Sulaiman Layeq: Pashto and Dari poet, PDPA founder and minister, 1930–2020

At a glance

• Sulaiman Layeq (سلیمان لایق) was born on 7 October 1930 and died in late July 2020, aged 90. Adamec gives his clan as the Sulaiman Khel; his mother tongue was Pashto and he wrote in Pashto and Dari. [7–9]

• He was among the founders of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), edited its weekly Parcham in 1968, and wrote the national anthem of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. [7, 8]

• After the 1978 coup he was minister of radio and television, was pushed out by the Khalq government, and from 1980 headed the Academy of Sciences and, from 1981, the ministry for frontier and tribal affairs under the Soviet-backed Parcham governments. [3, 7, 8]

• Admirers read him as a patriotic poet of social justice who late in life called his party's politics misguided. Critics read the minister as a servant of a government held up by the Soviet army. [2–4, 9, 11]

A mosque boy from a Mujaddidi family

Adamec's First Supplement to the Who's Who of Afghanistan (1979), drawn up after the April 1978 coup, gives his birth as 7 October 1930, the son of Abdul Ghani Nazim. [7] The father was a fighter in the Third Anglo-Afghan War on the Waziristan front under Haji Abdul Raziq and a devotee of Shaikh Ahmad Sarhindi, the Mujaddid. For that reason the boy was named Layeq Ghulam Mujaddid. In 1947, having lost faith in the Mujaddidis, he took the name Sulaiman, which his mother had wanted, and Layeq, the name of an ancestor seven generations back. [7] The Historical Dictionary puts him in the Sulaiman Khel tribe. [8] KabulNow's obituary calls his a religious Kharot family of Paktia, and the New York Times says he came from a lineage of religious leaders and trained in Islamic seminaries. [9, 11] The obituaries disagree on where he was born: Paktia in KabulNow, Sharana in Paktika in the Salam Watandar report. Adamec names no place. [7, 10, 11]

He first studied at a mosque, reading popular Dari verse books and elementary Arabic. In 1941 he entered the second grade at Habibia High School in Kabul, and in 1947 the Paghman School of Islamic Law, from which he graduated in 1952. [7] He then entered the College of Islamic Law at Kabul University, but was expelled in 1954 for opposing the government. He turned to the Faculty of Letters, graduating in 1957. Adamec adds that he was first active in politics in the eighth grade at Paghman and was expelled from that school for a time in 1952 and again in 1953. [7]

Poetry, radio and the party

His literary life began early. Adamec says his first Pashto poem appeared in the magazine Anis while he was still in primary school, and that between 1958 and 1960 he won eight government prizes for prose and verse in Pashto and Dari, among them a first prize in Pashto verse in 1958. [7] He worked for the newspaper Heywad in 1958, for Radio Afghanistan from 1959 to 1965 and in the Ministry of Information from 1965 to 1967. [7]

His first Pashto collection, Chunghar ("The Mountain of the Springs"), came out in Kabul in 1962; Adamec says it was banned and republished later. A second, Kigdai ("The Tent"), was printed in New Delhi in 1976, and a third, Yaduna and Darmanduna ("Harvests and Memories"), in Kabul in July 1978, with an introductory note by Nur Muhammad Taraki. [7] In 1973 he went to the Fifth Congress of Asian and African Writers and to a symposium of Asian and African poets in Yerevan. [7] Louis Dupree's survey of twentieth-century Afghan writers lists him among the poets in both languages and calls him "a well-known leftist journalist". [5] Kyara Klausmann, writing on Kabul University in the 1960s, records his poems among the political literature students passed around, beside Taraki's novels. [6]

Samuel Hodgkin, who translated three of his poems for the anthology Tulips in Bloom, describes "sentimental, romantic-revolutionary" verse that shares many tropes with Soviet poetry of the time: battle against nature, conquest of the cosmos, emotional overflow. Of the three poems he chose, two are dated 1959 (Kabul and Gulbahar) and one Pul-i-Khumri 1965. Their editors place Layeq in a prominent Sufi lineage of a leading Pashtun clan. [2] A line from the 1965 poem shows the manner:

My head won't be bowed beneath the quotidian fist

A fighter's head is no head, but a solid rock

That is Hodgkin's English; the translator worked from Layeq's collected works printed in 1981. [2] The New York Times gave another couplet, from a verse that became a slogan at revolutionary rallies: "If the road home is carpeted with thorns / We'll bare our feet and dance the way." [9]

