Mohammed Zahir Shah
Mohammed Zahir Shah was king of Afghanistan from November 1933, when his father was shot at a school prize-giving and he was proclaimed at nineteen the same afternoon, to July 1973, when his cousin Daoud deposed him while he was in Italy having his eyes treated. The forty years were the longest peace the country has had in its modern history, and the last. For the first thirty he did not rule. His uncle Hashim governed as prime minister until 1946, his uncle Shah Mahmud until 1953, and his cousin and brother-in-law Daoud until 1963. That was the Musahiban family's arrangement by which the king reigned and the elders governed. The country stayed neutral in the second war, joined the United Nations in 1946, quarrelled with the new Pakistan over the Pashtun lands from 1947, took American money for the Helmand dams and Soviet money for the Salang tunnel and the airfields, and unveiled its women in 1959. The last decade was his own. He dismissed Daoud in March 1963 over the Pakistan quarrel that had closed the border. He gave the country the constitution of 1964, with an elected assembly, a free press, political parties in principle and the royal family barred from office. The decade of democracy ran on it. It produced the assembly's paralysis, the student riots, the newspapers of the Marxists and the Islamists both, the famine of 1971 and 1972 in which perhaps eighty thousand died while the government said nothing, and the coup of 17 July 1973 by which Daoud, with the army's Soviet-trained officers, ended the monarchy. He abdicated by letter from Rome in August 1973. He lived twenty-nine years in a villa on the Via Cassia. He was stabbed by an assassin posing as a journalist in 1991. He was the name every faction invoked and none wanted back. Then the Americans flew him home in April 2002 to open the loya jirga that chose Karzai. That gave him the title father of the nation and no power. He was born in Kabul, was educated at the Habibia and in France at Montpellier. He died in Kabul in July 2007 at ninety-two. He was buried on the Maranjan hill by his father. The country remembered the forty years as the time when nothing happened.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 2007 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: king, monarch
