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Assessing the Legacy of Fayz Muhammad "Katib-i Hazarah"

Panel 050, 2016 Annual Meeting

On Friday, November 18 at 1:45 pm

Panel Description
Assessing the Legacy of Fayz Muhammad “Katib-i Hazarah,” Afghanistan’s Historian Extraordinaire Largely unknown outside his own country, Fayz Muhammad “Katib-i Hazarah” (1862-1931) authored an extraordinarily large and comprehensive set of works documenting the history, geography, and ethnography of Afghanistan from its founding in 1747 until just before his own death. With free access to government archives for some thirty-five years in the last decade of the nineteenth and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, he produced more than a dozen works. He is most famous for his multi-volume documentary history, Siraj al-tawarıkh, which was at first written under close supervision to insure that the work would reflect government policies and avoid criticism of prominent officials, including the royal family. Later, given free rein to write without oversight and, unconstrained then in his depiction of official corruption, government incompetence, and the violence directed at ethnic and religious minorities, especially his own people, the Hazarahs, he spared no one and voiced his own feelings of resentment and grievance. In addition, little known to the authorities, he kept a secret history in which he detailed his perceptions of years of injustice and broken promises by the Afghan state. He was a meticulous historian and in many ways embodies the transition of historiography in Afghanistan from the laudatory chronicling of dynasts, their struggles and triumphs, to a thematic, document-based, and source-critical approach in which, in almost post-modern fashion, the chronicler makes himself part of the story as well. Hitherto, the historiography of this region, known in modern times as Afghanistan, has relied almost exclusively on the cultural production of colonial forces (the empires of Great Britain and Russia and latterly those of the Soviet Union and the United States) in which the perspective is from the outside considering Afghanistan as an object of colonial concern. Fayz Muhammad was fully aware of the significance of colonial policies and objectives and writes from the inside to document the Afghan state’s efforts to contest, manipulate, and resist British and Russian initiatives. As the papers in this panel will demonstrate his interests extended well beyond international relations, encompassing many aspects of socio-political and economic life within Afghanistan. The papers will address the legacy of Fayz Muhammad’s life and work – as historian, storyteller, and public intellectual – in the expectation that they will contribute to an emerging conversation addressing revisionist perspectives on Afghanistan’s history.
Disciplines
History
Participants
  • Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi -- Presenter
  • Dr. Robert D. McChesney -- Organizer, Presenter
  • Dr. Amin Tarzi -- Presenter
  • Prof. Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami -- Presenter
Presentations
  • Prof. Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami
    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.
  • Dr. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
    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.
  • Dr. Amin Tarzi
    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.
  • Dr. Robert D. McChesney
    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.