ټولې لیکنې، د موضوع له مخې.

Ahmad Shah Durrani (born about 1722, died 1772), a Sadozai Abdali who had commanded Nadir Shah's Afghan horsemen, was chosen king by a jirga of chiefs near Kandahar in 1747 and built an empire from Khorasan to Sirhind, defeating the Marathas at Panipat on 14 January 1761.

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Bacha Khan (باچا خان, 1890–1988), of Utmanzai in Charsadda, founded the nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgar ("Servants of God") movement in 1929 and spent about a third of his life in British and Pakistani prisons. He died in Peshawar on 20 January 1988 and is buried in Jalalabad.

Pashtun tradition, written down by Nimatullah at the Mughal court in 1609–1611, traces every tribe to Qais Abdur Rashid and his sons Sarban, Bitan and Ghurghusht, with Karlan as an adopted foundling; the evidence of language places Pashto among the north-eastern Iranian languages, and the name Afghan is first recorded in 982 in the Hudud al-Alam.

The Pashtuns, called Afghans in a Persian geography of 982 and Pathans in India, ruled Delhi as the Lodi and Sur sultans (1451–1555), founded the Hotak and Durrani states in the eighteenth century, and have been divided since 1893 by the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Nearly all Pashtuns are Hanafi Sunni Muslims, with Shia communities in Kurram, Orakzai and among the Bangash; village religion runs through mullahs, sayyids and the shrines (ziarat) of saints such as Pir Baba in Buner, and the sharpest religious conflict in Pashtun history was the sixteenth-century struggle between Bayazid Ansari, Pir Roshan, and the orthodox party of Pir Baba and Akhund Darweza.

Sher Shah Suri (born Farid, died May 1545), an Afghan of the Sur clan whose family came from the Gomal country, defeated the Mughal emperor Humayun at Chausa and Kannauj in 1539–1540 and ruled north India from Delhi until he was killed by an exploding shell at the siege of Kalinjar.

In 1709 Mir Wais, chief of the Hotak Ghilzai and kalantar of Kandahar, killed the Safavid governor Gorgin Khan and took the city; his son Mahmud captured the Persian capital Isfahan on 23 October 1722, and Hotak rule ended when Nader Shah took Kandahar in 1738.

Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839 and again in 1878, and fought a third, month-long war there in 1919; the first ended with the destruction of the Kabul garrison in January 1842, the second with Abdur Rahman on the throne, and the third with Afghanistan's full independence under the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919.

Pashto dialects divide first on how the letters ښ and ږ are said: as retroflex sh and zh around Kandahar, as kh and g around Peshawar, as plain sh and zh around Quetta, and as palatal sounds among the central Ghilzai; Waziri and Wanetsi stand furthest from the Kandahar-based written standard.

Written Pashto literature begins around 1600 with the Roshani poets and their opponent Akhund Darweza, reaches its classical height with Khushal Khan Khattak (1613-89), Rahman Baba and Hamid, and runs alongside a far older oral tradition whose best-known form is the landay, a 22-syllable couplet sung mostly by women.

Pashto (پښتو) is an Eastern Iranian language spoken across southern and eastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan; a royal decree made it an official language of Afghanistan in 1936, and it is the first language of 81 per cent of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Abdul Rahman Mohmand, Rahman Baba (رحمان بابا), was a seventeenth-century Sufi poet of the Ghoryakhel Mohmand near Peshawar whose Diwan of ghazals is the most widely read book of Pashto poetry. He is buried at Hazarkhwani, where his shrine was bombed in March 2009 and reopened in 2012.

Pashto is written right to left in an Arabic-based alphabet of 44 letters, including ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ, څ, ځ, ښ, ږ, ګ and five forms of ye; its grammar keeps masculine and feminine throughout, and in the past tense of transitive verbs the verb agrees with the object.

Abdur Rahman Khan (امير عبدالرحمان خان), a grandson of Dost Mohammad, ruled Afghanistan as amir from 1880 to 1901 with a British subsidy, a standing army and great violence, crushing the Ghilzai and Hazara risings, conquering Kafiristan and agreeing the Durand Line in November 1893.

