Mohammed Nadir Shah
Mohammed Nadir Shah was king of Afghanistan from October 1929, when he took Kabul from the Tajik brigand Habibullah Kalakani who had driven Amanullah out, to November 1933, when a schoolboy shot him at a prize-giving. The four years founded the Musahiban dynasty of his brothers and his son that ruled the country until 1978. He was the general of the third Anglo-Afghan war, the man who took Thal in 1919 and made the British negotiate. He was Amanullah's war minister and then, having quarrelled with the reforms and the queen, his minister in Paris from 1924. From there he watched the kingdom fall. He came back through India in March 1929 with his brothers Hashim and Shah Wali and no money. He raised the Wazir and Mahsud tribesmen of the British side of the Durand line, whom the British let cross. He lost twice. He took Kabul on 10 October 1929 with a tribal army that he paid by letting it sack the city. The tribal jirga proclaimed him king five days later. He hanged Kalakani and his men on 1 November. He promised the tribes and the mullahs the reverse of everything Amanullah had done. He gave it them in the constitution of 1931, the sharia the law, the girls' schools closed, the veil back, the mullahs' council over the assembly. Behind it he built the army again, with British money and Turkish officers, the Bank-i-Melli, and the road over the Salang. He let the Amanullah loyalists know that they were watched. The Charkhi brothers, Amanullah's generals, were executed in 1932. The shooting was a Charkhi ward's revenge. He was shot on 8 November 1933 by Abdul Khaliq, a Hazara schoolboy of the Charkhi household, at the Nejat school prize day, and the boy and his family and teachers were killed by inches. His son Zahir, nineteen, was proclaimed the same afternoon. His brother Hashim governed for him for thirteen years. He was born in Dehradun, in the family's Indian exile, of the Musahiban branch of the Barakzai. The dynasty he founded by a tribal sack was the country's most peaceful.
- Lived: 1883 CE – 1933 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: king, general, monarch
