Mohammadzai Erotic

The Mohammadzai are less a people than a lineage that became a state. They are a clan of the Barakzai, one of the Durrani Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, and for roughly a century and a half nearly every man who ruled from Kabul was one of them. Emirs, kings, prime ministers, and the president who ended the monarchy all came from the same extended family, and in Afghan usage the name still works as shorthand for the old royal establishment.

Their rise began with a killing. Payinda Khan, the Barakzai chief, was executed by the Sadozai king Zaman Shah around 1800, and his eldest son Fateh Khan, the kingmaker of the next two decades, was blinded and killed in 1818. The surviving brothers, some twenty of them, tore the Durrani empire apart in response and divided it among themselves: one set held Kandahar, another held Peshawar until the Sikhs took it, and Dost Mohammad Khan took Kabul in 1826. His descendants kept the throne through two British invasions, the iron centralization of Abdur Rahman Khan, and the reign of Amanullah Khan, who won full independence in 1919 and lost the crown in 1929 over reforms pushed too fast. A cousin line, the Musahiban, descended from Dost Mohammad's brother Sultan Mohammad Khan, restored the dynasty months later. It produced Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah, who reigned for forty years, and Daoud Khan, who deposed his cousin in 1973 and was killed with much of his family in the 1978 communist coup.

By origin the Mohammadzai are Kandahari Pashtuns, Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, and their genealogy places them in the Zirak branch of the Durrani. Generations at court changed them. The Kabul families became Persian speakers in daily life, using Dari at home and in government while keeping Pashto as a badge of descent, and they tended to marry within the clan. Men carry the title Sardar, which still appears in family names. The clan also supplied much of Afghanistan's early modern intelligentsia: Mahmud Tarzi, the journalist who shaped Afghan nationalism, was a Mohammadzai of the Kandahar branch, and his daughter Soraya became Amanullah's queen.

After 1978 most of the prominent families left, mainly for Europe and North America. Zahir Shah spent his exile in Rome, returned in 2002 with the honorary title Father of the Nation, and died in Kabul in 2007. Others never left Kandahar or Kabul and live as ordinary townspeople and landholders. One caution: the Muhammadzai of Hashtnagar, near Charsadda in Pakistan, are a separate Pashtun tribe that happens to share the name.