Amanullah Khan (1892–1960), amir and then king of Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, won full independence from Britain in the Treaty of Rawalpindi of 8 August 1919 and gave the country its first constitution in 1923, but risings in the east and north forced him to abdicate in January 1929 and he died in exile in Switzerland.

Dost Mohammad Khan (1792 to 1863), a Mohammadzai Barakzai born in Kandahar, made himself master of Kabul in 1826, lost his throne to the British invasion of 1839, returned in 1842 and by his death at Herat on 9 June 1863 had brought nearly all of present-day Afghanistan under one government.

Khushal Khan Khattak (خوشحال خان خټک, 1613–1689) was chief of the Khattak tribe at Akora, a Mughal officer imprisoned by Aurangzeb in 1664, and from 1672 a leader of the Pashtun tribal war against the Mughals. He wrote poetry and prose in Pashto and Persian and is buried at Esori in the Khattak hills.

Malalai (ملالۍ) is the Pashtun heroine of the Battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880, who in the Afghan telling raised the fallen flag of Ayub Khan's army, rallied the fighters with a landay and was killed on the field. Tradition makes her a shepherd's daughter from near Maiwand in Kandahar, and Afghanistan has named its first girls' school, a Kabul maternity hospital and a state medal after her.

Pakistan's 2023 census counted 43.6 million people whose mother tongue is Pashto, 18.15 per cent of the country, about three million of them in Sindh and 2.4 million in Punjab; Afghanistan has no census of language or ethnicity, and some 1.9 million Afghan nationals were counted in Pakistan in 2023 and more than a million Afghans had gone back from Pakistan by mid-2025.

Jalalabad (جلال آباد), capital of Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan, stands on the Kabul river near the western end of the Khyber; named after Akbar, it was held by Sale's brigade through the siege of 1841–42 and was the winter capital of the Afghan amirs, three of whom are buried there.

Kandahar (کندهار), in the irrigated oasis of the Arghandab and Tarnak rivers in southern Afghanistan, stood on the Qaytul ridge from the Achaemenid period until Nadir Shah emptied the old city in 1738; Ahmad Shah Durrani built the present walled city as his capital and is buried there.

Peshawar (پېښور, Pēkhawar), ancient Purushapura, was the Kushan capital of Kanishka, the winter seat of the Durrani kings and the capital of the North-West Frontier Province from 1901; excavations at Gor Khuttree in the old city reach back to the Mauryan period.

The Khyber Pass runs about 33 miles through the last spurs of the Safed Koh from Jamrud, 10½ miles west of Peshawar, over Landi Kotal to Torkham and Dakka on the Afghan side; Afridi hold its eastern part and Shinwari its western end.

The Pashtun lands lie on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, among the Hindu Kush, Spin Ghar and the Sulaiman range; their rivers run either east to the Indus (the Kabul, Swat, Kurram and Gomal) or south-west into Sistan (the Helmand, at about 1,300 km Afghanistan's longest river, and the Arghandab), and the Khyber, Kurram, Gomal, Khojak and Bolan passes cross the mountains.

Pashtun men and women wear the partug (wide drawstring trousers) under a long kamis shirt, with the turban (patkay or lungai) and cap (khwalay) as the clearest marks of region and tribe; Kandahar is known for khamak whitework and gold-thread caps, Peshawar for the chappal.

A twentieth-century woman's dress of pink velvet in the British Museum (2008,6039.2), sold in 2008 as a "Barech Pathan dress" and bought in Karachi in 1990, carries a full-length embroidered pocket, mirror-work and breastfeeding slits that tie it closely to the Baluch dress of southern Afghanistan.

Pashtun folklore tells of jinn and pêrai (پیری), the giant dêw, the fairy ṣ̌āpêrai, the night-hag khapasa (خپسه) that causes sleep paralysis, and the ghol of the waste described to Elphinstone; amulets, iron and saints' shrines are the usual protection.

