Faiz Mohammad Katib Hazara
Encyclopedia
Faiz Mohammad Katib son of Saeed Mohammad b. Khudydad was born in 1279 (1862-63
), in Zard Sang village of Qarabagh
district, Ghazni Province
of Afghanistan
, and died in Kabul
in 1931. He was an ethnic Hazara and was of Mohammad Khuwaja clan. He was Afghan
court chronicler, a skilled calligrapher and secretary to Emir Habib Ullah Khan from 1901 to 1919. He was a renowned historian, writer and intellectual, among the renowned group of Afghans seeking social and political changes in the country at the beginning of the 20th century, which shaped early regional politics from Afghanistan to Morocco
. He was a member of what became known as Junbish-i Mashrutyat or The Constitutionalist Movement.
s, in 1880 he and his family moved first to Nawur
and then, because of sectarian strife, to Qandahar in the same year. In 1887 he left Qandahar for a year’s travel that took him to Lahore
and Peshawar
where he spent some time studying English
and Urdu
. He eventually landed in Jalalabad
and was invited in 1888 to join the administration of the Afghan amir Abdur Rahman Khan
.
on a state visit, Habib Ullah assigned Faiz Mohammad to copy and post in the Charsuq, Kabul’s main market-place, the detailed letters sent back by Nasr Ullah recounting his activities, so that “noble and commoner alike would be apprised of the honor and respect that the English were according him”.
During Habib Ullah’s reign, Faiz Mohammad was involved, if only peripherally, with the Young Afghan movement led by Mahmud Baig Tarzi
. He is said to have been associated with the publication of Tarzi’s reformist journal, Siraj al-Akbar, and three other journals, Anis, Ḥayy alal-falah, and Aina-ye Irfan. After the assassination of his patron in 1337/1919, Faiz Mohammad worked for a time at the Ministry of Education on textbook revision. Sometime later, he was appointed to a teaching position at the Habibiya Laycee
(Habibiya High School) in Kabul.
During the reign of Aman Ullah Khan (1919–29), the Iranian minister in Kabul Sayyed Mahdi Farrokh compiled a “who’s who” of contemporary Afghan leaders. His sketch of Faiz Mohammad characterizes him as a devout Shiʿite, highly regarded by the Qizilbash community of Kabul, as well as a leader among his own people, the Hazaras, and an important source of information for the Persian mission about what was going on in the capital.
In 1929, the Tajik outlaw Habib Ullah Kalakani, known to history as Bacha ye Saqqao (son of the water-carrier), ousted Aman Ullah Khan and took control of Kabul for nine months (January to October 1929). During this uprising Faiz Mohammad, who spent almost the entire period inside the city, kept a journal which was the basis for an unfinished monograph entitled Kitab-e Tadakoor-e Enqilab which he began shortly after the fall of Bacha ye Saqqao.
During the occupation, Faiz Mohammad was forced to take part in a delegation sent by Kalakani to negotiate with Hazara groups opposing the Tajik leader. According to his account, he managed to subvert Kalakani’s plans and caused the mission to fail. However, he and the mission’s leader, Noor al-Din Agha, a Qizilbash Shiʿite from Kabul, paid a heavy price for this: both were sentenced to death by beating. Faiz Mohammad alone survived the ordeal and was saved by a colleague. The Persian mission in Kabul, under a directive from Reza Shah
to do what it could to aid the Shiʿites of Kabul, sent medicines to his house. He eventually recovered enough to travel the following year to Tehran for more medical care. After less than a year there, he returned to Kabul, where he died on 6 Shawal 1349/3 March 1931, at the age of sixty-eight or sixty-nine.
down through the reign of Habib Ullah Khan. The first was a history of Afghanistan entitled Tohfat ul-Habib (Ḥabib’s gift) in honor of the amir, but Habib Ullah Khan deemed the finished work unacceptable and ordered Faiz Mohammad to start over. The revised version is the three-volume history of Afghanistan entitled Siraj al-Tawarikh (Lamp of Histories), an allusion to the amir’s honorific “Lamp of the Nation and Religion” (Siraj al-mella waʾl-din). There were also problems in publishing it, the third volume never being completely printed. It is thought that the process of publishing the third volume lasted several years and only ended after Habib Ullah Khan’s death. Some say the publication on the third volume was halted at page 1,240 for unspecified reasons. Habib Ullah Khan’s successor, Aman Ullah Khan, was initially interested in the work and typesetting resumed in the mid-1920s, but when the amir reviewed the material in it on Anglo-Afghan relations, he reportedly changed his mind, and ordered all published but still incomplete copies of the third volume taken from the press and burned. Despite this reaction, Faiz Mohammad continued work on his chronicle. The manuscript of the remainder of the third volume is widely believed to have been finished, and the autograph was reportedly turned over to the Afghan archives by Faiz Mohammad’s son. Volumes devoted to Habib Ullah Khan and Aman Ullah Khan may also have been written. A farman issued by the latter announced that Faiz Mohammad had been ordered to complete the Siraj and then begin work on a chronicle of the reign of Aman Ullah Khan to be entitled Tarikh-e Asr-e Amaniya. There is some evidence to suggest he did indeed carry out these commissions, although nothing more was ever published.
