ABSTRACT
In 2010, the US State Department released a photograph of Ambassador Frank Ricciardone, number two at the US embassy in Kabul, paying his respects at the mausoleum of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani on the campus of Kabul University. Afghani is revered in Afghanistan as a native son who inspired the modern revival of Islam, and who championed both internal reform and resistance to Western imperialism. The documentary record on the irrefutable evidence is marshaled in an appendix to the definitive biography of Afghani by the historian Nikki Keddie. Afghani's Iranian nationality was well known to intelligence agencies and Orientalists in his own day. In 1936, J. Rives Childs, an American diplomat stationed in Cairo, visited Tehran, and in an official dispatch laid out the evidence, which included the presence in Iran of Afghani's family. The historian Elie Kedourie described Childs as "probably the first Westerner conclusively to establish Afghani's Shi'ite and Iranian origin".
