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Coronotation of Ahmad Shah Abdali as imagined by a modern Afghan painter. Retrieved from PRTKand's images on Flickr See also Chapter 79, 'Enlightenment' in The Republic of Rumi: a Novel of Reality

Ahmad Khan Abdali (c.1722-1773), who ruled over Afghanistan as Ahmad Shah Durrani from 1747 to 1773, is generally considered to be the father of the Afghan nation (popularly called “Shah Baba” in that capacity) as well as the founder of the present-day Afghanistan.

His direct impact on the region which Iqbal foresaw as Pakistan was that Sindh, Baluchistan and Punjab broke away from the throne of Delhi in 1751 (the Frontier region, now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, had already been taken away from the Mughals by Abdali’s predecessor).

On January 16, 1761, Abdali defeated the Marhatta Confederacy in the Third Battle of Panipat, thus preventing the takeover of the region by the Hindu revivalist movement. For this, he is remembered by many Muslims in the sub-continent as a savior, although some contemporaries like the poet Mir Taqi Mir and the fiction-writer Mir Amman of Delhi mentioned him as a ruthless invader.

Abdali is mentioned prominently by Iqbal. In Javid Nama (1932), he is shown in Paradise in the company of his predecessor Nadir Shah and the later-day freedom fighter Sultan Tipu of Mysore (see Chapter 79 in A Novel of Reality), and proclaims that all Asia is a single organism and its heart is Afghanistan.

In What Should Now Be Done, O Nations of the East (1937), Iqbal offers an impressionistic account of a visit to the tomb of Abdali in Kandahar (Afghanistan), where the spirit of Abdali addresses him from heaven.

Abdali’s comments about Afghanistan in Javid Nama may be seen as consistent with the spirit of his extant verses in Pushto and Persian, such as the following famous ones: