Qiyamuddin Khadim: Pashto poet, critic and editor of the awakening generation

At a glance

• Qiyamuddin Khadim (قیام الدین خادم) was a Pashto poet, essayist, critic and editor of Kabul. Mohammad Siddiq Roohi gives his years as 1285–1358 of the solar Hijri calendar, roughly 1906–07 to 1979–80. Adamec's Who's Who gives his birth as 1907. [1, 5]

• Roohi names him son of Mulla Hisamuddin and grandson of Mulla Ali Gul Akhundzada. [1]

• Adamec lists him as a senator of the Meshrano Jirga, the upper house, and as editor of Hiwad, "educated privately", with Pashto as his mother tongue. [5]

• Roohi counts fourteen of his books in print, among them Bayazid Roshan and Pashtunwali. Gregorian's bibliography dates the first to Kabul in 1945 and the second to Kabul in 1952. [1, 4]

• Roohi and Habibi, two historians of Pashto literature, place him among the poets of the Pashto Society's circle and of the "awakening" that Roohi dates to the second decade of Zahir Shah's reign, about 1943–53. [1, 2]

Where the sources put him

Abdul Hai Habibi wrote a short history of Pashto literature as a university textbook. In a passage on the poets who came up after Nadir Shah, he describes how the Pashto Anjuman and then the Pashto Society ("Pashto Tolana") became the nursery of Pashto verse and prose. He names Aminullah Zamaryali, Ghulam Jilani Jalali, Qiyamuddin Khadim, Siddiqullah Rishtin, Abdul Rauf Benawa, Gul Pacha Ulfat, Abdul Shakur Rashad and Mohammad Arsala Salimi, and says that in thought these poets were wholly new, while only some of their work showed anything new in form. [2] He sets the group between the old classical school and the new one: they carried the old literary inheritance to the young generation and brought the young to national facts. [2]

Roohi's history of modern Pashto literature, printed at Peshawar in 1999, groups them by what they wrote. Khadim appears in his list of literary researchers and again in his list of linguists, beside Habibi, Rashad and Rishtin. [1] In Roohi's chapter on the awakening period he opens Khadim's entry by saying that when people discuss the literature of the "Wesh Zalmian" age, the names that come first to mind are Habibi, Ulfat, Benawa, Khadim, Rishtin and Rashad. They did much for a standard Pashto and for its spelling and style, and trained many pupils. Ulfat, Benawa and Khadim also wrote literary studies, Roohi adds, but they are mostly famous as poets of the awakening. [1]

The man in his own words

Roohi quotes a line by Abdul Rauf Benawa from Osnai Likwal ("The Writer of Today"): Khadim "has the right of seniority and eldership among today's Pashtun writers and poets", and stands in the first rank of Afghan scholars and men of letters. [1] Roohi himself says that Khadim loved Pashto, Pashtunwali and the progress of his country, had good feelings and spoke bluntly. [1]

Khadim printed his own life story in the same book. In one part, headed "The criticisms of me in life", he lists what people say against him. He is a man who will not yield: his mother said so too, and he answered that if he yielded he would be like everyone else. He argues too much: he says he likes debate on basic questions of principle, not debate for its own sake. Friends tell him he lacks courage in literature. And the one sin he admits to is a love of the truth: other people bend to considerations in their affairs, he writes, but he cannot trample on truth and fact. He had drawn that habit, he writes, in his poem "The poet's creed". [1]

Roohi adds that the passage is also a sample of his prose: it is short, goes straight to the point and does not stretch a matter to earn by length. [1]

Books

Roohi lists fourteen individual works in print. The better known are Da kochnyano akhlaqi palana (the moral upbringing of children), Rohi gulona, Da marghlaro amil, Naway zhwandun ("New Life"), Makarim al-akhlaq ("Noble Character"), Pashtunwali, Bayazid Roshan, Khayali dunya ("The Imaginary World"), Da Sharif sarguzasht and Nubugh aw abqariyat ("Talent and Genius"). [1] Gregorian's bibliography of 1969 lists Khadim's Bayazid Roshan (Kabul, 1945), on the founder of the Roshani movement, Pir Roshan, and his Pashtunwali (Kabul, 1952). [4]

In a note Roohi adds three more. Kharwan is a collection of poems printed in 1346 (1967–68), Da Baba nasihat is a poem printed in 1335 (1956–57), and Nawe rana is a collection of essays printed in 1343 (1964–65). Three further books were printed at Peshawar: Loy ashaban, Lerghoney Pashtana qaumoona and Pashtopatai. [1]

A poem on his creed

Roohi prints "Da shair maslak" ("The poet's creed") whole. Every couplet ends in the refrain ka wam wam, ka na wam na wam, "whether I am or am not", and its first lines read: [1]

صحيح لاره به ښايم که وم وم که نه وم نه وم

Sahih lara ba khayam ka wam wam ka na wam na wam

I will show the right road, whether I am or am not.

رښتيا رښتيا به وايم که وم وم که نه وم نه وم

Rashtya rashtya ba wayam ka wam wam ka na wam na wam

I will speak the truth, the truth, whether I am or am not.

A later couplet names what he served:

خدمت د خپلې ژبې، قام، وطن زما مسلک دی

Khidmat da khple zhabe, qam, watan zama maslak dai

To serve my language, my people and my country is my creed.

The poem is signed with his pen-name, Khadim, "the servant". [1]

The awakening movement

Roohi's account of the period is political. In the second decade of Zahir Shah's reign, he writes, Pashto literature grew with the spread of the Pashto language and with a movement for democracy and reform, and that is the stage he calls the "awakening". It is bound up with the political movement of the Wesh Zalmian, the Awakened Youth: almost all the well-known Pashto writers and poets of the time were in that political organisation, so most of their verse and prose took a social and political colour. The Wesh Zalmian programme included a clause on advancing the Pashto language. Roohi also says that other organisations followed, with their own papers. [1] He does not list Khadim by name among the members, and the sources here give no date or office for any membership of his.

Louis Dupree tells the same movement from the side of the state. In his account the liberal press grew freer, and the brotherhood, founded in 1947, was ready to go underground if need be. The government, he writes, first ignored it and then judged the opposition a menace to the status quo; it dissolved the student union in 1951, closed the independent papers and arrested about twenty-five liberal leaders before the elections of 1952. About half of those jailed agreed to stop, and several later held high posts under Daoud's government; others stayed in prison and died there. [3] The Shah Mahmud years, when the liberal parliament sat, are told in the article on Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmud Khan.

Offices

Adamec's entry lists Khadim as a senator of the Meshrano Jirga and as editor of Hiwad, a newspaper. It gives no date for either. [5]

Where he sits in Pashto writing

The Pashto Society and the writers around it are the subject of the wider article on Pashto literature and oral poetry. Habibi's textbook gives Khadim a place in the middle generation between the classical and the new school, and Roohi names him with Habibi, Ulfat, Benawa, Rishtin and Rashad among the men who shaped a standard Pashto and its spelling. [1, 2]