Akhund Darweza: Pashto writer of the Makhzan and opponent of Pir Roshan

At a glance

• Akhund Darweza (اخوند درویزه, Akhūnd Darwezah) was a saint and teacher among the Yusufzai and a disciple of Pir Baba of Buner. Mikhail Pelevin dates him 1533 to 1638. [8]

• Writers call him a Tajik (Elphinstone, Leyden, Caroe) and a Turk by descent (Shahbaz Khan and Himayatullah Yaqubi). [1, 2, 7, 9]

• His best-known book is the Pashto Makhzan (مخزن), written to refute Bayazid Ansari and finished by his sons and grandsons. A Persian work, the Tazkirat al-abrar, is also his. [3, 8]

• Raverty says he gave Bayazid the name Pir Tarik and was the first to arrange the spelling Pashto has followed for three centuries. [3]

• He died at Peshawar. His tomb is in the Hazarkhwani graveyard south of the Ganj Gate, which is also called the Akhund Darweza Baba graveyard. [6, 10, 12]

A holy man on Yusufzai land

The older European accounts agree on one thing: Akhund Darweza lived among the Yusufzai and was famous for his sanctity. Mountstuart Elphinstone, whose account of the Afghans appeared in 1815, names the great opponent of the Pir Tarik as "Aukhoond Derwezeh, a Taujik of Boonere, who is now the greatest of all the saints of Afghaunistaun". [2] Raverty, in 1862, calls him "the greatest and most venerated of all the saints of Afghanistan". [4] The Peshawar district gazetteer of 1897 calls him a local historian and a saint of Buner. [6]

Where his family came from is told in two ways. Leyden, who translated the Makhzan's narrative of Bayazid Ansari in 1810, says he "was of Tajik origin, and resided chiefly at Bunher", the Yusufzai country, and adds that among the Tajiks, from whom he descended, he "has always been highly venerated". [1] Caroe also calls him a Tajik, "from Ningrahar" (Nangarhar), and notes that the family of his teacher Pir Baba are true Sayyids, "which the Akhund Darwezah, a disciple only and a Tajik, was not". [7]

Shahbaz Khan and Himayatullah Yaqubi, in a 2017 article in Al-Idah, give a different line. They follow the introduction by Sayyid Taqwim ul-Haq Kakakhel to the Pashto Academy's edition of the Makhzan and say he was born in 1533 in the house of Shaikh Gadai, a Turk by descent whose forefathers had long lived among Pashtun tribes. His grandfather Shaikh Sa'di moved with the Yusufzai, and when they took Swat and Buner around 1514 he received a share of land because of the respect he enjoyed. Khan and Yaqubi say his birthplace is not known exactly but was probably in Buner. [9] Nangarhar, Buner, Tajik and Turk are all in the record, and none of the older writers calls him a Pashtun by descent.

Pir Baba and the years of study

Khan and Yaqubi say he did not get a proper education as a boy. He later went to Sayyid Mesar Ahmad, Mullah Zangi and Mullah Sanjar, and his thirst for learning took him to Hindustan as well. Through Mullah Sanjar he met Sayyid Ali Tirmizi, Pir Baba, sometime between 1552 and 1554, swore allegiance to him and became one of his trusted deputies. [9]

Pir Baba's own story is in the article on religion among Pashtuns. Caroe's version is that Qambar Ali of Tirmiz on the Oxus came to India in the service of Babur and Humayun, and that his son Ali stayed behind in 1540, was called to the Doaba near Peshawar to fight heresy, and finally settled at Pacha in Buner, where he was buried. [7] Khan and Yaqubi say he died in the Yusufzai country at eighty-one. [9] Leyden says Darweza "succeeded his Pir". [1] Caroe calls the shrine at Pacha "the most hallowed shrine in all the Frontier country" and describes Darweza as "one of Pir Baba's earliest disciples". [7]

The quarrel with Bayazid

The story of Bayazid Ansari is told in the article on Pir Roshan, and Leyden's translation of Darweza's narrative is summarised there. Here the other sources fill in Darweza's own part.

Khan and Yaqubi, who draw on Darweza and on later Pashto editions, say Bayazid sent a pamphlet to Pir Baba, who rejected it. They quote Darweza as saying that Pir Baba told him: "The exposition of Islam is the task of the Ulama (Religious Scholars) whereas its implementation is the task of the Muslim kings." [9] They say Pir Baba and Darweza went to Hashtnagar, near present Charsadda, to debate Bayazid. Darweza wrote that they silenced him with their arguments. He went a second time alone and failed to convince him, and on a third visit Bayazid would not appear. [9]

The name Pir Tarik has two stories. In Leyden's translation Darweza says he gave it himself, "the more appropriate name", and that Bayazid "will constantly retain" it "to the end of time". [1] Caroe says Darweza invented it, and Raverty says he conferred it. [3, 7] Khan and Yaqubi say it was Darweza's teacher Mullah Zangi who suggested the name at the third visit to Hashtnagar, citing the Makhzan's own text. [9]

Darweza reports a verse duel. He says that one of Bayazid's followers recited a poem of Bayazid's against learning and the learned, and that his brother Mulla Asghar answered with verses against Bayazid in the same language. [1] Leyden prints the answer, which he calls "silly and outrageous invectives". It includes these lines: [1]

Is there any one, O ! accursed ! who is hostile to the learned, like you ?

