Afghanistan

AFGHANISTAN. - 1. GEOGRAPHY. - More than twice the size of Italy (650,000-700,000 sq. km.), A. occupies the NE. part of the Iranian plateau.

A country two-thirds mountainous, with vast desert or steppe areas and a dry continental climate, it is dominated by nomadic and transhumant pastoralism (sheep). The cultivable areas are limited (cereals, cotton, sugar beet); the mining possibilities are considerable (coal, metals, sulfur), but only petroleum is exploited. Economic development, to which the Anglo-Russian antagonism is opposed (A. is a buffer state), is retarded by the scarcity and archaic nature of communications (caravan trade, lack of railways); the volume of trade is therefore insignificant (fruit, woolens exported, against cotton goods and tea).

The population (7-12 million inhabitants) is predominantly of Iranian stock, Muslim-Sunni and nomadic. The State is governed by an Emir, appointed by hereditary right. Attempts at renewal along Western models have had little success.

The capital is Kabul (150,000 inhabitants), near the Indian border.

Giuseppe Caraci

2. CATHOLICISM IN AFGHANISTAN

The first reports of groups of Christians in A. are found in the Book of the Laws of the Countries of Bardesanes (ed. Fr. Nau, in Patrologia syriaca, I, 2, p. 606 ff.), who lived between 154 and 222. From the 5th century onward the Christians of A. shared the fortunes of the Nestorian Church. They held out, even after the Muslim conquest in the 7th century (only in 871 did the capture of Kabul take place), in respectable minorities at least until the 9th century, and then, until the second half of the 19th, in tribes fiercely independent in Kafiristan (that is, "land of infidels"). When later the bloody Mongol domination of Genghis Khan (from 1221 in A.) permitted the resumption of contacts between Catholicism and central-eastern Asia, A. remained outside it: for Marco Polo, toward the end of that century, simply "there Mahomet is adored." In the 16th and 17th centuries four Jesuits passed through, called from Goa to his court by Akbar: Father A. Montserrat (1581), Brother Bento Goes (1603), Father G. De Castro, of Turin, who followed the emperor Jahangir to Kabul, charged with the assistance of the Christians who were with the imperial troops (1625-26); and Father E. Roth, who writes of having found in Kabul a group of Christians and, on the ground that he considers them descendants of St. Thomas, maintains that they did not appear to him as people present there by chance or passing through, but resident there ab immemora.

Christians, Portuguese and Indians, in the 18th century are found in the retinue of the viceroys of Kabul and among the soldiers in service there, for whom it seems that now and then some Jesuit pushed as far as Kabul. Certainly, Christians were led from Lahore to Kabul and to Kandahar in 1752 by the founder of the modern Afghan kingdom, Ahmad Shāh Durrani, for artillery service, and some Jesuit visited them twice a year. Some Catholic Armenians, come from Persia, settled in Kabul at the time of the invasions of Nādir Shāh in A. and in India, between 1736 and 1747; they were not many, but respected and influential especially when Armenian women entered the ruling family. They inhabited a quarter of their own in the very Bala Hissar, the citadel-hill of Kabul and seat of the royal palace, and an enclosed section of theirs in the city's very ancient cemetery, and there they gathered every Sunday. At the time of M. Elphinstone's mission (1809) there was also a Greek priest.

After the Armenians were expelled by Abdurrahman, because they had intermarried with the rebel Ishak Khan (1888), there was no longer a Christian community in Kabul: the hiring, however, already under the same king, of Englishmen for the health or technical service and - after Abdurrahman (1919) had rejected English tutelage - of persons of various nationalities, to whom was added the personnel of the legations and embassies, led Pius XI, in the year of Amanullah's visit (1938), to think of establishing in Kabul, under the official form of chaplain of the legation of Italy, which already had the authorization for it in its treaty, a priest charged with the religious assistance of the Catholics resident in A. This was carried out in 1932 with the sending of a Barnabite father and the erection of a chapel in the Italian legation, where the approximately 400 Catholics living in the Afghan capital gather.

Virginio M. Colciago