A holy man crowned Afghanistan's founder with sheaves of grain
In June 1747 a tribal grand council near Kandahar debated for nine days over who should lead the Afghans. A dervish ended it by praising the young Ahmad Khan, then tucking wheat or barley stalks into his turban and naming him Pearl of the Pearls. The Durrani Empire, and modern Afghanistan's origin story, began there.
Ahmad had been a commander for the Persian ruler Nader Shah, whose death in June 1747 left a vacuum. After the jirga chose him over an older rival, he renamed his Abdali tribe Durrani after his new title. The year marks the first Afghan state independent of both Persia and the Mughals, and Ahmad is still called the Father of the Nation.
Expansion came quickly. He took Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul and Peshawar, pressed the Mughal emperor into ceding Sindh and Punjab in 1749, secured Mashhad to the west and brought the peoples north of the Hindu Kush under his rule. Afghan armies entered India eight times, and in 1757 he sacked Delhi yet left a Mughal emperor on the throne as a figurehead who accepted Afghan overlordship. At its height the empire covered today's Afghanistan, much of Pakistan, and parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and northwestern India, ranking with the Ottomans among the most significant Islamic powers of the late 18th century.
Its dealings with Qing China reveal a delicate rivalry. In 1763 Ahmad sent an embassy to the Qianlong Emperor; his envoy at first refused to kowtow, which Beijing took as a claim of equality, and ties were cut. Among the gifts were four horses, painted by the court artist Giuseppe Castiglione. When Afghan forces invaded neighbouring Badakhshan in 1768, a Qing tributary, Qianlong refused to intervene despite pleas for help, concluding that his stretched armies could not treat the Afghans as mere vassals.
After Ahmad's death in 1772 his son Timur Shah moved the capital to Kabul, wintering in Peshawar. The empire was already fraying, and in the early 19th century it lost Peshawar, Multan and Kashmir to the Sikh Empire. The dynasty lingered until Dost Muhammad Khan and the Barakzai line displaced it, giving way to the Emirate of Afghanistan.
Source: Durrani Empire
