarch against the “savage” Taliban.
Eventually, this Afghan republic, lasting from 2004 – 2021, was hollowed out by corruption, kleptocracy, and dependence on foreign military powers. The Taliban returned in 2021, more fierce than ever. The many former exiles who staffed the government fled as suddenly as they’d returned.
The Perils of Royal Nostalgia
The US government presented the war in Afghanistan as a necessary intervention to defeat terrorism. During Bush’s “War on Terror,” the verbiage was “state building” and democracy. Afghanistan represented the good fight for women’s rights. This discourse found a welcome home among the generation shaped by the Soviet-Afghan war and its aftermath. The Afghan diaspora lived with “sojourner’s syndrome,” a belief that their exile would be temporary.
After each rupture – the Soviet-Afghan war, the civil war, the Taliban years – the diaspora held their breath. But after decades away, they barely knew their homeland. And the past they longed for was hardly as good as they remembered it. While urban elites prospered in 1970s Afghanistan, most of the country lacked access to education, healthcare, or basic roads. The Afghanistan the elite dreamed of had barely existed for most Afghans.
In both the Afghan and Iranian diasporas, images of a rosy, pre-Revolutionary past serve as political shorthand for the restoration of an era imagined as more legitimate. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym identifies this as restorative nostalgia, a mode of remembering that mobilizes idealized images of the past in order to rebuild it without being critical of its shortcomings. In this context, we can call it “royal nostalgia.”
Afghan royal nostalgia emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s during a profound crisis. Taliban rule, international isolation, and the lasting devastation of civil war created a vacuum of legitimacy in which the long-exiled king was seen as a bridge to bring back a lost nation.
A key moment was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, when the Taliban pulverized Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. This crisis jump-started nostalgia for the monarchy, especially the era from 1960-70s, when Zahir Shah opened Afghanistan to research, archaeology, natural resource development projects, and international visitors. Kabul was remembered as a place of universities, museums, and cultural exchange rather than a site of war.
Afghan royal nostalgia condensed an entire country into a handful of images from one city and one decade. The rebuilding of Afghanistan was an attempt to restore Kabul as it appeared in some family photographs and inherited memories. Zahir Shah returned as a symbol, while Hamid Karzai, an Afghan once living in America, staged unity through carefully selected ethnic clothing. British Vogue magazine even dubbed Karzai as a “stylish leader.”
Nostalgia proved easier to mobilize than to govern. The former king-turned-Baba spent his final years in the Arg, Kabul’s Royal Palace, restored after the American invasion. The monarch had returned on the backs of an army of foreign occupation. But he was unable to move more than a few feet without an armed escort. He died in 2007, surrounded by Louis XIV furniture and decoration resurrected from the 1970s. He was buried in a simple white shroud at the royal mausoleum on Maranjan Hill in Kabul. The funeral was held with the pomp and circumstance of a royal burial. His sons did not continue the monarchy. With the death of Zahir Shah, the symbolic restoration ended.
The Taliban insurgency grew in intensity. The insurgency grew more organized and lethal. IEDs and suicide bombings increased. In response, U.S. and NATO forces escalated. The war expanded endlessly into villages, homes, and farms.
The monarchy did not return stability to Afghanistan. The struggle to make an entire country in the image of Kabul with the help of a foreign army failed catastrophically.
After ali-Hazrat
Restorative nostalgia may briefly unite a diaspora, but it is not enough to build a nation. Afghanistan offers a stark lesson. The promise of a new golden era was more tangible as a dream rather than a political reality. When that dream collapses, it is the people with nowhere to flee who bear the greatest cost.
Even now, the remnants of the Afghan monarchy are still exhibited in the homes of exiles, like my father’s collections of stamps and banknotes with the king’s face. But these objects are no longer political claims.
They are reminders of the impossibility, and undesirability, of return. My father himself never returned.
Back in Kabul, Zahir Shah’s mausoleum suffered a worse fate. It was stripped of wires, its light fixtures stolen, graves broken and vandalized. Just the name remains, ali-Hazrat, as those who still long for the kingdom remember him as. Everything valuable was carried off.
The author thanks Zarlasht Sarwari, Mejgan Massoumi, Zarena Aslami, and Leila Nadir for their vital input.
