Pir Muhammad Kakar: Pashto poet of Kandahar and author of Ma'rifat al-Afghani

At a glance

• Pir Muhammad Kakar (پیر محمد کاکړ) was a Pashto poet and teacher of Kandahar in the time of Ahmad Shah Durrani. Abdul Hai Habibi says he was born about 1120 AH (about 1708) in Zhob and lived in Kandahar. [3]

• He wrote Ma'rifat al-Afghani (معرفة الافغاني) in 1186 AH, which V. V. Kushev gives as 1773. It is the earliest of the Pashto teaching works Kushev lists. [4]

• Habibi and a 2014 Deutsche Welle report call him the teacher of Prince Sulayman, a son of Ahmad Shah, who was briefly king at Kandahar in 1186 AH. Kushev says the book was presented to that prince and that Ahmad Shah invited the poet to teach members of the royal family. [3, 4, 6]

• Kushev holds that the book is a textbook for adult learners and not a grammar. Habibi calls it a short grammar. [3, 4]

• His diwan runs to about 5,000 couplets by Habibi's estimate. Habibi dates its completion to 1196 AH (1782). [3]

• The sources give three different ends to his life: before 1196 AH, about 1196 AH (1782), and about 1216 AH (1801 or 1802). [3, 5, 6]

A poet from Zhob who lived at Kandahar

Habibi, in his short history of Pashto literature, places Pir Muhammad among the poets of the Kandahar side. He says the poet was born about 1120 AH in Zhob, moved to Kandahar, and spent his life there. [3] A 2014 report in Deutsche Welle's Pashto service repeats the same birth year and place, and says he was brought to Kandahar in Ahmad Shah's time to work on making Pashto a language of the office. [6] Kushev calls him mulla Pir Muhammad Kakar, a well-known poet who also had a name as a preacher and theologian. [4]

Habibi, Kushev and Deutsche Welle all call him Kakar, the name of a Pashtun tribe, and none says which section of it he belonged to. [3, 4, 6]

Habibi says the dates are estimates. Pir Muhammad was already an old man with a white beard in 1186 AH, the year Ahmad Shah died, and Habibi has him dead before 1196 AH. He quotes the poet's own line "the good season of youth has passed over Pir Muhammad" as the sign of his age. [3] The Deutsche Welle report says only that his life is estimated to have lasted until 1216 AH. [6] Sajjad Nejatie, in a footnote of his 2017 Toronto thesis on the Durrani confederacy, gives his death as about 1196 AH (1782). [5] Habibi himself says the diwan was finished in 1196 AH, which sits uneasily with a death before that year. [3] No source read here gives an exact day or a place of death. The Deutsche Welle report adds that his tomb was in danger of falling into ruin, and that a seminar of scholars decided it should be rebuilt. [6]

The prince he taught

Habibi says Pir Muhammad was a respected scholar at Ahmad Shah's court and the teacher of Prince Sulayman, Ahmad Shah's son. [3] The Deutsche Welle report says the same, on the word of literature teachers. [6] Kushev words it more broadly: Ahmad Shah Durrani invited him to be teacher and tutor to members of the Shah's family, and he presented his book to "the Shah's brother Sulayman" during that prince's brief reign. [4] The two accounts disagree on whether Sulayman was Ahmad Shah's son or his brother. The Timur Shah article records, on Ganda Singh's authority, that Sulaiman was Ahmad Shah's eldest son, and that Ahmad Shah named the second son Timur as heir; the vizier Shah Wali Khan put Sulaiman on the throne at Kandahar until Timur marched against him. Habibi's and Deutsche Welle's "son" agrees with that. [3, 6]

No source read here names Timur Shah's sons as his pupils. The pupils named are Sulayman and, in Kushev's wording, members of Ahmad Shah's family. [3, 4]

The book itself speaks of the prince. Its fourth chapter is headed, in Pashto with an interlinear Persian gloss, as a chapter of praise for Prince Sulayman (shahzada), and the poet names himself in couplets on that page and on printed p. 7. [1] The couplet on p. 7 reads:

پیر محمد غریب ناتوان دی

Pīr Muḥammad gharīb nātawān dē.

