Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan William Dalrymple

Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan. Book Review and Story Of Kohi Noor Diamond.

 William Dalrymple

The year 1809 opened auspiciously for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of the icy landscape long clotted with drifts of waist-high snow...

It was just then, at that moment of thaw and sap, that Shah Shuja received two pieces of good news – something of a rarity in his troubled reign.

The first concerned the recovery of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had been made to find it. 

Shah Zaman, Shuja’s elder brother and predecessor on the throne of Afghanistan, was said to have hidden the gem shortly before being captured and blinded by his  enemies. A huge Indian ruby known as the #Fakhraj , the family’s other most precious gem, had also disappeared at the same time.

So Shah Shuja summoned his blind brother and questioned him on the whereabouts of their father’s most famous jewels: was it really true that he knew where they were hidden? Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being taken prisoner. 

Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court! historian later recorded, ‘Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts.

They found the Koh-i-Nur with a Shinwari sheikh who in his ignorance was using it as a paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj, they found it with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream to wash his clothes.

Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan

 William Dalrymple

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 By Sohail Ahmad On Twitter.