Halima Khattak (Bibi Halima): daughter of Khushal Khan, Sufi poet

At a glance

• Halima Khattak (حلیمه حافظه, Bibi Halima, "Halima the hafiza") is remembered as a Pashto poet, a daughter of Khushal Khan Khattak and full sister of Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak. [1, 2]

• Everything told about her comes from one book, the Pata Khazana ("Hidden Treasure", پټه خزانه), a biographical anthology of Pashto poets that Abdul Hai Habibi published in Kabul in 1944. Its authenticity is disputed. [1, 2]

• The book gives her a short entry: her teachers, her learning, her life in her brother's house, and one ghazal of six couplets. It gives no dates, and her name is not in the notices of the Khattak family in Raverty's Selections. [1–3]

• The ghazal is about a love that has become love of God. It is the only poem of hers known. [1]

One book names her

The Pata Khazana says it was written at Kandahar in 1728–29 by Muhammad bin Daud Hotak for the young ruler Shah Hussain, and Habibi, who edited it and put it into Persian, says he obtained a copy in the spring of 1944. [2] The book has three parts: poets of the past, poets then living, and poets who were women. Halima's entry, number 45 in Habibi's edition, is in the third part, after the entry for Nazo Tokhi and two entries before that of Zainab Hotak. [1, 2]

Raverty's Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans (1862) tells the life of Khushal and of his sons Ashraf and Abdul Qadir at length. It says Khushal had fifty-seven sons "besides several daughters", and does not name a daughter. [3] Searches of the text of Raverty's Selections, his Pashto grammar and dictionary, and his Notes on Afghanistan found no poet of this name among Khushal's family. For her the Pata Khazana is the only source known.

What the book says of her

The entry is headed in Pashto "an account of the pearl of chastity, Halima the hafiza", a hafiza being a woman who knows the Quran by heart. [1, 2] She is the daughter of Khushal Khan Khattak and the full sister (sakah khor) of Abdul Qadir Khan. [1, 2]

The compiler gives two voices. First his father: "When I went to Banu she was alive." The father, who is not otherwise dated, says she studied the usual sciences in her father's lifetime and then became a disciple of Shaikh Sadi Lahori, swearing allegiance at the hand of her brother Abdul Qadir, who was that shaikh's deputy. [1, 2] Then, "It has been narrated": she is a learned and gnostic woman who has never married, prays, teaches other women in her brother's house, and knows the Quran by heart. [1, 2] The father also says she writes Pashto poetry, is among the foremost poets of her time, and is liked by her fellow poets. She has read all the books of mysticism, and can explain the difficulties of the Masnavi and of the Maktubat, the letters of Imam Rabbani. Her verse has no earthly love in it; all of it follows the way of the real, and praises the true Beloved. [1, 2]

The father recited one of her poems, the compiler says, and he copies it into the book. [1, 2]

Her brother has his own entry. The Pata Khazana says Abdul Qadir, a son of Khushal, went to Kabul in 1113 AH (1701) to arrange the passage of caravans through Bangash for the Khattaks, was born on 22 Jumada II 1061 AH (1651), joined the Naqshbandi movement, wrote a diwan, a verse Yusuf and Zulaikha and a prose Hadiqa-yi Khattak, and became the deputy of the Naqshbandi shaikh Rahmani Sadi Lahori. [2] The compiler adds that he does not know whether Abdul Qadir is alive or dead. [2] Raverty gives Abdul Qadir's birth as 1652, and tells how Afzal Khan had him killed with ten brothers; for that see Abdul Qadir Khan Khattak and Afzal Khan Khattak. [3] The compiler's uncertainty about Abdul Qadir's death does not fit Raverty's account of his killing, though Raverty gives no year for it. [2, 3]

The book gives her no birth or death year, no mother, no husband and no children.

The ghazal

The poem is headed ghazal. [1] In Habibi's Pashto edition it is printed as six lines, each of two halves, and the last carries her pen-name, Halime, as poets of the form do. The transliteration and English below are the site's; the English of the book's translator is looser. [1, 2]

It opens with joy at the thought of the beloved.

د اشنای په فکر خوښه هسې شان شوم / نه پوهېږم چه ممتاز که نورجهان شوم

Da ashnāi pa fikr khwakha hase shān shwam / na pohegam che Mumtāz ka Nūrjahān shwam

In the thought of my friend I became so glad that I do not know whether I have turned into Mumtaz or Nur Jahan. (translated for Pashtunxwa, from p. 182 of Habibi's edition) [1]

Habibi's Persian note explains the two names: Mumtaz Mahal was the queen of Shah Jahan and Nur Jahan the queen of Jahangir, both Mughal emperors. [1, 2] The poem then turns to praise of God.

