How does genealogy respond to a messiah? What competing visions of temporality and history are found between Afghan genealogies and messianic movements in the Sulayman mountains? And what might this tell us about ethnicity and history in the eary modern period? In the early seventeenth century, a number of scholars such as Niʿmat Allah Harawi, Akhund Darweza, and Khushhal Khan Khatak began to inscribe genealogies of the Afghans that traced their peoplehood through the celebrated champion of Qays and then back to Malik Talut: King Saul of Biblical-Qur’anic history. While scholars have recognized Niʿmat Allah’s genealogy of the Afghans as an attempt to defend and valorize an Afghan community treated with suspicion and hostility in the Mughal courts, less attention has been given to the social purpose and historical imagination of other Afghan genealogies of early modern South Asia. This paper suggests that Afghan genealogies—especially that of Akhund Darweza—were not merely acts of constructing a blessed identity for a misunderstood people; rather, these genealogies crafted a philosophy of history that responded to the proliferation of messianic and mystical movements between Peshawar and Kabul. As this paper demonstrates, Akhund Darweza and Khushhal Khan Khatak feared the epistemological anarchy that accompanied the cyclical temporalities of messiahs such as Bayazid Ansari: how could we know anything for certain if messiahs were re-opening past prophetic moments and drawing future secrets from the Unseen realm into the present age? In combining heresiographical condemnation of messianic movements with legendary narratives of descent from patriarchs and prophets, these genealogies attempted to tether knowledge, religion, and peoplehood to a careful construction of lineage. Approached in such a way, this paper argues that the genealogies of Akhund Darweza and Khushhal Khan Khatak necessitate that historians recognize the irreducibly theological commitments that animate these early modern constructions of ethnicity. Indeed, Akhund Darweza’s exploration of Afghan ethnicity is entangled with his understanding of Islamic eschatology: the Afghans have a tragic role to play at the End Times. In short, by offering a close reading of the genealogies of Akhund Darweza and Khushhal Khan Khatak, this paper argues that our notions of identity, ethnicity, and the racialization of the Afghans in the Mughal Empire only gain their full purchase against the horizon of religious debates on the nature of time, revelation, and truth.