education for girls, and so forth were met with fierce resistance by a great section of the conservative rural and urban clerical establishment. As to citizens’ participation in government matters, this has been nearly impossible for decades. The Constitution of 1923 (and the one of 1931) had contemporary and progressive traits that introduced Afghanistan to modern constitutionalism. But in actual terms governance remained authoritarian. A majority of what were stipulated as constitutional rights turned out to be pure theory. Hence, we can say that Afghanistan in the twentieth century was, in fact, an absolute rather than a constitutional monarchy. The country was not a police state, but the central operations of the government were running by a series of authoritarian figures including Prime Minister Hashim Khan (1929–1946), Shah Mahmud Khan (1946–1953) and Muhammad Da’ud Khan (1951–1963). Except for the years between 1963 and 1973 during which the prime minister was a common citizen all the figures came from the royal family. They had made achievements in certain fields, for example they firmly stuck to Afghanistan's political neutrality during the Second World War and worked on modernizing with the help of foreign development aide. But under the rule of such powerful prime ministers the political participation of citizens was hardly possible despite the existence of a bicameral parliament. The final decisions were always made by the power-holders. Discontent with and criticism of the inadequacies that affected social and political life hardly featured in the official contemporary sources of the time. But they appear and are published decades later in other sources for example the personal memoirs of important political figures of . Equally, the Afghan press, which was relatively diverse for a third world country, had to struggle against mild to serious forms of censorship. In 1952, for example, the country banned all privately owned newspapers. As already mentioned, Pazhwak, who in the 1940s held a high position in the press, resigned in protest the above-mentioned press law. Despite, or perhaps because of, such difficulties Pazhwak wanted to play a role in further developing the Afghan society. He had to express his criticism in such a manner that would allow for an efficient communication of criticism but without triggering existential problems for him. The themes related to Afghanistan which he openly or subtly dealt with in his texts included social conditions, the citizens’ right of freedom, the peaceful handling of a