Being a badinjan-e rumi is better than not being at all: Reflections on the life of an Afghan Minister
By Magnus Marsden
One of my intellectual highlights of 2016 was discovering an autobiography written by a long-serving Afghan Minister. I came across the biography having met during the course of research in the Chinese city of Yiwu several traders whose families had emigrated from Central Asia’s Emirate of Bukhara to northern Afghanistan in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. The ‘Bukharans’, as they referred to themselves, were now trading in a range of settings across Asia, most especially moving commodities between China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. During discussions about their community and its history, several mentioned to me the name of Mohammad Khan Jalallar. They told me of the important role that this politician from Afghanistan had played in the fortunes of their community, and, indeed, in the modern history of the country. In 2017, I managed to establish contact with Mr Jalallar in his residence in New Jersey, USA - the country in which Mr Jalallar had settled after years of public service in Afghanistan. In November 2019, I was eventually able to travel to New Jersey to meet him, and was welcomed into his home, where the two of us chatted for two memorable hours. Our conversation broached his experiences of life and work in Afghanistan, and the history and social dynamics of the community of Central Asian emigres of which he was a part.
Several of my colleagues were surprised that I had made the long trip to New Jersey to interview an elderly Afghan politician. From my perspective, however, meeting this fascinating figure from Afghanistan’s modern past illuminated especially clearly key themes that span across my research. These include recognition that the type of navigational skills cultivated by traders in geopolitically fraught contexts such as Afghanistan are transferable across the domains of economy and politics, and that, as a result, groups of actors active in the economy have often also played a critical role in processes of state formation. Mohammad Khan’s autobiography and recollections of his life also shed an intense spotlight on the cosmopolitanism of trade in Muslim Asia, and raise intriguing questions about the legacy of cultural and religious diversity on identity formations within and beyond the region today.
Mohammad Khan Jalallar served his country in various positions in government between the 1950s and late 1980s before eventually leaving the country and settling in the United States of America with his family. Mohammad Khan made his name as the country’s Minister of Commerce, a position to which he was appointed in 1970 and went on to occupy with a few short interruptions until 1989. Over this period, he witnessed at first-hand some of the most remarkable and disturbing moments of modern Afghan political history, including three coups and the Soviet invasion. For some close observers of Afghan politics, Mohammad Khan’s ability to withstand such powerful political currents and maintain his position in government over tumultuous times reflected the depth of his connections with both super powers active in the country, but especially the USSR. Before having become a gifted politician and diplomat, Mohammad Khan had learned from his father (Sufi Jan) the skills of being an astute and able merchant – by the 1960s, father and son imported Buler watches from Switzerland to Afghanistan. He clearly deployed his background in the field of trade in a direct manner, working closely with merchants to improve Afghanistan’s import-export and taxation regulation, for example. More broadly, the everyday diplomatic skills required of an immigrant trading community no doubt also informed the deft way in which he handled his simultaneous interactions with Soviet and US officials over a period that stretched across the early to high periods of the Cold War.
Sufi Jan belonged to an Uzbek-speaking family that owned and farmed land in the Qowa region of Central Asia’s fertile Ferghana Valley. In 1910, he opened a silkworm factory in nearby Marghilan. In the years that immediately followed the Bolshevik revolution, the farm and factory were both collectivised, but Sufi Jan continued to be able to do some work as a result of Lenin’s NEP, or New Economic Policy. Stalin abandonment of NEP in 1929 further reduced Sufi Jan’s ability to work; he also fell under the suspicion of the authorities in a clamp down on notable families in the region. In 1930, after a period underground in Dushanbe (the capital city of present-day Tajikistan), Sufi Jan fled to northern Afghanistan by way of the Turkmen border town of Karkee. During the course of his journey to Afghanistan, Turkmen smugglers insisted that Sufi Jan travel separately from his wife and child who, as a result, remained in Soviet Central Asia – the family would never reunite.