The learned sit, as heirs, in the heritage of the prophet

Did the Mughals stand behind him

Elphinstone judged that the Pir Tarik "would long have remained unconfuted, if the arguments of Aukhoond Derwezeh had not been supported by the arms of the Mogul emperors". [2] Caroe repeats the doubt. [7] Leyden finds support in Darweza's own words: "As the power of religion, and religious ordinance is feeble without the authority of the prince, my exertions were of no avail, for at that time there was no sovereign of Islam to cut off the head of the infidels". [1]

Khan and Yaqubi take the other side. They say the Mughal-agent charge, made by Allah Bakhsh Yusufi and Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar, has no documentary proof. Darweza criticised Akbar in the Makhzan for ignorance of Islam, he took refuge in Peshawar when the Mughals invaded the Yusufzai country, and the claim that he asked the governor of Kabul to act against Bayazid has, they say, no evidence behind it. They conclude that he and Pir Baba acted for religious reasons. [9] Caroe adds one more detail from Darweza's pages: the Mughal campaigns of 1587 to 1592 in Bajaur and Swat, in which, Darweza states, "everywhere the tribesmen were being exterminated". [7] The wider story is in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

What he wrote

Raverty says Darweza was said to have written upwards of fifty works, mostly pamphlets, and that apart from the Makhzan and the Persian Tazkirat al-abrar they were no longer known in his day. He also names a Pashto Kasidah Burdah by Darweza. [3]

The Makhzan has more than one name. Leyden and Raverty call it the Makhzan Afghani, Raverty also gives Makhzan al-asrar, and Pelevin the Makhzan ul-islam, "Treasury of Islam". [1, 3, 8] Leyden describes it as a miscellaneous compilation on the ritual and moral practice of Islam, in the Pashto language and "a style of measured prose", so loosely arranged that its chapters can be moved about and almost every copy differs. [1] Part of it is translation from short Arabic and Persian tracts, among them the Qasida Burda, mixed with exhortations to the Afghan tribes, moral maxims, verses and "mystical explanations of the Arabic and Pashtu letters of the alphabet". [1]

Pelevin counts 61 known manuscripts: 21 in Britain, 18 in Indian libraries, 10 at Peshawar University and three each in Kabul, St Petersburg and Berlin, and says the real number may be near a hundred. About a third is translated from classical Arabic works and gives what an ordinary believer needs: duties, law, prayer and washing. There are also religious terms set out in alphabetical order, one for each Arabic letter. Pelevin writes that the text reached its final form at the end of the seventeenth century, and says the work was written with Darweza's son Abd ul-Karim and later supplemented and edited by his descendants. [8] The oldest dated copy he names is at the Salar Jang Museum in Hyderabad, from 5 March 1649. [8]

A Berlin copy has an English pencil note on its first leaf, apparently by a buyer, which says it was copied in Roh by one of the natives in Pashto, "for the use of the Natives", and bought from a Rohilla at Agra in 1796. [8] Dorn printed extracts in his Chrestomathy of 1847, calling the style "extremely crude and uncouth" and the work "one of the earliest productions of Afghan literature". [5] The first complete modern edition was published at Peshawar in 1969, with Kakakhel's introduction; a second edition appeared in 1987. [8, 9]

Darweza says why he wrote in Pashto. At the end of his narrative of Bayazid he states: "I have written it in the Afghan language, because the greater part of the Pokhtans understand no other." He also wanted any surviving book of Bayazid's that fell into a believer's hands to be burned. [1] His narrative stops at the death of Bayazid's son Jalala and the rise of Ihdad, which, on Caroe's date of 1599 for Jalala's death, puts the writing at about 1600. [1, 7]

Whether he was the first Pashto prose writer is disputed. Dorn calls him "the first author who composed in the Afghan language". [5] Caroe calls him "the first extant writer in Pakhtu". [7] Raverty rejects Dorn's claim, saying that Dorn does not give his authority and that Shaykh Mali wrote his history of the Yusufzai about a century and a half earlier. [3] Pelevin gives the Roshani Khair al-Bayan as the oldest surviving work. [8] Darweza himself reports that Bayazid circulated Pashto poems among the Yusufzai before he replied with poems of his own. [1] The wider picture is in Pashto literature and oral poetry.

