Kandahar

A rock inscription found at Old Kandahar in 1958 carries an edict of Ashoka in two languages, Greek above and Aramaic below. Greek was the speech of the settlers left in the region after Alexander, and Aramaic had been the administrative language of the Achaemenid empire that preceded them, so the emperor addressed the population of his north western frontier in the two languages it actually used.

The content is what the edicts say elsewhere: that ten years after his consecration the king caused people to become more pious, that killing living beings has ceased, that hunters and fishermen have stopped, that those without self control have restrained themselves, and that obedience to parents and to elders has increased.

The interesting part is the translation. The Greek renders dharma as eusebeia, piety, the ordinary Greek word for proper conduct towards gods and parents, which is a reasonable equivalent and also a substantial reinterpretation. Whoever produced the text was translating an Indian religious vocabulary into a Mediterranean one for readers who had no other access to it, and doing it in the third century BCE. A second Greek inscription from the same city gives a longer passage in a more polished style.

These are among the earliest datable evidence for Indian religious ideas being deliberately put into a European language, and for a Buddhist ruler treating a Hellenistic population as an audience rather than as subjects to be ignored.

Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded the Afghan state in the middle of the eighteenth century, obtained a cloak venerated as having belonged to the Prophet Muhammad and built a shrine for it at Kandahar, with his own mausoleum beside it. The cloak is kept locked away and has been shown very rarely, at moments understood as grave, and its custodians are a hereditary family. Whether the garment is what tradition says is not a question the shrine invites; what matters historically is what it has been used for.

In April 1996 the Taliban leader Mullah Omar had the cloak taken out and appeared with it on a rooftop before a crowd of clerics assembled in the city, who acclaimed him Commander of the Faithful. It was an act of political theatre with a precise religious meaning, claiming a title of leadership over the Muslim community by physical association with the Prophet, and it was performed by a movement that elsewhere was destroying shrines and images on the ground that veneration of objects is forbidden. The tension between those two positions is worth stating rather than smoothing over.

Kandahar has remained the movement's centre of gravity ever since, and its leadership has been based there rather than in the national capital, so a provincial city with an eighteenth century relic and a Pashtun tribal hinterland has repeatedly determined how Afghanistan is governed.