Besides the monumental Siraj al-Tawrikh, Faiz Mohammad wrote the following works:
Among the works he is known to have copied is a 230 folio collection of farmans isssued by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb
(1068–1118/1658–1707) which he completed in Jalalabad in 1312/1894; the divan of Šehab-e Torshizi, a late 18th century poet from Herat
; and Risala-ye fiuz, a treatise on explosives.
In the late 20th century American scholar Robert D. McChesney
extensively researched Faiz Mohammed's life and written works, in particular the Sirajul Tawarikh. In 1999 McChesney published a translation of Tazkeratul Enqilaab's under the title Kabul under siege: Fayz Muhammad's account of the 1929 Uprising.
Gregorian
Gregorian might refer to:* The thought or ideology of Pope Gregory I or Pope Gregory VII *Things named for Pope Gregory I:**Gregorian chant** Gregorian mass**Brotherhood of Saint Gregory...
), in Zard Sang village of Qarabagh
Qarabagh District, Ghazni
Qarabagh district is located 56 km to the south west of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan. The 1,800 km² area is one of the most populated at 109,000; some reports count more than 200,000...
district, Ghazni Province
Ghazni Province
Ghazni is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan. Babur records in his Babur-Nama that Ghazni is also known as Zabulistan It is in the east of the country. Its capital is Ghazni City...
of Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, and died in Kabul
Kabul
Kabul , spelt Caubul in some classic literatures, is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. It is also the capital of the Kabul Province, located in the eastern section of Afghanistan...
in 1931. He was an ethnic Hazara and was of Mohammad Khuwaja clan. He was Afghan
Afghan
Afghan may refer to:* The country of Afghanistan, as abbreviated in reports as Afghan, or Afg.* Someone or something related to Afghanistan, see also Demography of Afghanistan* Afghan cuisine...
court chronicler, a skilled calligrapher and secretary to Emir Habib Ullah Khan from 1901 to 1919. He was a renowned historian, writer and intellectual, among the renowned group of Afghans seeking social and political changes in the country at the beginning of the 20th century, which shaped early regional politics from Afghanistan to Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
. He was a member of what became known as Junbish-i Mashrutyat or The Constitutionalist Movement.
Early life
Faiz Mohammad spent his youth in Qarabagh, tutored in Arabic and the Koran by local mullahMullah
Mullah is generally used to refer to a Muslim man, educated in Islamic theology and sacred law. The title, given to some Islamic clergy, is derived from the Arabic word مَوْلَى mawlā , meaning "vicar", "master" and "guardian"...
s, in 1880 he and his family moved first to Nawur
Nawur District
Nawur is the largest district in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. Its population, which is entirely Hazara, was estimated at 91,778 in 2002. The Jikhai River originates here.-References:...
and then, because of sectarian strife, to Qandahar in the same year. In 1887 he left Qandahar for a year’s travel that took him to Lahore
Lahore
Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the second largest city in the country. With a rich and fabulous history dating back to over a thousand years ago, Lahore is no doubt Pakistan's cultural capital. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, Lahore remains a...
and Peshawar
Peshawar
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the administrative center and central economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan....
where he spent some time studying English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and Urdu
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
. He eventually landed in Jalalabad
Jalalabad
Jalalabad , formerly called Adinapour, as documented by the 7th century Hsüan-tsang, is a city in eastern Afghanistan. Located at the junction of the Kabul River and Kunar River near the Laghman valley, Jalalabad is the capital of Nangarhar province. It is linked by approximately of highway with...
and was invited in 1888 to join the administration of the Afghan amir Abdur Rahman Khan
Abdur Rahman Khan
Abdur Rahman Khan was Emir of Afghanistan from 1880 to 1901.The third son of Mohammad Afzal Khan, and grandson of Dost Mohammad Khan, Abdur Rahman Khan was considered a strong ruler who re-established the writ of the Afghan government in Kabul after the disarray that followed the second...
.