Another work is tied to him through a pupil. Pelevin's description of the Fawa'id-i shari'at, a Pashto work on law by Akhund Qasim Shinwari, says its preface praises Pir Baba and Darweza, "who was the author's spiritual guide". Raverty dates that book to 1713. [3, 8] Dorn had guessed that a work with this title might be Darweza's own. [5]

The spelling of Pashto

Raverty's grammar of 1867 carries a note on the Pashto letters: "The system of orthography followed for the last three centuries or more, with these exceptions, was first arranged by Akhund Darwezah, the celebrated saint of the Afghans". [3] He gives no evidence for it. The other sources show why the claim was made. Leyden says the Makhzan holds explanations of the Arabic and Pashto letters, and that Darweza's son Karimdad wrote a dissertation on "the peculiar letters of the Afghans, as distinguished from those of the Arabs". [1] Pelevin describes a Berlin copy of the Makhzan whose last part treats "the peculiarities of the Afghan graphic system and the shortcomings of Pashto versification". [8]

Karimdad's apology for his own writing is quoted by Leyden and Dorn: "in Afghan poems, the authors are accustomed to pay no great attention to the correctness and similarity of the rhyme, or the equal proportion of the lines to each other, in a couplet; nor are they more careful, with respect to uniformity of orthography." [1, 5] That confirms that spelling in Pashto was not uniform in his day. It does not show which letters Darweza fixed. The other candidate is Bayazid, whose Khair al-Bayan opens with an account of its own script, as the article on Pir Roshan explains. For the letters as they stand now, see the Pashto alphabet and grammar.

Sons, brother and pupils

Darweza's brother Mulla Asghar took part in the dispute with Bayazid's followers. [1] His son Karimdad, Leyden says, "acquired some celebrity in the same cause", and his tomb is "a place celebrated for the resort of the faithful, in the northern parts of Sewad". [1] Raverty says Karimdad "appears to have assisted his father" in his works. [3]

The sources disagree on how many sons are involved. Dorn names Karimdad as Darweza's co-author and says the copy he used was arranged by "Abdulkarim, another son". [5] Pelevin treats Karimdad and Abd ul-Karim as one man, and adds a grandson, Abd ul-Halim, whose questions to Karimdad and whose poems appear in the later copies. [8] Leyden, who knew Karimdad's work as part of the Makhzan, thought Karimdad "a plain well meaning man" who "valued the truths of religion, more than the elegancies of style". [1]

His tomb at Peshawar

The Peshawar gazetteer of 1897 says Darweza "wrote a history and several theological works, and died at Peshawar, where his tomb is still a place of general resort and superstitious sanctity". [6] The same gazetteer cites him on the spelling of the city's name, giving Parshor, and notes that he read the name as meaning turbulence. [6]

The tomb stands in the Hazarkhwani graveyard, a short distance south of the Ganj Gate of the old city. Ibrahim Shah, a research scholar in archaeology at the University of Peshawar, wrote in 1997 that the cemetery is also called the Akhun Baba graveyard "after the celebrity of the famous saint Akhun Darweza Baba lying enshrined herein". He says it holds thousands of graves of ordinary people, officials and saints, and that nothing shows when it was first used. [10] The graveyard is better known today as the Rahman Baba cemetery; the poet's shrine in it is described in the article on Rahman Baba. [11, 12]

The shrine has been attacked. The Express Tribune reported on 29 March 2013 that the caretaker of Akhund Derwaiza's shrine, a man of about sixty who had served there for 25 years, was shot dead inside it. The paper says militants had burned the shrine in 2009 and that residents of Hazarkhwani rebuilt it and brought the caretaker back in 2010. It adds that the run of attacks on shrines was blamed on the banned Lashkar-e-Islam. [11] In January 2020 the same paper, reporting that land grabbers were encroaching on the Hazarkhwani cemetery, quoted a land-record official who said it reached the edge of the "Akhund Darwiza Baba graveyard". [12]

How later writers have judged him

Khushal Khan Khattak, who made much of his own orthodoxy, mentions him twice in verse. In a ghazal in Raverty's Selections he writes of his own heart: "Like unto Akhund Darwezah, I point out godliness and piety to it". [4] In another poem, in Caroe's translation, he says he read Darweza's book "from end to end" and found "no poetic measure for delight". [7] Caroe writes that one achievement of Bayazid's family "has more in it to stir the heart than all the words of their opponent, the Akhund Darwezah". [7] Khushal is the subject of his own article.

Caroe's verdict on the Makhzan is that it "is in the nature of a doctrinal diatribe". [7] Khan and Yaqubi, writing in Peshawar in 2017, defend Darweza against the charge of acting for the Mughals. [9] When militants burned his shrine in 2009 it was the residents of Hazarkhwani who rebuilt it. [11]