Everyday Pashtun food is bread, dairy and tea, with meat kept for guests and feasts. Elphinstone recorded in 1815 that a stranger in a Durrani village was fed bread, qurut and ghee in the hujra by whichever household's turn it was; the best-known Pashtun dishes today include chapli kabab from Takht Bhai and Peshawar, Kabuli palaw and winter landi.

Pashtunwali (پښتونولي), "the way of the Pashtuns", is the unwritten code by which Pashtuns judge a man's conduct; its core duties are guarding honour (nang) and the household (namus), feeding guests, sheltering anyone who comes as a suppliant (nanawatai) and answering injury (badal), with disputes settled by a jirga of elders.

Bayazid Ansari (Pir Roshan, born at Jalandhar in 1525 to a Kaniguram family) founded the Roshaniyya movement and wrote Khair al-Bayan, the oldest surviving Pashto work; the Halnama credits his circle with new rabab tunes and new forms of Pashto verse.

The hujra (حجره) is the men's guest house of a Pashtun village, where travellers are fed and lodged, elders meet in council and young men learn custom; the qala or kala is the walled family compound, its women, grain stores and well kept behind mud walls that in Mohmand villages stood 18 feet high.

A jirga (جرګه) is a Pashtun assembly of men, usually elders, that sits in a circle on open ground to settle feuds, land disputes and questions facing a lineage or tribe, deciding by consensus and enforcing its rulings through fines, expulsion and the burning of a defaulter's house; Afghanistan's national Loya Jirga and the Wolesi Jirga take their names from it.

Pashtun music, called tang takor (ټنګ ټکور) in Pashto, is built around the rabab (رباب), a short-necked lute carved from one piece of mulberry wood, and around sung forms such as the two-line tappa and the charbeta. Its best-known dance, the attan (اتڼ), is danced in a circle to the dhol and surnai; UNESCO listed the art of making and playing the rabab in 2024.

The Gharghasht (غرغښت) are one of the main Pashtun genealogical branches, traced to Ghurghusht, third son of Qais Abdur Rashid; they include the Kakar, Panni, Mando Khel, Babai, Naghar and Dawai, with the Safi and Jadoon (Gadun) often placed among them.

The Orakzai (اورکزي) are a Pashtun tribe of Orakzai Tirah, the Khanki, Mastura and Kharmana valleys north-west of Kohat, divided between Sunni and Shia clans; their country became Orakzai Agency in 1973 and a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018.

The Ormur (اورمړ), who call themselves Baraki, live mainly at Kaniguram in Waziristan and Baraki Barak in Logar, speak the Southeast Iranian Ormuri language, and are counted in Afghan genealogies as descendants of Sharkhbun; Pir Roshan grew up among them.

The Afridi (اپريدي, Aprīdī) are a Karlanri Pashtun tribe of the Khyber Pass, the Bazar and Bara valleys and Tirah Maidan, divided into eight clans; in 1672 Afridi and allied tribes under Aimal Khan and Darya Khan destroyed a Mughal army at the top of the Khyber.

The Durrani, called Abdali until 1747, are a confederation of Pashtun tribes centred on Kandahar, Helmand and Herat, divided into the Zirak league (Popalzai, Alikozai, Barakzai and Achakzai) and the Panjpai league (Nurzai, Alizai, Ishaqzai and two smaller tribes); every Afghan royal dynasty from 1747 until the end of the monarchy in 1973 came from them.

The Ghilzai (Pashto غلجي, Ghəljī, also Ghalzai) are one of the three great Pashtun confederations of Afghanistan, about two-fifths of the country's Pashtuns, living between Kandahar, Ghazni, Kabul and the Durand Line; their Hotak tribe ruled Kandahar from 1709 to 1738 and Persia from 1722 to 1729.

The Yusufzai (یوسفزی) are a Pashtun tribe of the Mardan and Swabi plain, Swat, Buner, Dir and the Panjkora valley, who reached the Peshawar valley from Kabul around 1500 under Malik Ahmad; their land was shared out by Shaikh Malli's survey and in 1586 they destroyed Akbar's army under Raja Birbal.