چه ئې کړمه ستا په مینه سر فرازه / ثنا خوانه په څو رنګه د رحمان شوم

Che ye karma stā pa mīna sar frāza / Sanā khwāna pa tso ranga da Rahmān shwam

Since your love raised my head, I became in many ways a praiser of the Merciful. (translated for Pashtunxwa, p. 182) [1]

چه مجاز مې د ایاز ولاړئ له زړه نه / سر بلنده تر محمود غوندې سلطان شوم

Che majāz me da Ayāz wlāṛ ye la zṛa na / Sar balanda tar Mahmūd ghwande sultān shwam

When my worldly love, the love of Ayaz, left my heart, I became more lofty than a sultan like Mahmud. (translated for Pashtunxwa, p. 182) [1]

Habibi's English translator renders the third couplet's sense as pride greater than "sitting on Mahmud's throne". [2] The poem keeps to the line the book gives her, that "worldly love" has gone and only the true beloved remains: wherever she looks it is all He, and every other thought has left her heart, so that friend and enemy are alike to her. [1, 2] The signature couplet is the one place where a warning enters.

«حلیمې» د غماز مکر زیات له حد شو / چه دې بېل له یاره نکا، په ګمان شوم

"Halime" da ghammāz makr ziyāt la had sho / Che de bel la yāra nakā, pa gumān shwam

Halima, the slanderer's guile has passed all bounds; I have become fearful that he may part you from the friend. (translated for Pashtunxwa, p. 182) [1]

The English translator renders the close as "Be aware O Halima / Your love it may bewitch", which does not follow the Pashto. [2]

The argument over the book

Habibi said the manuscript came to him through Abdul Ali Khanozay, a Kakar, and that it is a copy made at Quetta in 1886 by Muhammad Abbas Kasi, for a Hotak, of the 1728–29 work. [2] The anthology claims to cover poets from the eighth century onward, centuries before the earliest known Pashto writing; see Pashto literature and oral poetry.

Doubt came at once, and the critics are named.

• Georg Morgenstierne, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1960), in words Habibi quotes, wrote that the Pata Khazana and Habibi's other find raise "a number of grave linguistic and historical problems", that authenticity cannot be settled until the manuscripts are open to philological study, and that even if the book is genuine its dating of the oldest poems "may be doubted". [2]

• Louis Dupree's Afghanistan (1973), citing Wilber, says its authenticity "has been recently questioned". [2]

• Lucia Serena Loi studied the book in 1987. Her reviewer C. J. Brunner, as the translator's note quotes him, says she showed that most of the 216 words Habibi listed as rare appear in nineteenth- and twentieth-century dictionaries, and so removed "the only prop" of the 1729 dating. [2]

• Qalandar Momand's Pata Khazana fil Mizan (1988) called the book a fabrication. A blog summary of his case lists the compiler's date, 16 Jumada II 1141 AH, as a Monday and not the Friday the book says; the name Attock used for the Indus by an early poet; and the letter ځ in a book supposedly older than that letter's present shape. [5] A second blog adds that Loi and the Iranologist David MacKenzie had doubted it earlier and that the manuscript is not open to the public. [6]

• María Isabel Maldonado García and Bakht Munir, in a 2016 Punjab University article, write that the anthology "has not been authenticated" and is considered a forgery by most experts, because it uses letters that entered the Pashto alphabet after the 1936 orthographic reform. [4]

Habibi answered in remarks added to the English edition. The critics, he said, gave no detailed analysis; one forger could not write in so many styles, dialects and metres; Dupree's note had no reasoning and Wilber did not know Pashto. He said the original manuscript is in the Calligraphy Library of the Ministry of Information and Culture, was photographed and published in 1976, and is available to the public. [2] The Khyber blog says nobody knows where it is. [6]

The wider scholarly view is against the book: Maldonado García and Munir say most experts treat it as a forgery, and Morgenstierne, Loi and Brunner give the grounds. Habibi and his translator did not give way, and the published debate has not produced a test of the manuscript. [2, 4, 6] For Halima it means this. If the book is what its editor says, her entry is a report from a Hotak court scholar of 1728–29, passed through his father, on a Khattak woman who taught in her brother's house. If it is a later work, she has no early witness: no earlier source is known that names her.

What is not known

Her dates are unknown, and so is where she lived. The book places her in her brother's house, and names no village. The book calls her a daughter of Khushal Khan, whom Raverty credits with several daughters, none named. [1, 3] Her ghazal is the only text of hers. For Abdul Qadir's own ghazals, in Raverty's English and the Pashto of the Gulshan-i Roh, see his article; for Khushal's family and the Sufi vocabulary of the odes see Khushal Khan Khattak.