Shah Shujah Durrani

Shuja Shah Durrani, also known as Shah Shujah and Shujah al-Mulk, was Shah of the Durrani Empire in two reigns: from 13 July 1803 to 3 May 1809, and again from 7 August 1839 until his assassination on 5 April 1842. A son of Timur Shah Durrani, he was of the Sadozai lineage of the Durrani clan of Pashtuns, and became the fifth king of the Durrani Empire. ^{1 2}

He was born Shuja ul-Mulk Mohammad at Kandahar on 4 November 1785; his father was Timur Shah Durrani and his mother a Sadozai lady. He was governor of Herat and Peshawar from 1798 to 1801. ^{1 3}

Shuja proclaimed himself King of Afghanistan in October 1801, after the deposition of his brother Zaman Shah, but ascended the throne properly only on 13 July 1803. On coming to power he ended the blood feud with the powerful Barakzai family and forgave them, marrying their sister Wafa Begum to seal the alliance. ¹

In 1809 he allied Afghanistan with British India against a feared invasion by France. A British diplomatic mission reached his court that year; Mountstuart Elphinstone described the king as a handsome man of olive complexion with a thick black beard, a clear voice and a princely address, and noted that Shuja wore the Koh-i-Noor diamond in one of his bracelets. ¹

In June 1809 his predecessor and brother Mahmud Shah defeated him at the battle of Nimla and deposed him. Shuja went into exile in the Punjab, where Jahandad Khan Bamizai captured him and imprisoned him at Attock (1811–1812) and then in Kashmir (1812–1813). When Mahmud Shah's vizier Fateh Khan invaded Kashmir alongside Ranjit Singh's army, Shuja left with the Sikh army and stayed at Lahore in 1813–1814; there he was imprisoned and forced to give up the Timur Ruby, the Koh-i-Noor and the Darya-i-Noor diamonds to Ranjit Singh, before escaping to Ludhiana and the East India Company. ¹

From 1818 he drew a pension from the East India Company, which thought he might one day prove useful, and lived at Ludhiana, where his brother Zaman Shah joined him in 1821. In 1833 he struck a deal with Ranjit Singh to march his troops through the Punjab, ceding Peshawar to the Sikhs if they could take it; in 1834 he marched on Kandahar and was defeated by an alliance of the Kandahar sardars and Dost Mohammad Khan, while the Sikhs retook Peshawar. ¹

In 1838 Shuja gained the support of the British and of Ranjit Singh for wresting power from Dost Mohammad Khan, and on 7 August 1839 the British, with Sikh help, restored him to the throne, thirty years after his deposition, in the First Anglo-Afghan War. Most Afghans by then could not remember him, and those who did remembered a cruel and tyrannical ruler. ¹

He shut himself away in the Bala Hissar citadel at Kabul, exacting vengeance on those he felt had betrayed him, and grew deeply unpopular; he did not remain long in power once the British and Sikhs left. On 4 April 1842, under religious pressure, he mustered an army near Kabul nominally to attack the British; the next day his godson Shujah ud-Daula, a son of his nawab Muhammad Zaman Khan, led the gang that ambushed and assassinated him. ^{1 2}

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