Soraya Tarzi

Soraya Tarzi (24 November 1899 – 20 April 1968) was Queen of Afghanistan as the wife of King Amanullah Khan, and as Queen she became one of the most influential women in the world at the time. She played a major part in the modernisation reforms of Amanullah Khan, particularly regarding the emancipation of women. ¹

Soraya Tarzi was born in Damascus, Syria, then part of the Ottoman Empire, the daughter of the Afghan political figure Sardar Mahmud Beg Tarzi and granddaughter of Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi; she belonged to the Mohammadzai Pashtun tribe, a sub-tribe of the Barakzai dynasty. The English article's body text dates her birth to 24 November 1899, while its lead and infobox give 1897; the Arabic article and Wikidata give 1899, which this museum follows, marking the date debated in the data note. ^{1 2 3}

She studied in Syria, learning Western and modern values, and her mother was the Syrian feminist Asma Rasmiya, daughter of Sheikh Muhammad Saleh al-Fattal of Aleppo, muezzin of the Umayyad Mosque. ¹

After the Tarzi family returned to Afghanistan and was received at court, Soraya met Prince Amanullah, a sympathiser of her father's liberal ideas, and they married on 30 August 1913 at Qawm-i-Bagh Palace in Kabul. ¹

She was the future king's only wife, which broke centuries of tradition, and both of them actively denounced polygamy; when Amanullah succeeded to the throne he dissolved the royal harem and freed its enslaved women. ¹

When Amanullah was enthroned as King in June 1926, Soraya was enthroned alongside him, and she was the first Muslim consort who appeared in public together with her husband, something unheard of at the time; she took part in hunting parties and in some Cabinet meetings. ¹

The emancipation of women was part of Amanullah's reform policy, and the women of the royal family, particularly his wife and sisters, acted as the role models of this change. In 1921 she founded and contributed to the first magazine for women, Ishadul Naswan (Guidance for Women), and the first women's organisation, Anjuman-i Himayat-i-Niswan, and she opened the first primary school for girls in Kabul, the Masturat School, in 1921, as well as the first hospital for women in 1924. ¹

In a public speech in 1926 she argued that women should take their part in serving the nation as women did in the early years of Islam, and that this required acquiring knowledge. She sent fifteen young women, graduates of her Masturat school, to Turkey for higher education in 1928. ¹

She shared her view that purdah, the seclusion and veiling of women, was an un-Islamic Abbasid-era innovation, and in August 1928 she publicly removed her veil during a speech at the Loya Jirgah; conservative objection to the unveiling of women then began to mobilise public opinion against the reforms. ¹

In 1927–1928 Soraya and her husband visited Europe, meeting among others Pope Pius XI and receiving honorary degrees from Oxford University in 1928. ¹

In 1929 the King abdicated to prevent a civil war and went into exile; the family fled first to India and then lived in exile in Rome, invited there by Italy. Not much is known about their life in exile; the New York Times reported that the royal couple had converted to Catholicism, but this was later found to be false. ¹

Soraya Tarzi died on 20 April 1968 in Rome. Her funeral was escorted by an Italian military team to the Rome airport, and in Afghanistan a solemn state funeral was held; she is buried in the family mausoleum at Jalalabad, next to her husband the King, who had died eight years earlier. ¹

In 2019 Time chose her as its woman of the year for 1927, in a series of covers celebrating women of the year from 1920. ¹

Every source gives her religion generically: the article's text calls her the first Muslim consort to appear in public with her husband, its infobox gives Islam, and Wikidata's religion value is Islam; no source names a school, so under the museum's two-source rule the record stays unknown, as the data note explains. ^{1 3}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.