History
He was soon attached to the entourage of the amir’s eldest son, Habib Ullah Khan, at the recommendation of one of his teachers, Mullah Sarwar Ishaq'zai. Faiz Mohammad accompanied the prince from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1311/1893-94. There is a manuscript attributed to him, dated 29 Rajab 1311/5 February 1894, which places him in Jalalabad at this time. In 1314/1896, when Habib Ullah’s younger brother Nasr Ullah Khan toured EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
on a state visit, Habib Ullah assigned Faiz Mohammad to copy and post in the Charsuq, Kabul’s main market-place, the detailed letters sent back by Nasr Ullah recounting his activities, so that “noble and commoner alike would be apprised of the honor and respect that the English were according him”.
During Habib Ullah’s reign, Faiz Mohammad was involved, if only peripherally, with the Young Afghan movement led by Mahmud Baig Tarzi
Mahmud Tarzi
Mahmūd Bēg Tarzī was one of Afghanistan's greatest intellectuals. He is known as the father of Afghan journalism...
. He is said to have been associated with the publication of Tarzi’s reformist journal, Siraj al-Akbar, and three other journals, Anis, Ḥayy alal-falah, and Aina-ye Irfan. After the assassination of his patron in 1337/1919, Faiz Mohammad worked for a time at the Ministry of Education on textbook revision. Sometime later, he was appointed to a teaching position at the Habibiya Laycee
Habibia High School
Habibia High School is a school in Kabul, Afghanistan, which has educated many of the former and current Afghan elite, including President Hamid Karzai and the country's most famous musician Ahmad Zahir. It was founded by King Habibullah Khan in 1903....
(Habibiya High School) in Kabul.
During the reign of Aman Ullah Khan (1919–29), the Iranian minister in Kabul Sayyed Mahdi Farrokh compiled a “who’s who” of contemporary Afghan leaders. His sketch of Faiz Mohammad characterizes him as a devout Shiʿite, highly regarded by the Qizilbash community of Kabul, as well as a leader among his own people, the Hazaras, and an important source of information for the Persian mission about what was going on in the capital.
In 1929, the Tajik outlaw Habib Ullah Kalakani, known to history as Bacha ye Saqqao (son of the water-carrier), ousted Aman Ullah Khan and took control of Kabul for nine months (January to October 1929). During this uprising Faiz Mohammad, who spent almost the entire period inside the city, kept a journal which was the basis for an unfinished monograph entitled Kitab-e Tadakoor-e Enqilab which he began shortly after the fall of Bacha ye Saqqao.
During the occupation, Faiz Mohammad was forced to take part in a delegation sent by Kalakani to negotiate with Hazara groups opposing the Tajik leader. According to his account, he managed to subvert Kalakani’s plans and caused the mission to fail. However, he and the mission’s leader, Noor al-Din Agha, a Qizilbash Shiʿite from Kabul, paid a heavy price for this: both were sentenced to death by beating. Faiz Mohammad alone survived the ordeal and was saved by a colleague. The Persian mission in Kabul, under a directive from Reza Shah
Reza Shah
Rezā Shāh, also known as Rezā Shāh Pahlavi and Rezā Shāh Kabir , , was the Shah of the Imperial State of Iran from December 15, 1925, until he was forced to abdicate by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran on September 16, 1941.In 1925, Reza Shah overthrew Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last Shah of the Qajar...
to do what it could to aid the Shiʿites of Kabul, sent medicines to his house. He eventually recovered enough to travel the following year to Tehran for more medical care. After less than a year there, he returned to Kabul, where he died on 6 Shawal 1349/3 March 1931, at the age of sixty-eight or sixty-nine.
Publications
Faiz Mohammad is best known for his books on Afghan history. During Habib Ullah’s reign, he accepted two commissions to write a comprehensive history of Afghanistan covering events from the time of Ahmad ShahAhmad Shah Durrani
Ahmad Shah Durrani , also known as Ahmad Shāh Abdālī and born as Ahmad Khān, was the founder of the Durrani Empire in 1747 and is regarded by many to be the founder of the modern state of Afghanistan.Ahmad Khan enlisted as a young soldier in the military of the Afsharid kingdom and quickly rose...
