The History of Afghanistan: Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s Sirāj Al-tawārīkh

3181 Pages·2012·9.55 MB·English

by  R. D. Mcchesney

The History of Afghanistan (vol 1)

The History of Afghanistan
Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah’s
Sirāj al-tawārīkh
Volume 1, The Sadūzāʾī Era 1747–1843
Translation, Introduction, Notes, and Index by
R.D. McChesney
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Katib, Fayz Muhammad.
 [Siraj al-tawarikh. English]
 The history of Afghanistan : Fayz Muhammad Katib Hazarah’s Siraj al-tawarikh.
  p. cm.
 Includes index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-23491-8 (hbk. set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23498-7 (e-book set)
1. Afghanistan—History. I. McChesney, R.D., 1944– and Khorrami, M.M. II. Title.
 DS356.K3313 2013
 958.1—dc23
2012036732
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ISBN 978-90-04-23492-5 (vol 1 hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-23491-8 (set hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-23498-7 (set e-book)
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CONTENTS
Volume One
Note on Transliteration  ............................................................................... vii
Preface and Acknowledgments  ................................................................ ix
Abbreviations  ................................................................................................. xiv
Introduction  ................................................................................................... xv
Title Page of Sirāj al-tawārīkh, Volume One  ........................................ cxv
Table of Contents of Sirāj al-tawārīkh, Volume One  ......................... cxvii
Volume One: The Sadūzāʾī Era  ................................................................. 1
Index  ................................................................................................................. 333