Pir Muhammad is poor and weak. [1]

At the foot of printed p. 5 the line "After the praise and the blessing, Shah Sulayman gave the command" calls him king. [1] Sulayman's reign was short, and Habibi puts both the book and his rule in 1186 AH. [3]

Ma'rifat al-Afghani

Kushev lists Ma'rifat al-Afghani, "Learning of the Afghan Language", as the earliest of the Pashto linguistic works of the later eighteenth century, and dates it to 1186 AH, which he gives as 1773. [4] Habibi gives the same 1186. [3] The Internet Archive's copy of the printed book carries a catalogue note that says 1168 AH, which looks like a transposition of Habibi's and Kushev's year. [1]

The book was first printed at Lahore in 1341 AH (1923), to fill an order from Kandahar book-traders, and the title page names the booksellers Mulla Jan Muhammad and Mulla Bismillah of Kandahar. [1, 4] Kushev says it was reissued at Kabul in 1356 (1977) with a foreword by Habibullah Rafi, from a manuscript dated 1230 AH (1815) in the library of the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan. [4] Sajjad Nejatie cites the Lahore edition as edited by Mawlawi Abd al-Rashid. [5]

Kushev counts ten chapters. The first four are verse in praise of God, of the Prophet, of his Companions and of the ruler of the day. [1, 4] The main teaching starts with the fifth chapter, which the printed page heads in Pashto as the words that kings, governors and other men of the diwan use most. [1] Kushev adds that the sixth chapter covers everyday talk such as trade and prices, farming, gardening and irrigation, the seventh clothing, food and drink, the eighth the words of nomads, herders and shepherds, the ninth hunting, and the tenth is a general word list. [4]

What the pages actually do is repeat one short sentence through the verb. The fifth chapter's first page runs on the phrase farmān ("a royal order") with the verb warkawə, "to give", set out in command, past, future and negative forms, each with a Persian gloss above it. [1] A line of it reads:

فرمان ورکړه، فرمان واخله، فرمان مه ورکوه

Farmān warkṛa, farmān wākhla, farmān ma warkawa.

Give the order. Take the order. Do not give the order. [1]

Kushev describes the method the same way: a sentence of the same meaning is given with the verb in more than twenty forms for the persons, numbers and tenses, so that the learner takes in the grammar from phrases and single words. [4] A later page, printed pp. 22 and 23, runs the same drill on the phrase "to spoil the garden". [1]

A grammar or a textbook

Kushev rejects the name grammar. He calls the book a textbook whose author meant to make a guide to learning Afghan, and says some researchers have wrongly presented it as a grammar. [4] On his account Prince Sulayman, who spoke Pashto, had little need of it. It was more likely meant for Dari-speaking governors, city heads, courtiers and officials who had to learn the bases of Pashto syntax and morphology in order to draw up court documents and official letters. [4] Kushev calls it hardly a scholarly achievement even by the standards of its time, and a relic of the cultural life of the Durrani capital. [4]

Habibi, writing earlier, calls it a short Pashto grammar (lanḍakay grammar) written at that time. [3] Nejatie, who also takes it to be a manual for officials of the Durrani bureaucracy, says it is not clear to him that it was written under any official policy to replace Persian with Pashto as the language of administration. [5] Deutsche Welle says it was written to fulfil Ahmad Shah's wish, and calls it the first Pashto teaching book. [6]

Raverty's introduction to his Pashto grammar says that when he wrote there was no grammar of the language apart from a small work by Major Leech. [2] The grammar does not mention Pir Muhammad's book. [2]

The diwan and what is lost

Habibi calls Pir Muhammad's diwan one of the first-rank works of Pashto. He puts it at about 5,000 couplets and says it holds a place of its own: it joins the ease of Khushal Khan's speech, the meaning and devotion of Rahman Baba, and the fine reasoning of Hamid. [3] Habibi sets him apart from Kazim Khan Shaida, whom he faults for packing his verse with Persian and Hindi conceits, and says Pir Muhammad kept the natural turn of Pashto. [3] For that other poet see Kazim Khan Shaida.

