Abdul Rauf Benawa: Kandahar poet, scholar and minister

At a glance

• Abdul Rauf Benawa (عبدالرؤف بېنوا) was born in 1913 in Kandahar, in a family of religious scholars, and wrote in Pashto, Persian and Arabic. [1, 5]

• His first printed book, Pashto Kalay (1941–42), was a reader for Pashto courses. He later edited Rahman Baba's diwan, wrote Hotakiha on the Hotak dynasty and compiled the three-volume Osnai Likwal, a dictionary of present-day Pashto writers. [1, 3, 4]

• He headed the Pashto Academy in Kabul (1946 to 1951 in Adamec's list), directed Radio Kabul, served as press attaché in New Delhi and Cairo, sat in the lower house of parliament and was minister of information and culture from 13 June 1967. [2, 3, 5]

• In 1980 the Kabul government that Soviet troops had installed named him ambassador to Libya, and Afghan intellectuals judged the appointment in opposite ways. He died in New Jersey in January 1984 by Adamec's and one essayist's date, January 1985 by Kakar's and the Kandahar editor's. [1, 2, 5]

A Kandahar family

Benawa was born in 1913 near the shrine of the Cloak, the Kharqa Sharif, in a devout Alizai family of Kandahar. He studied the religious and customary subjects outside any school and began his literary life very young. [1] The collection of memoirs published in Kandahar in 2011 adds that his father, Mufti Abdullah, served as a mufti of the city's court for thirty-three years, and that his elder brother, Maulana Abdul Karim Haqqani, was a scholar and his teacher. [1] Adamec, from Afghan sources, also gives Kandahar and 1913, and says he published a newspaper, Tulu-i Afghan ("Afghan sunrise"). [5] The city is described in Kandahar.

His pen name, Benawa, is the refrain of one of his best-known poems. Abdul Bari Jahani, in an essay in the Kandahar collection, prints it as an example of a poet whose call goes unheard. The refrain is "All of them are dead, old and young alike" (twola mare di); in one stanza the poet says:

څوک مي نسته چي مي یاد کړي

Tsok me nasta chi me yad kri

There is no one to remember me;

بېنوا یم - بېنوا یم

Benawa yam, Benawa yam

I am Benawa, Benawa. [1]

The Pashto Society and the books of the 1940s

The editor of the Kandahar collection says that the Pashto Society (Pashto Tolana) printed Benawa's first book, Pashto Kalay ("The Pashto village"), in 1320 (1941–42), and that it entered the curriculum of the Pashto courses. At that time he was the Society's director of journalism. [1] In 1322 (1943–44) came a short study, Pashto da Shahano pa Darbar ki ("Pashto at the kings' courts"), on rulers who gave Pashto writers a place at their courts. [1] The Society itself is described in Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmud Khan and in Pashto literature and oral poetry. Adamec's entry says Benawa became president of the Pashto Academy, and his entry on the Afghan Academy lists him among its heads for 1946 to 1951. [5]

The Kandahar editor lists nearly sixty works. The dated ones include Pashtane Mermani ("Pashtun women"), portraits of 118 women, which won the Khushal Khan Khattak prize in 1323 (1944–45); Adabi Fanoon ("Literary arts"), the lectures he gave at the Faculty of Letters in 1323–24, which the Society printed in 1326 (1947–48) with sections on rhetoric, prosody, rhyme and the principles of writing; and Pashtunistan, a 480-page book on the geography, history, tribes and leaders of the Pashtun lands and on the movement, serialised in the newspaper Anis in 1330 (1951–52) and printed the same year. [1] Adamec gives the title of one more book as Pashtana Likwal ("Writers of Pashto"). [5] The American historian Vartan Gregorian cites two others of those years, Khushhal Khattak tseh wayi (Kabul 1950) and Hotakiha (Kabul 1951), the latter as the monograph on the Ghilzai up to 1738. [4] Their subjects are in Khushal Khan Khattak and Mirwais Hotak.

Wesh Zalmian and the post in Delhi

Benawa belonged to the Awakened Youth (Wesh Zalmian). Adamec dates the society to 1947 in Kandahar and lists Benawa among its members with Abdul Hai Aziz, Gul Pacha Ulfat, Shamsuddin Majruh, Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar, Faiz Muhammad Angar and Nur Muhammad Taraki; it aimed at education and an end to corruption, and later split over Pashtun nationalism. [5] M. Hassan Kakar, the Afghan historian, dates it to 1945 in Kabul. [2]

Kakar tells what followed. Benawa, as director general of the Pashto Academy, helped Taraki into the Press Department, where Taraki became assistant director of the Bakhtar news agency in 1952. Then, "fearful of being arrested", Taraki and Benawa resigned from the party and followed the government line, and in 1953 Prime Minister Shah Mahmud appointed them press attachés in Washington and Delhi. [2] Adamec dates Benawa's Delhi post to 1954 and 1955. [5] Taraki then defied Daoud's government, which had recalled him; Kakar writes that Benawa and Mohammad Akbar Parwani, appealing to Daoud, made his return possible. [2] Kakar adds that Daoud, though he had ties with Parchami leaders, declined to make any with Taraki, although Benawa had asked him to. [2] The rest of that story is in Nur Muhammad Taraki and Mohammad Daoud Khan.

