The Shrine of the Cloak, and a Relic Used for Authority

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.