Dostum portrait

 

…seen in the corner of a shop on Chicken Street. $300, no thanks.

New style of war rug

One of our readers sends us a number of new war rugs which have just come on the market (characterised by yellow fields, and poor materials and skills). This is a portrait of Ghazi Amanullah Khan. This sharp-eyed reader also suggests that the image below, which features a “135″ tank (or is that T35?), might solve a part of the jigsaw puzzle posed by the “ragged mihrab” discussions. This also feeds into Kevin Sudeith’s discussions of the same motifs on his warrug.com blog.

Precedents for the Masood portrait

This image is in Kevin Sudeith’s blog at warrug.com

I’m not sure of the source of this photograph, its date, or location (all of which would be interesting) but the rug depicted here is clearly an earlier version of the rug contributed by Max Allen in our previous post.

A deeper source of the (photographic) imagery for these rugs is found in Dr Whitney Azoy’s article “Masood’s Parade: Iconography, Revitalisation and Ethnicity in Afghanistan” in Expedition magazine (the link is to a PDF file). The article discusses the pervasiveness and range of iconographic mood in the photographs, posters and paintings of Masood available in Afghanistan in 2002.

Portrait rug 10: President Zia of Pakistan

thanks to warrug.com

Portrait rug 9: Kenan Evren

thanks to warrug.com

Kenan Evren was the President of Turkey from 1982 – 1989.

Portrait rug 8: Colonel Gaddafi

thanks to warrug.com. The text reads “God is Great” (above) and in arabic, Colonel Gaddafi – God look after him – my gift is not worthy…

Portrait rug 7: Ahmed Shah Masood

Thanks to warrug.com for this image. The text reads (loosely) “The great General of the Mujahideen, knowledgeable in relious matters, the leader of Afghanistan resistance, the martyr [in red] Ahmed Shah Masood”

Thanks to Max Allen for the following image:

Max interprets the tracer-like paths aiming towards his face plus the mark on his forehead as a representation of his assassination… And given that this is a recent production, and therefore commemorative in nature, these elements can be thought of as a symbolic anticipation of the horrific actual event (his death is reported to have been caused by a bomb disguised as a video camera). Given these circumstances, to show him kneeling as if in prayer gives the scene additional gravitas.

See also the following biodata from Wikipedia:

Ahmed Shah Masood (احمد شاه مسعود) (c. 1953 – September 9, 2001) (variant transliterations include Ahmad, Massoud, etc.) was a Kabul University engineering student turned Afghan military leader who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, earning him the nickname Lion of Panjshir.

Massoud was an ethnic Tajik who was charismatic and respected by a faction of the Afghan population. In the early 1990s he became Defence Minister under President Burhanuddin Rabbani. Following the collapse of Rabbani’s government and the rise of the Taliban regime, Massoud became the military leader of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of various armed Afghani opposition groups, in a prolonged civil war. As the Taliban established control over most of Afghanistan, Massoud’s forces were increasingly forced into the mountainous areas of the north, where they controlled some 10% of Afghanistan’s territory and perhaps 30% of its population until late 2001. He was assassinated on September 9, 2001.

Portrait rug 6: Hamid Karzai

Thanks to warrug.com

The following biodata from Wikipedia:

Hamid Karzai (Pushtu: حامد کرزي, Dari: حامد کرزی) (born December 24, 1957) is the current and first democratically elected President of Afghanistan (since December 7, 2004). Since December 2001, Hamid Karzai had been Chairman of the Transitional Administration and been Interim President from 2002.

Portrait Rug 5: Khumaini

This image from Kevin Sudeith at warrug.com

Other examples show that this image is in mass production – the only variations from one to the next is in such details as the sequence of colours in the border.

Portrait Rug 4: Khomeini

This image thanks to Kevin Sudeith from warrug.com.

The text in white appears to be a (mystic) love poem in praise of K, admiring his beauty (the mole on his lip), and e.g. “lovesick at the beauty of your eyes”, and “without the love of K you cannot love Muhammad al Mahdi (the 12th Imam)”.

And see the text in white below the image, remarkably contradicting the kind of orthodoxy we might associate with Khomieni: “They open the door of the drinking house and we go there day and night as we are sick of going to the mosque and the school.”

For information about Muhammad al Mahdi, see the Encylopedia of the Orient.

From Wikipedia:
Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini (Persian: آیت الله روح الله خمینی Arabic: آية الله روح الله الخميني) (May 17, 1900? – June 3, 1989) was a Shi’a Muslim cleric and marja, and the political and spiritual leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which saw the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Following the Revolution, Khomeini held the office of Supreme Leader, the paramount figure in the political system of the new Islamic Republic, and retained this position until his death.

Khomeini was considered a spiritual leader to many Shi’a Muslims, and in Iran is officially addressed as Imam rather than Ayatollah, and his supporters also adhere to this convention.