Raverty names "that of Pir Muhammad of Kandahar" among Pashto poetical works of great merit "now rarely to be met with". [2] He gives no tribe or date, and Habibi's Pir Muhammad Kakar also lived in Kandahar.

Habibi says Pir Muhammad wrote a book on the history of the Pashtuns that has not survived. Deutsche Welle reports the same, and quotes Zalmay Hewadmal, a cultural adviser to President Karzai, citing Abdul Rauf Benawa: if the history were found it would light up many corners of Afghan history. [3, 6] The Deutsche Welle report also names a Persian work on jurisprudence, Hidayat al-Mubtadi, as his. [6]

The poems

Habibi describes the diwan's themes with examples. He gives the Sufi picture of the soul cut off from its source, which Rumi had taken from the reed flute in the opening of the Masnavi, and says Pir Muhammad gave it a social side: the poet weeps with all who are sad. [3]

بېلتانه په غم شريك كړم د غمجنو

د هر چا په غاړه ژاړم لکه نی

Bēltāna pa gham sharīk kṛam da ghamjano, da har chā pa ghāṛa zhāṛam laka nay. [3]

Habibi's gloss is that the Pashto word ghāṛa means the throat or neck, and also the way a reed-player blows the pipe, so the line has the poet weeping on every man's neck, as the reed weeps in its separation. [3]

He also shows Pir Muhammad's debt to the earlier poets, and the poet's own opinion of them. In a ghazal he asks why those who praise the delicate poets do not count Rahman's poetry a miracle, and sets Khushal Khan Khattak's poetry beside it for the fair-minded. [3] Habibi sets his lines beside Rahman Baba's. Rahman has the beloved with a face like a fairy and gazelle's eyes, and says he cannot tell whether she is a gazelle or has worked magic; Pir Muhammad says he does not know whether hunting with sharp gazelle eyes is an art or magic. [3] Habibi adds that Pir Muhammad often follows Rahman's or Khushal's ghazals in this way. [3] He finds Pir Muhammad's version of the same idea more modest than Khushal's. [3]

Habibi also reads some couplets as pictures of the poet's time. One points to the state of the poor, another to unworthy men raised to high rank. [3] He guesses that Pir Muhammad suffered from men of his day or from pupils he had trained, because one ghazal turns to God as Ghaffar, the Forgiving, in a cry of distress. [3] That reading is Habibi's.

Where the book sits in Pashto language study

Writing about the Pashto script itself is older than Pir Muhammad. Kushev traces it to the opening of Bayazid Ansari's Khayr al-Bayan, which lists the letters, and then to Akhund Darweza and his son Abd al-Karim in the Makhzan, and to Khushal Khan Khattak, who proposed signs for particular Pashto sounds. [4] See Pir Roshan and Akhund Darweza. Work that took up grammar and vocabulary, Kushev says, began only in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the first of it was elementary teaching material and conversation books. The earliest he names is Ma'rifat al-Afghani. [4] Larger grammars and word lists followed from Pashtuns in India in the early nineteenth century. Kushev says Dorn made the greatest use of Mahabbat Khan's Riyaz al-Mahabbat, and that Ilahyar Khan's Aja'ib al-Lughat served Raverty for his dictionary. [4] The Durrani court, meanwhile, had a Pashto poet in the king: Nejatie notes that a diwan of Pashto poems is attributed to Ahmad Shah. [5] The Ahmad Shah article gives that setting.