Version 1 of Faiz Muhammad Katib Hazara

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. ↩