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Transliteration is the process of representing the characters of one alpha-
bet in the characters of another; in this case, representing the letters of the
Arabo-Persian alphabet in the letters of the Latin alphabet. Proper translit-
eration allows the reader of the destination alphabet who is familiar with
the source alphabet to correctly reproduce the letters (and words) as they
originally appear. Everyone else probably finds trans literation confusing
and annoying. One problem with transliterating the Arabo-Persian alpha-
bet is the fact that only consonants and long vowels actually have charac-
ters. The three short vowels of the Arabo-Persian alphabet—the fatḥah,
kasrah, and żammah—are rarely, if ever, represented in script. In addi-
tion the two diphthongs -aw- and -ay- cannot be differentiated in writing
from the long vowels ū and ī. All of this opens the way for translitera-
tion into the Latin alphabet—which has five short vowels and must use
digraphs to represent diphthongs—to become somewhat chaotic, unpre-
dictable, and often dependent on the pronunciation preferences of the
one doing the transliterating. Further complicating the matter are words
of Pashto origin (whose alphabet has 39 letters) rendered in the Arabo-
Persian alphabet (with 32 letters) in a print environment where the addi-
tional seven Pashto letters have no type font and the closest Arabo-Persian
type has to be substituted, as is the case with the Sirāj al-tawārīkh. For
the Latin alphabet another complicating element is conventional usage.
Where a name or term has been so commonly used as to merit inclusion
in a standard dictionary, the principle of consistent letter-for-letter repre-
sentation is ignored for the generally accepted usage. Beyond this, one has
to take into account the intermediate language (and sometimes alphabet)
through which a word has passed from the Arabo-Persian alphabet to the
Latin. French, German, Spanish, and Italian each have their own preferred
ways of rendering a word from the Arabo-Persian. (As one example, writ-
ers of French, for reasons of pronunciation, almost always transliterate
the single ‘s’ (sīn) from the Arabic alphabet as a doubled ‘s’ e.g. Hassan
and Hussein for Hasan and Husayn.) Russian adds the Cyrillic alphabet
as a further filter as well as the phenomenon of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ conso-
nants. The Persian word kalān (big, tall), for example, when passing into
the Latin alphabet through Cyrillic script usually winds up being kalyan
because Russian puts the “soft sign” (miagkii znak after the ‘l.’) Thus,
rendering into English words which have passed through intermediate
languages and alphabets inevitably leads to a multitude of forms for the
note on transliteration
same word (e.g., Muhammad, Mohammad, Mohammed, Mukhamed,
Mehmet, Mekhmed, Mahomed, Mahomet, etc.)
Given the very contingent realm in which transliteration may occur,
the following rules apply (exceptions noted) for this work:
1. Consonants, long vowels, and diphthongs are rendered according to
the standard established by the International Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies (IJMES).
2. Short vowels rely on the authority of ʿAli Akbar Dihkhuda, Lughat-
nāmah, 14 vols. (Tehran: Tehran University Publications, 1993–94).
3. In the text, the diacritics representing letters for which no exact Latin
alphabet equivalent exists are used on the first appearance of a techni-
cal term. Otherwise, diacritics are reserved for the titles of books, the
bibliography, glossary, and index of each volume.
4. Proper names are only transliterated in the index to each volume.
5. The digraphs sh and kh each represent a single letter. On very rare
occasions the kh and the sh may actually stand for the two letters k
and h (in the toponym Makhad for example) or s and h (in the word
for dysentery-ishāl).
6. Toponyms in India are rendered according to long-standing English
usage: for example: Punjab rather than Panjāb, Jhelum for Jīlam, Sutlej
for Satlaj, Delhi for Dihlī, Dera Ghazi Khan for Dīrah-i Ghāzī Khān,
Derajat for Dīrajāt, Lahore for Lāhūr or Lāhawr, Peshawar for Pishāwar.
Toponyms in Afghanistan, however, follow the text closely and may
vary significantly from present-day usage. Thus Ghaznīn for Ghazni,
Qandahār for Kandahar, Pamqān for Paghman, Lahūgard for Logar,
Lamqān for Laghman. But as an exception, Herat is used instead of
the more accurate Harāt.
7. Other exceptions to the IJMES rules are: Beg for Bīk/Bayg and Bey for
Bī in titles, Turkmen for Turkmān, and Mohmand for Muhmand. Fayz
Muhammad also writes the Sikh name Singh with five consonants (s-n-
g-h-h-Sing-hah) perhaps reflecting the way the name sounded to him.
Here it is transliterated “Singh.”
8. Compound names are divided according to Persian spelling. The names
Habib Allah and Aman Allah, for example are most commonly written
in European languages as single words, Habibullah (var. Habibollah),
Amanullah (Amanallah, Amanollah) yet in Persian they are never writ-
ten that way.
9. Italics are reserved for titles of books, names of ships, and restored text
omitted or censored from the Kabul edition.
viii
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The project to translate Sirāj al-tawārīkh began in the late autumn of 1967.
I had just graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree
in Oriental Studies and had been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to go to
Afghanistan to research the reign of Amir ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan. Having
written my senior thesis on the amir’s “modernization” efforts, my plans
were to expand that in some way. But, really, I had very little idea about
what I was doing. Connie, my wife of barely a year, and I were more than
a little aware of my vulnerability to the draft and being sent off to war in
Vietnam. I had also been accepted for graduate work at the Center for
Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard and passed the exams for admission to
the Foreign Service. What I was probably doing was just avoiding having
to make some career and life-determining decision. Afghanistan on a Ful-
bright seemed more fascinating than graduate school and certainly pref-
erable to the army, although the tentacles of the Selective Service were
unaffected by distance or national boundary.
In Kabul, someone, perhaps Prof. Muhammad Ali at Kabul University
or Dr. ʿAbd al-Hayy Habibi at the Afghan Historical Society told me about
the importance of the Sirāj al-tawārīkh (“Lamp of Histories”) for studying
that era. When I was unable to find the book either at the Kabul Pub-
lic Library or the University library, it was the late Prof. Habibi who sug-
gested I try ʿAbd al-Samad Maymanagi, the reportedly illiterate, but highly
knowledgeable, bookseller whose “shop” on the plaza in front of the Spin-
zar Hotel was an umbrella in the heat of summer and a refrigerator box
in winter. ʿAbd al-Samad, for many Afghans and one or two foreign schol-
ars, was the link to a hidden treasure trove of rare Afghan publications,
although I had no idea at the time. When I asked him, he produced a copy
of not just the first and second volumes of Sirāj, which were relatively easy
to find, but the extremely rare third volume as well.
Because the third volume deals extensively and solely with the reign
of ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan, I thought it would be useful to translate its 863
pages both to improve my Persian and to gain research material for what-
ever might come after my time in Kabul ended. So I spent the next year
and a half on it, producing a draft translation of little real use and there
the project remained for the next fifteen years or so. I occasionally gave
some thought to taking it up again but my academic interests had shifted
somewhat. Close observation of the work of the U.S. Foreign Service in