Having fled from Soviet Central Asia to Afghanistan, Sufi Jan, like tens of thousands of others, became a ‘Bukharan émigré’ and settled, initially, in Andkhuy, a border town in northern Afghanistan. Not until 1955/56, would Sufi Jan discover that both his wife and son in Central Asia had died. Having fled to northern Afghanistan, he quickly set to the task of building a new business. He bought a shop in Andkhuy from a Jewish trader who was vacating the town because in the early 1930s the Afghan government barred Jews from living and trading in northern Afghanistan, largely due to fears that Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews in the region were acting as spies for the Soviet Union. In the shop, he sold locally made shiny black shoes (kawlash) that an ethnically Turkmen trader provided to him on a credit basis. His émigré friends in Andkhuy persuaded Sufi Jan to take a second wife, reminding him that according to Islamic teachings, this was an entirely legitimate course of action. Sufi Jan took a second wife, also from Ferghana, and started a new family. Muhammad Khan Jalallar was the couples’ first child and born in 1935. In 1936, the family moved to Kabul – the city in which some years later Mohammad Khan’s mother fell ill and died, leading his father to marry for the third time, once again to a woman from the Ferghana Valley. Sufi Jan eventually made sufficient capital in Kabul to launch a wholesale cloth business in one of the city’s market. In northern Afghanistan, his interactions had been with Persian-speaking Jews and Turkmen Sunni Muslims; in Kabul traders identifying themselves as Afghan Sikhs and Hindus dominated the market in which he ran his business.
Mohammad Khan grew up in a culturally diverse world saturated by the ethos and ethics of Central Asian modes of trade and commerce. Yet he also remembered how his stepmother had showered him with sweets on each occasion that he had come home from school with good marks for his performance. The encouragement at home to study hard clearly had an effect: in 1955, Muhammad Khan enrolled at Kabul University to study Law. At the same time, having heard in 1955 of the death of his wife and son in Ferghana Valley (now part of Uzbekistan), his father told his first and only son to marry. In his second year of study at university, Mohammad Khan married a woman of immigrant parents from Qoqand, another region of Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley. In the years to come, Mohammad Khan challenged conventions surrounding family life that played a powerful role in the collective identity of his community of Central Asian émigrés – known in Afghanistan for its strict adherence to Islamic and customary traditions. He took his wife to watch American movies in Kabul’s famed cinemas. After a while, his wife ‘came out of the chadari’ – the all-enveloping body veil commonly referred to in the West as ‘the burqa’. By 1969, Mohammad Khan attended with his wife events organised in one of the most potent symbols of Afghan modernity, Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel.
In 1958, Muhammad Khan graduated from Kabul University with one of the highest grades in his class and soon after commenced his long period of government service, initially taking a position in the Ministry of Planning. By 1970, Mohammad Khan had risen within the government, being appointed as the Deputy Minister of Finance; shortly after, in 1972, he was promoted to Minister. After the bloodless coup d’état of 1973 in which the Prime Minister (Mohammad Daud Khan) deposed and exiled the country’s King (Zahir Shah), announced the formation of the Republic of Afghanistan, and became its first President, Mohammad Khan fell out of political favour. For a few months, he focused his attention on trade and commerce: helping to develop his father’s watch business, even in the face of the country’s new rulers placing obstacles before the activities of father and son. A reassessment of his activities in the Ministry of Finance during the 1960s by President Daud Khan led, after some months, to Muhammad Khan regaining the trust of the country’s authorities: on January 1st 1973, the country’s Prime Minister invited him to take up the position of Minister of Commerce.
During his long tenure as Minister of Commerce, Muhammad Khan invested his energies into attempts to improve Afghanistan’s taxation system, streamline the organisation of its import-export trade, and improve commercial relationships with countries in the region. He recalls these activities in considerable detail in his autobiography. Of equal interest, however, are the insights the book offers into the nature of relationships between merchants and state officials and the changes these were undergoing in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. In an especially fascinating passage, for example, Mohammad Khan recounts how he sought to intercede – ultimately unsuccessfully - with the Prime Minister on behalf of the country’s dwindling community of Jewish traders, many of whom enjoyed close ties to his homeland in Central Asia and were friends of his father. The Prime Minister scornfully asked him, ‘are you a Jew?’
In April 1978, Mohammad Khan was in Kabul’s presidential palace (the Arg) as it was stormed by military personnel involved in a leftist coup that toppled and eventually resulted in the murder of President Daud Khan (d. 1978). Mohammad Khan recounts being held by the plotters in the palace for three days. The country’s newly installed leader, President Nur Muhammad Taraqi, eventually issued instructions for him to return home. While saying that he was never a member of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), President Taraqi (d. 1979) and later President Hafizullah Amin (d. 1979) both recognised Mohammad Khan’s talents and influential international connections: between 1978 and 1979, they saw to it that he served in a series of ad hoc positions in the Ministry of Commerce.