Radio, Cairo and the ministry

Adamec's entry gives the rest of his career in a few lines: president of the Pashto Academy, director of Radio Kabul, press attaché in New Delhi in 1954 and 1955 and in Cairo from 1964 to 1966, and minister of information and culture from 1967. [5] His chronology records that on 13 June 1967 Prime Minister Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwal named him to that post. [5] Louis Dupree's table of ministers shows the same date. Dupree also calls Benawa a member of parliament's lower house, a Maiwandwal supporter and a writer for the paper Masawat, and says that Mir Ghulam Muhammad Ghobar's history Afghanistan dar Masir-i Tarikh was written under Benawa's sponsorship as minister, printed by the Government Press and at once suppressed. [3] In Cairo he published two works in Arabic, Afghanistan al-Yawm and Arbain Haqiqa an Afghanistan, in 1342 and 1343 (1963–65). [1] The king through these years was Mohammad Zahir Shah.

His admirers say a career of that kind taught him nothing about money. One writer in the Kandahar collection says Benawa spent thirty of his sixty-three years in official posts, as director, university teacher, adviser, deputy minister, minister, president and deputy of the nation, and that three months after he left the ministry he was selling the copper vessels of his house. [1] Another memoirist says he took no bribe in his ministries or embassies, and recalls the ministries of tribal affairs and finance, and the press, as treasuries of opportunity for graft. [1] The same writer reports the other talk: some said Benawa always sat "on a winning horse" and always held a government post. Against that he sets what he saw in the Khalqi years, when people said Taraki was Benawa's friend: Benawa at a broken table in a small dark room of the Pashto Society, working on his studies like others the government disfavoured. [1]

What he wrote and collected

Dupree describes the three-volume Osnai Likwal as the major work on modern Pashto literature, covering writers on both sides of the Durand Line, among them Ghani Khan, the son of Abdul Ghaffar Khan. [3] The Kandahar editor dates the volumes to 1340, 1341 and 1346 (1961–62 to 1967–68) and says they profile 229 writers in alphabetical order with samples of verse and prose; the work won a first-class prize. [1] His Da Afghanistan Nomyali ("The notables of Afghanistan"), a biographical dictionary, began to appear in 1353 (1974–75). [1] A 1958 collection of landays, the short folk couplets, was printed by Radio Afghanistan; Dupree quotes landays from it, among them this one:

If you don't wield a sword, what else will you do?

You, who have suckled at the breast of an Afghan mother! [3]

Benawa also translated Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali into Pashto; one essay in the collection counts the printed book as the first independent Pashto edition of a work by Tagore. [1] The same essayist compares him with Ghani Khan, born a year later: both studied Arabic and Islamic subjects in youth, both became poets, and Ghani went to prison while, "by good luck", Benawa never did. [1] See Ghani Khan.

The appointment of 1980

After the Soviet intervention of December 1979 the new government in Kabul brought some well-known men into its service, among them Abdul Hai Habibi, Mir Mohammad Siddiq Farhang, Rawan Farhadi and Benawa. Kakar calls the appointments "a shock to many": the four had good reputations with intellectuals who expected them to stay away from the "client regime", and they cooperated "at a time when the Soviets had occupied their homeland and were killing Afghans by the thousands". [2] Kakar spoke to Benawa about it. Benawa said he had been in hospital when he heard of his appointment; when Kakar suggested he could therefore have declined, Benawa told him to be careful in those critical times, and the efforts of his closer friends failed too. In 1980, Kakar writes, the regime appointed him ambassador to Libya. [2] Adamec dates the embassy 1980 to 1984. [5] The wider setting is in the Soviet war and the refugees.

Friends who wrote after his death describe the Libyan years differently. Rashad, who spoke at the Writers' Union of Afghanistan on the fifth anniversary of the death, says Benawa served four years in Libya as Afghan ambassador with a painful illness beside him. Even so, Rashad says, he translated Muammar al-Qaddafi's Green Book into Pashto as Shin Kitab and was compiling a Persian-Arabic dictionary; he wrote that he had reached five thousand Persian words with perhaps twenty thousand Arabic equivalents. [1] The collection's editor calls the Shin Kitab a translation of a volume of Qaddafi's writings. [1] In a letter Benawa wrote that his health and his doctor allowed him little work, and that the old scholarly ways seemed to have fallen out of favour with the revolutionary generation. [1] After his death, Rashad adds, neither the translation nor the dictionary could be traced. [1]

His death

Benawa developed bone cancer, Kakar writes, and went to the United States for treatment, where he died. [2] The sources do not agree on the year. Jahani puts his death on 11 January 1984 in New Jersey, and Adamec also gives 1984. [1, 5] The Kandahar editor and Rashad give 21 Jadi 1363, which they convert to 11 January 1985; Kakar says 1985. The editor adds that he was buried at Rose Hill in New Jersey and was 71 years old by the solar count and 73 by the lunar. [1, 2]

Jahani notes that Benawa had once written a poem on foreign lands, Pardes da Pasarli ("The spring of a foreign land"), and later lived abroad himself. He prints a poem whose refrain is that of a stranger: [1]

زه د زړه سره ژړا کړم

Zə da zra sara zhra krəm

I weep with my heart,

له نصیبه ګیله من یم

la nasibe gila-man yem

I am full of complaint against fate.

آه پردېس د بل وطن یم

Ah, pardes da bel watan yem

Ah, in this foreign land I belong to another country.