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Faiz Muhammad Katib Hazara

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Faiz Muhammad Katib Hazara was a Hazara historian and court chronicler in Kabul, author of the Siraj al-Tawarikh, and has been called Afghanistan's last traditional and first modern historian.

Faiz Muhammad, known as Katib ("the scribe"), was a Hazara historian who served at the court in Kabul. Sources disagree about his birth year, giving dates around 1860 to 1862. He died in Kabul in 1931.1

Siraj al-Tawarikh

His major work, the Siraj al-Tawarikh, is a history of Afghanistan in Persian, published in Kabul from 1913 to 1915.1 It is a principal source on Abdur Rahman Khan's campaigns against the Hazaras, and scholars rely on its detail.2 An English translation was prepared by Robert McChesney and Mehdi Khorrami.3

McChesney's study of him is titled "The Bottomless Inkwell", and treats him as both the last traditional and the first modern historian of Afghanistan.4

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia, Faiz Muhammad Kateb. ↩ ↩2

  2. Mehdi J. Hakimi, The Afghan State and the Hazara Genocide, Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 37, 2024. ↩

  3. Princeton University, The History of Afghanistan: Fayz Muhammad Katib Hazarah's Siraj al-Tawarikh. ↩

  4. Nile Green (ed.), Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes, Oxford University Press, 2016. ↩