In December 1979, Afghanistan’s third communist President, Barbrak Karmal, came to power. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he appointed, once again, Mohammad Khan to the position Minister of Commerce. In his autobiography, Muhammad Khan claims to have first heard of his appointment in a radio announcement, arguing that this move by President Karmal left him with no other option than to accept the position. He remained in post until 1989, in which year President Najibullah (the former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence and security service who became President in 1986 ) changed the cabinet’s composition.
Muhammad Khan was confined to his house until 1991, and the experience resulted in the couple leaving Afghanistan in 1991. They travelled by way of Czechoslovakia, Russia and Canada to the USA, settling in New Jersey, where his children had based themselves some years before.
The distinct sense of identity that Mohammad Khan’s background in Central Asia provided him was something he carried with him throughout his life. Across his entire career, Mohammad Khan travelled widely on government visits, and there is much material in his autobiography of interest to historians of modern Afghan politics. But his autobiography also offers insights into his expansive social networks and the efforts to which he went to keep these vital. He recounts – in a manner not dissimilar from the Persian travelogue or safarnama - several international trips, mostly made on behalf of the governments for which he served. In between the discussions of meetings with an array of diplomats and political figures, he describes with equal – if not greater - energy, enthusiasm, and excitement meeting his ‘countrymen’ from Central Asia in the settings to which he travelled. Contemporary approaches to international politics place much emphasis on so-called ‘soft power’ and the importance to this of diaspora-homeland. Years before such discussions amongst international relations specialists, Mohammad Khan had been busy building connections between himself, the government of Afghanistan, and the countries vibrant, geographically dispersed and economically successful Central Asian émigré community. In the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, some of the largest private investment into the country derived from Central Asian émigré business people.
During repeated trips to Moscow and Tashkent, he ate in Uzbek restaurants and tracked down his distant relatives. In the midst of a visit to Turkey in 1968, he met a cousin in Ankara and travelled to the southern town of Adana to meet Uzbeks who had settled in the country having left Afghanistan in 1952. He found time during a trip to the US in 1969 to meet relatives in San Francisco, and a small but vibrant community of Central Asians in Brooklyn and New Jersey, his future home. During an official visit to Cairo in 1969, he tracked down a religious scholar from Central Asia who had left Afghanistan in 1959. Several visits to Jeddah, such as one in 1977, saw Muhammad Khan intersperse official meetings with visits to the houses of his Central Asian ‘countrymen’ who had settled in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia having fled after the Bolshevik revolution. New Jersey is also home to a lively Central Asian émigré community that has been settling in the region having made its way to the USA by way of Afghanistan and Turkey since the 1950s. The community hosts a long-standing organisation – the Turkistanian American Association – that organises celebratory events and regular sessions of informal chat and discussion (gashtak) for its members. In exile, Muhammad Khan continued to maintain connections to and between his Central Asian ‘countrymen’.
The title of Mohammad Khan’s autobiography - ‘Rumi Tomato’ – is a reference to banjan-e rumi, the term used in the form of Persian spoken in Afghanistan that distinguishes tomatoes from aubergines on the grounds of the former being from Rume, or Asia Minor. Muhammad Khan used the notion of ‘the tomato from Asia Minor’ as the title of his autobiography because it captured the complex nature of his own identity. As he remarked in Tashkent to a gathering of the ‘Motherland Society’ (a Tashkent-based organisation that was established with the aim of establishing contact with Uzbeks outside of the USSR):
‘I feel like this fruit. My seed is form here, but I was born, grew up, educated, promoted and earned respect in my country, Afghanistan. But sometimes I hear an inner voice calling me badinjan-e rumi. This is how I feel about myself. It may not be this way, but still, this is how I feel. But still I tell myself, being a badinjan-e rumi is better than not being at all’.[1]
Mohammad Khan Jalallar sadly died on May 4th 2020 at his home in New Jersey aged 84.
Magnus Marsden is Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is Chief Academic Adviser at the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies, Vice President of the Association of International Afghan Studies and Director of the Sussex Asia Centre.
This blog post was first published as an Op-Ed by the Afghanistan Institute of Strategic Studies.
[1] Jalallar, Mohammad Khan, 2011. Rumi Tomato: Autobiography of an Afghan Minister (edited by Babur Rashidzada): USA, p. 234.