The manuscript of Siraj al-tawarikh in four volumes, published in eleven volumes in English translation, amount to about two million words, written during a period of more than thirty years. In addition to the usual changes that the passage of time and increasing experience bring about in the prose of any writer, in the case of Fayz Muhammad, “Katib-i Hazarah”, there were other elements which contributed to the shaping of the aesthetics and stylistics of the later parts of his monumental work. Some of the more significant elements include the level of censorship of his works during different periods, his level of access to official documents, and the constant modifications of his job description. Such factors encouraged and sometimes even forced him to emphasize certain aspects and components of his writing skills and employ various linguistic registers to navigate through perilous periods while maintaining his readers’ interest, as well as a certain level of job security. After a general overview of Katib’s multi-disciplinary discursive capabilities, this paper focuses on the fourth volume of Siraj al-tawarikh and, within a comparative framework, highlights specific historical and biographical details which gradually transformed the linguistic register and atmosphere of the text. I will further argue that, in particular, the conditions that developed during the reign of Amir Habib Allah Khan encouraged and at times required Fayz Muhammad to veer from his usual evidence-based writing habits, and instead allocate a larger textual space to stories – or “petites histoires” – which, as New Historicists would put it, could puncture imposed, official grand narratives. It is precisely in these stories that Fayz Muhammad demonstrates his skillful usage of literary devices such as sarcasm and irony, especially when he composes anecdotes filled with tried-and-tested leitmotifs of sex and violence. A close reading of a number of such stories/anecdotes will not only identify the writer as a modern storyteller but will also unveil sites of resistance vis-à-vis the official discourses made manifest mainly in previous volumes of Siraj al-tawarikh.

Fayz Muhammad’s Siraj al-Tawarikh (ST) is arguably the most important locally produced Persian language source for the modern history of Afghanistan. ST has been examined most often as an artifact of Afghan state history, particularly Durrani dynastic historical chronicling. This paper provides a reading of ST beyond the parameters of nationalist historiography to address global history generally and the intersections between the global histories of capitalism and local environmental histories in the Middle East and Persianate world, specifically. The essay interrogates ST with questions about the relationship between European capital and the environmental history of Afghanistan in mind for the years c. 1880-1920. The first part of the essay will outline the presence of the European actors who received concessions or contracts from the Afghan state for the export and import of commodities, primarily, but also for various other tasks involving the transfer of industrial technologies, engineering skills, medical and other sciences. The scientific and commercial imports representing European capital and technology were concentrated primarily in the government workshops in Kabul, but also at various locations within the organizational matrix of the state-operated commercial monopolies over export commodities such as timber that imbricated global capital in local agricultural production and animal farms, vineyards, forests and mines throughout the country. The second part of the paper considers ST’s attention to the primary site of capital concentration in Afghanistan, the aforementioned workshops in Kabul known as the mashin khana. The foci here will be the division of labor within and the products of the workshop complex. Recently acquired archival photographs of the mashin khana will be used to argue that the workshops represent the Afghan state’s quest to transition through manufacturing to an industrial phase of production as rapidly as possible. Energy supply, specifically wood for steam manufacturing and electricity for industry, is pursued in the third part of the paper. It will address ST’s treatment of the forests and rivers of Afghanistan, particularly the government timber monopoly and state projects involving river damming, diversion and hydroelectricity. Animal transport labor is considered here via ST’s attention to the domestic camels used to transport wood and the imported elephants used to transport industrial machinery to the mashin khana and other industrial sites where European capital and technology accumulated in the country during the two decades before and after 1900.

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.

Among native historians of Afghanistan, Fayz Muhammad is a towering figure, yet one whose work is almost unknown outside that country. In part, this is due to the efforts made by the amir of Afghanistan, Aman Allah Khan (r. 1919-1929), to suppress his work. Partly his obscurity rises from the fact that much of his writing remains in manuscript and Afghanistan has been anything but hospitable in recent decades to research in its libraries and archives. Finally, the failure to appreciate Fayz Muhammad’s opus is simply because outside Afghanistan the country’s history, if anyone thinks of it at all, has been understood to be merely a byproduct of English, Russian, and American imperial history. The sources on Afghan history used by generation after generation of Euro-American scholars have been overwhelmingly British and European. Afghan historians in general and Fayz Muhammad in particular are rarely, if ever, turned to for information on the country’s own story of its past. This paper will begin the introduction to Fayz Muhammad’s significance in Afghan historiography, particularly his massive chronicling of Afghan history for the period 1747-1925. It will give a précis of his life, education, and career; examine the different contexts within which he wrote; sketch his techniques and methodologies; describe his self-awareness of his role as historian and his personal grievances, repeatedly expressed, that relate to being a member of a religious and ethnic minority. He wrote his magnum opus, Siraj al-tawarikh (Lamp of Histories) under various conditions ranging from being under tight court control to being completely unsupervised and free to write what he pleased. His sources were multiple but he relied on the massive archival material found in the Royal Arg. Oral sources were acceptable if backed by documentary evidence. The presentation will sketch the uncertain and winding journey of his manuscript of the Siraj to its publication.