down through the reign of Habib Ullah Khan. The first was a history of Afghanistan entitled Tohfat ul-Habib (Ḥabib’s gift) in honor of the amir, but Habib Ullah Khan deemed the finished work unacceptable and ordered Faiz Mohammad to start over. The revised version is the three-volume history of Afghanistan entitled Siraj al-Tawarikh (Lamp of Histories), an allusion to the amir’s honorific “Lamp of the Nation and Religion” (Siraj al-mella waʾl-din). There were also problems in publishing it, the third volume never being completely printed. It is thought that the process of publishing the third volume lasted several years and only ended after Habib Ullah Khan’s death. Some say the publication on the third volume was halted at page 1,240 for unspecified reasons. Habib Ullah Khan’s successor, Aman Ullah Khan, was initially interested in the work and typesetting resumed in the mid-1920s, but when the amir reviewed the material in it on Anglo-Afghan relations, he reportedly changed his mind, and ordered all published but still incomplete copies of the third volume taken from the press and burned. Despite this reaction, Faiz Mohammad continued work on his chronicle. The manuscript of the remainder of the third volume is widely believed to have been finished, and the autograph was reportedly turned over to the Afghan archives by Faiz Mohammad’s son. Volumes devoted to Habib Ullah Khan and Aman Ullah Khan may also have been written. A farman issued by the latter announced that Faiz Mohammad had been ordered to complete the Siraj and then begin work on a chronicle of the reign of Aman Ullah Khan to be entitled Tarikh-e Asr-e Amaniya. There is some evidence to suggest he did indeed carry out these commissions, although nothing more was ever published.
Besides the monumental Siraj al-Tawrikh, Faiz Mohammad wrote the following works:
- Tuhfatul Habib' Afghan History (1747–1880), in two volumes. (The original script, hand-written by Faiz Mohammed, exists in the National Archive in Kabul)
- Tazkeratul Enqilaab accounts of the days of Habibullah, Bacha-e Saqaw
- History of Ancient Prophets/Rulers, from Adam to Jesus
- Hidāyat-i kisht-i gul-hā va qalamah-hā va ḥubūbāt va ghayrah (1921–1922)
- Jughrāfiyā-yi ṭabʻī va Afrīqā
- Tarikh-e Hokama-ye Motaqaddem, compiled while he was working at the Ministry of Education;
- Fayz al-Foyuzat ,a fragment of which, called Afghan treaties and agreements (ʿahd wa misaq-e afghan) was published in Sayyed Mahdi Farrokh’s Tarikh-e Siasi-ye Afghanistan (Tehran, 1314 Š./1935) and which, in tune with the times, was a sharp critique of the Abdul Rahman’s relations with the British;
- Faqarat-e Sharʿiya, which is not known to have survived; and
- Nasab-nama-ye Tawaʾef-e afghena wa taʿaddod-e nofus-e ishan, also known as Nijhad-nama-ye Afghan, a description of Afghan tribes and non-Afghans residing in Afghanistan. The Nijhad-nama was published in Persia in 1933 from a manuscript thought to be the autograph and held in the Kitab Khana-ye Milli-ye Malik in TehranTehranTehran , sometimes spelled Teheran, is the capital of Iran and Tehran Province. With an estimated population of 8,429,807; it is also Iran's largest urban area and city, one of the largest cities in Western Asia, and is the world's 19th largest city.In the 20th century, Tehran was subject to...
.
Among the works he is known to have copied is a 230 folio collection of farmans isssued by the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb
Abul Muzaffar Muhy-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir , more commonly known as Aurangzeb or by his chosen imperial title Alamgir , was the sixth Mughal Emperor of India, whose reign lasted from 1658 until his death in 1707.Badshah Aurangzeb, having ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for nearly...
(1068–1118/1658–1707) which he completed in Jalalabad in 1312/1894; the divan of Šehab-e Torshizi, a late 18th century poet from Herat
Herat Province
Herat is one the 34 provinces of Afghanistan; together with Badghis, Farah, and Ghor provinces, it makes up the South-western region of the country...
; and Risala-ye fiuz, a treatise on explosives.
In the late 20th century American scholar Robert D. McChesney
Robert D. McChesney
Robert Duncan McChesney is a scholar of the social and cultural history of Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan.-Academic career:Robert D...
extensively researched Faiz Mohammed's life and written works, in particular the Sirajul Tawarikh. In 1999 McChesney published a translation of Tazkeratul Enqilaab's under the title Kabul under siege: Fayz Muhammad's account of the 1929 Uprising.
Links
- Biography of Fayż Mohammad Kāteb at Encyclopædia IranicaEncyclopædia IranicaEncyclopædia Iranica is a project whose goal is to create a comprehensive and authoritative English language encyclopedia about the history, culture, and civilization of Iranian peoples from prehistory to modern times...
. - kateb-e-hazara.blogfa.com
- Faiz Mohammad Katib Hazara's Kitāb-i musṭatāb-i sirāj al-tavārīkh - Afghanistan Digital Library