One of the founders of the PDPA

Adamec's entry for him says that in 1964 he sat in the congress of 27 men that founded the PDPA, in Taraki's house, and so was a founding member. In Adamec's entry for Taraki the founding congress is dated 1 January 1965, with about 30 young men. [7] The article on Nur Muhammad Taraki follows the 1965 date. In 1966 Layeq became an alternate member of the party's Central Committee. [7] He stood for the National Assembly from Pul-i-Khumri in Baghlan in 1965 and 1969 and lost both times; Adamec says the cause was government interference. [7]

When the party split in 1967 he went with Babrak Karmal's Parcham. [7] KabulNow says he stayed loyal to Parcham under the influence of its ideologue Mir Akbar Khaibar, although most of his Pashto-speaking comrades backed Khalq. [11] In March 1968 the faction began the weekly Parcham, published by Layeq and edited by him and Khaibar. It was openly critical of the government and was closed in July 1969. [8] Adamec's list of the weeklies of the 1960s names Khalq under Taraki and Parcham under Layeq as the two organs of the PDPA. [8]

Minister, prisoner, minister again

After the coup of 27 April 1978, in which the party took power and Mohammad Daoud Khan was killed, Layeq became minister of radio and television in Taraki's government. [7, 8] The government then turned on the Parchamis: Karmal was dismissed in August 1978 and accused of plotting. [7] The Supplement says Layeq was "said to have stepped down" from his party and cabinet posts in December 1978. [7] The Historical Dictionary says the Khalqi regime purged and imprisoned him. [8] The article on Hafizullah Amin describes the sweep against known Parchamis in 1978 and 1979.

When the Parchami faction came to power under Karmal, Layeq was appointed president of the Academy of Sciences in April 1980, and in 1981 minister of frontier affairs, which the same year became the Ministry of Tribes and Nationalities. [3, 8] Under Mohammad Najibullah he stayed a member of the politburo and of the central committee's secretariat. [8] Mashal's obituary says he pressed in the late years of that government for reconciliation with the insurgents. [9] For the war itself see the Soviet war and the refugees, 1978 to 1992.

What critics said of the politician

Writers hostile to the Soviet presence saw the posts as cover. In the Freedom House volume of 1987, A. Rasul Amin wrote that Layeq was only the nominal head of the Academy of Sciences, which in reality was directed by the Uzbek Academy's president, and that the ministry he headed copied the Soviet Commissariat of Nationalities and was "in actuality" under KhAD and KGB control. [3] The reporter Edward Girardet described the ministry as working to win over Pashtun tribes south of the Hindu Kush by the old British methods of bribes, favours and threats. [4] Two newspaper reports of January 1984, translated by the US government, concern Urgun in Paktia. One, from the Penang Star of 23 January, has Layeq saying on Radio Kabul that the resistance around the town was "crushed" with the help of rebel groups that had gone over; it adds that a Western diplomat put the villagers killed in Soviet and Afghan reprisals there on 2 to 5 January at as many as 100. Another report of the same weeks quotes a Pashto newscast in which he said that "Servants of America were wiped out" from the district. [1]

Layeq's own later words are harsher on his side than these. In interviews in his last years, after his return to Kabul in 2005, he told the New York Times, the government he joined had been misguided, so extreme in its ideas and so deep in people's lives that it was unacceptable. He offered to be tried: "They can start with me; I am a volunteer to go to a tribunal." [9] KabulNow's obituary still held that he never confessed what wrongs his party did, and that his late interviews beat around the bush. [11]

What admirers said of the poet

The same obituary says many Afghans admired him as a moderate patriotic poet, and that Hazara and Tajik intellectuals as well as Pashtuns sent condolences. It adds that he spent his later adult years on Pashto literature and folklore. [11] Salam Watandar reported that President Ashraf Ghani called the death a great loss for the country. [10] The retired colonel Dawood Popal, an early party member who wept at the grave, said Layeq's honesty kept him at the edge of power in the early years, and promised that his books and poems would stay with him. [9] Mashal called him an unlikely champion of the left, from a religious family, and counted about a dozen collections in Pashto and Persian. [9]

The unfinished epic, the bomb and the grave

Around 1980, on a provincial assignment in the east, soldiers brought Layeq a young guerrilla charged as a counterrevolutionary. Layeq said he pardoned him; the man refused the pardon and confessed. The meeting, Mashal reports, became the subject of an epic of some 800 pages, "A Man from the Mountains", that Layeq worked on for forty years. It examines why neither Marxism nor Islamist militancy ended Afghanistan's tribal and feudal injustices. [9]

In September 2019 he was on his way to his office at the Academy of Sciences when a Taliban car bomb struck a convoy of American and NATO troops in Kabul; he was wounded. He was treated in Kabul, India and Germany and died in late July 2020, at 90, without finishing the poem. [9, 10] He was buried in Kabul on a hill, among old comrades of the party. [9, 10]