Photograph of Major Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari sitting amongst a group of Afghan chieftains and army officers, taken in January 1879.
This article is the first installment of a Wire series on the history of Afghanistan in light of Taliban’s takeover of the country in August, 2021.
THE APOSTLE’S FIELD
Early Christian sources disagree regarding the apostolic journeys of Thomas. Some claim that, when the Twelve divided up the known world among themselves, the lot of Thomas fell to Parthia, which was centered in modern Iran. Others record that the Lord commissioned him for India. It’s possible that he labored in both regions, as both Parthia and India were somewhat loose geographical terms for wide swaths of of territory in South-Central Asia. Interestingly, both civilizations overlapped at the western foot of the Hindu-Kush mountains. In antiquity, this region was known as Bactria. Today, it is the modern nation-state of Afghanistan. It was in Bactria that a second or third century pseudographical source named “The Acts of Thomas” places the apostle, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
“Coming to India Thomas undertook to build a palace for [King] Gundafor, but spent the money entrusted to him on the poor. Gundafor imprisoned him; but the Apostle escaped miraculously and Gundafor was converted. Now it is certainly a remarkable fact that about the year A.D. 46 a king was reigning over that part of Asia south of Himalayas now represented by Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab, and Sind, who bore the name Gondophernes or Guduphara. This we know…from the discovery of coins…Despite sundry minor variations the identity of the name with the Gundafor of the "Acta Thomae" is unmistakable and is hardly disputed.”[1]
In other words, archeologists have unearthed evidence that the king whom the Acts of Thomas claims was served by the apostle was in fact a historical figure, and that he reigned in what is today Afghanistan, during the same time that Thomas would have been in the region. Not surprisingly, the disciple nicknamed The Twin is considered the patron saint of Afghanistan, although there are hardly any traditional Afghan Christians remaining today to venerate him as such.
As for Thomas, several traditions hold that he continued southeast on his missionary journey, weaving through a diverse world of Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Hinduism, until he was finally laid on the altar of martyrdom near the coast of the Indian Ocean in what is now Chennai in modern India. Whether or not his miraculous escape from an Afghan prison was the impetus for the saving faith of an Afghan king, we may not know until it is revealed by the Last Day. We do know that the church had taken root in parts of Afghanistan by the fifth century, as the Apostolic Church of the East appointed bishops in places like Kandahar, Herat, Zaranj and Farah, all major cities in Afghanistan today. The Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire in modern Iran was generally tolerant towards the Christians. But by the middle of the seventh century, a new power was expanding rapidly from the caravan routes of Arabia. It would soon defeat the Sassanids and reach the Afghan frontier.
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GREAT GAMES AND GRAVEYARDS
During the reign of the Muslim caliphs Omar and Uthman, the second and third “rightly-guided” caliphs after Muhammad, the Islamic Caliphate expanded into modern Iran and Afghanistan. At first, Islam made little headway against the tribal religions and customs of the Afghan people. But in the following centuries, Muslim preachers would gradually convert many of the inhabitants of Afghanistan to Islam, so that most of the tribes were Muslim-majority by the middle of the ninth century. The caliphs of Damascus and Baghdad would expel the Hindu monarchs from southern Afghanistan and rule over the entire region.
Over the next millennium, Afghanistan lay at the crossroads of empires from the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia, falling under the sway of the Mongols, the Turko-Mongol Timurids, the Muslim Indian Mughals, and the the Sikhs. During the nineteenth century, Afghanistan became the centerpiece of a chessboard in the “Great Game,” the competition between the burgeoning Russian and British empires to monopolize the lucrative resources of Asia. Each successive empire swept across Afghanistan’s slopes and plains, initially occupying its territory in seeming victory, only to be frustrated by the restive mix of Afghan tribespeople, before finally withdrawing. This pattern of conquest, persistent unrest, and eventual withdrawal would be repeated over and over again, earning for Afghanistan a reputation as the “graveyard of empires,” where the fragility of the world’s waning powers was exposed.
birth of The Mujahedeen
Despite Afghanistan’s reputation as the graveyard of empires, it was nonetheless a deeply cultured, moderate, and rich society, enduring and prospering throughout tumultuous times until the end of the twentieth century. However, beginning in the 1970’s, the fortunes of Afghanistan would begin to shift. In 1973, a member of Afghanistan’s royal family named Mohammed Daoud Khan overthrew his royal cousin and ended the monarchy that had existed in Afghanistan in one form or another since the eighteenth century. After the ascension of Afghanistan’s nascent communist movement, Khan’s government was overthrown in 1978, and the strongman was himself assassinated by militiamen in the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which took control of the government in Kabul and became a satellite of the Soviet Union. However, the ideals of the pro-Soviet regime were deeply unpopular amongst a very traditional, tribal society, and the Communist regime was fractured by internal division. Fearing intervention from the United States, the Russian army invaded Afghanistan in December, 1979, and installed a rival Communist faction in the hopes of pacifying the country. However, the Soviet presence on Afghan soil had the opposite effect.
Beginning in 1980, the American CIA, British MI-6 and Gulf Arab kingdoms began arming and training Afghan resistance fighters in Pakistan. Known as the mujahedeen, or “doers of jihad,” the anti-Soviet Afghan militia began a long, brutal war of attrition against the Soviet Union. Although the Russians controlled the urban areas, the mujahedeen held sway across vast swaths of the countryside, launching guerilla attacks against the Soviet military. They were joined by tens of thousands more mujahedeen from all over the Muslim world; Salafi devotees whose dedication to a global, apocalyptic battle against the infidels would begin to seep into the mosques and madrassas of Afghanistan. The Russians responded with repeated offensives into rebel territory, decimating rural Afghan communities with relentless bombing raids, and increasing its military deployment to over 100,000 personnel. However, despite the overwhelming show of brutal force, victory remained elusive for the Soviet Union, which found itself overcommitted and diplomatically isolated. The decentralized nature of the Afghan resistance made it nearly impossible to dismantle, and by the late 1980’s, the Russians had begun to withdraw. Negotiations in Geneva allowed for the Soviets to exit Afghanistan while saving face. It was a massive victory for the mujahedeen and their Western allies, and the war became one of the catalysts for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Satisfied with the outcome of the war, the United States began to disengage from Afghanistan. However, what both superpowers left behind in their wake was a vastly different landscape. Afghanistan was devastated by a decade of war, having suffered a pattern of atrocities at the hands of their Soviet occupiers, including massacres, rape, looting and destruction. Almost 100,000 Afghans had died in the conflict, while thousands of communities lay in rubble. Moreover, the seeds of global jihad had been planted amongst traditional Muslim communities. Although the Cold War contest was over in Afghanistan, the following decades would see a movement arise from within that would draw the world into a War on Terror. It would also awaken another movement among desperate people for the hope of Good News, and a spark of light which had not been seen since the days of the Apostle Thomas and the Eastern Church would begin to blaze across Afghanistan again.
[1] “St. Thomas the Apostle.” Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org/cathen/14658b.htm.