Recent scholarship and discoveries of hereto inaccessible writings of Fayz Muhammad Katib (1862-1931) have revealed that perhaps the historian’s most challenging critic and his nemesis was Mahmud Tarzi (1865-1933). According to Fayz Muhammad, Tarzi even tried to take ownership of the historian’s work. While Fayz Muhammad in his works refers to Tarzi’s actions and character, the same cannot be said in reverse. The two men, both born in Ghazni three years apart, had very different backgrounds, life experiences, and convictions, yet both were very instrumental, willingly or not, in forging the modern history, literature, and national character of Afghanistan. This paper will begin with Fayz Muhammad’s views on Tarzi’s role as one of the reviewers of his magnum opus, Siraj al-tawarikh, and on what Fayz Muhammad believed to be Tarzi’s attempts not only to hinder and undermine the work and its author, but also to steal the history. While both Fayz Muhammad and Tarzi were helping to shape the master narrative of Afghanistan through their historical and journalistic creations and, for the latter, his political activities, they came from very different worlds and held very different world views. Fayz Muhammad, as a Hazarah, was a representative of an ethnic and religious minority that was being excluded from the national character of Afghanistan; Tarzi was a member of the ruling clan with direct access through marriage and mentorship to the country’s leading princes, one of whom became the ruler who curtailed Fayz Muhammad’s role considerably. Fayz Muhammad was trained as a cleric with sympathies towards Iran; Tarzi was a secularist with special disdain for clergymen and wanted to bring Afghanistan closer to the Ottomans and later the Turkish Republic. A review of these and other differences between the two men will take the paper beyond the personal antagonisms and should allow room to investigate what, if any, possible influence Tarzi has had on the messages being put forth in Siraj al-tawarikh and to what end.