Miraculous Edges of Rebellion: On the Strange History of Ḥājjī Mīr Khān

Abstract

In this article I consider different accounts of the 1709 uprising in Kandahar led by Mīr Ways Khān, often remembered and revered by the name Ḥājjī Mīr Khān. Narratives of the uprising guide us through a world in which supernatural happenings are held to be constitutive elements of social and political fortunes. Despite this, the strange and miraculous aspects of the rebellion are not often considered in contemporary analyses of the event. I argue that a focus on these miraculous edges of rebellion offers us one way by which to disentangle Mīr Ways Khān’s rebellion from an axiomatic teleology of tribe, kingdom, and nation-state: a teleology that has shaped securitized visions of Afghan pasts. Rather than herald the end of the Safavid dynasty or foreshadow the rise of today’s Afghanistan, the revolt was used across archives to telegraph divergent futures that never came to pass.