Khattak

The Khattak take their name from their ancestor Luqman. Rose's Glossary (1911) gives the tribe's own story: out hunting with his brothers, Luqman met four Afghan girls and chose the best-dressed, who turned out to be the plainest. His brothers laughed at him with the words "Luqman pah khatai lar", "Luqman is in the mud", and the nickname Khatak stayed with his descendants. His sons were Turman and Bulaq. Turman's line took the name of his abler son Tarai, so the tribe divides into the Tari and the Bulaq, to which the Saghri and Bangi Khel belong.

The genealogists disagree about Luqman's father. The Khulasat al-Ansab counts Khattak as the fifth son of Kodai, and Caroe's table and Rose's second volume follow it. Ibbetson, in Rose's third volume, calls him "Luqman surnamed Khattak, son of Burhan, son of Kakai", and Bellew and Longworth Dames also place the tribe under Kakai. Both lines belong to the Karlanri. The Kaka Khel, a holy section descended from the saint Shaikh Rahim Yar, are venerated across the north; Rose thinks they are Honi by origin.^1,2,3,4,5

Ibbetson places the tribe's first home on the west face of the northern Sulaiman range, in the Shawal valley later held by the Wazir. Towards the end of the 13th century the Khattak moved east with the Mangal and Hanni. About a century later, after a quarrel with the Bannuchi, they went north and east into the empty hill country across the middle of the Kohat district to the Indus. Massy (1890) dates the move out of Shawal to the 14th century. In alliance with the Bangash they drove the Orakzai out of Kohat by the end of the 15th century and split the district with them.

Malik Akor (Akorai, Aku) made the tribe a power on the Peshawar road. Akbar gave him the land south of the Kabul river between Khairabad and Nowshera and the tolls at the Akora ferry, in return for guarding the road from Attock to Peshawar. The sources date this differently: Massy to 1581, Caroe to 1586, and Rose puts the founding of Akora in 1587. In Shah Jahan's reign the Khattak crossed the Kabul river and took a strip of its north bank from the Swat junction to the Indus and a position at Jamalgarhi, north of Mardan. They also held Makhad, east of the Indus. Caroe doubts that a tribe stretching 150 miles from north to south by Akbar's time could have been newcomers, and suggests that some of the people the chronicles call Dilazak were Khattak.^4,7,9,5,11

Caroe says Akor, his son Yahya and his grandson Shahbaz were all killed in the wars with the Yusufzai; Massy has Akor killed in 1600 fighting the Bulaq. When Shahbaz died in 1641, Shah Jahan confirmed his son Khushhal Khan as chief and keeper of the highway. In 1659 he led a Mughal expedition against the Afridi and Orakzai of Tirah. Aurangzeb later imprisoned him; Rose says at Ranthambhor, with his release in 1666, while Massy says six years in Gwalior fort. Khushhal was with the governor Muhammad Amin Khan at the Mughal defeat in the Khyber in 1672. He then turned against the Mughals and their Bangash allies, and was wounded in a failed attack on Kohat in 1675.

His son Ashraf Khan, the poet Hijri, held the chiefship from 1672–73. In 1681 his brother Bahram handed him to the Mughals, and he died a prisoner at Bijapur in 1693–94. Khushhal died in 1689 (Rose gives 1688). Ashraf's son Afzal Khan led the tribe from about two years after Khushhal's death, for sixty-one years by Iranica's count. Afzal collected his grandfather's writings and from about 1708 wrote the Tarikh-i Murassa, a Pashto history of the Afghans that tells the Khattak story up to 1723–24. Afzal is buried at Ziarat Kaka Sahib near Nowshera.^5,8,9,11

Elphinstone, writing in 1815, found the Khattak in two divisions under chiefs who were cousins. The northern Khan, at Akora, was as much subject to the Durrani king as the Peshawar tribes; the southern Khan, at Teri, kept more independence in his hills and drew income from the rock salt mined near Teri. Massy dates the split to 1748, when Afzal's grandson Sadat Khan helped Ahmad Shah Durrani invade India and was confirmed as Khan of Akora, while his cousin Khushhal Khan took the southern country. That Khushhal Khan was killed fighting the Marathas at Hasan Abdal in 1759.

In the early 19th century rival cousins fought over the Teri chiefship, turning to the Sikhs or the Afghans for help. Ranjit Singh granted Kohat, Hangu and Teri to Sultan Muhammad Khan Barakzai. Rasul Khan, chief of Teri, died in 1843 and was succeeded by his adopted son Khwaja Muhammad Khan, who helped Reynell Taylor in 1848 and was given the lease of the Teri tahsil, made perpetual in 1858. By 1908 the Khan of Teri, Khan Bahadur Abdul Ghafur Khan, held the whole tahsil in jagir for a quit-rent of Rs. 20,000.^6,9,4,7

The Khattak are the northernmost of the frontier tribes to speak the soft, south-western form of Pashto. The Imperial Gazetteer draws the line between soft and hard Pashto through the Kohat district and notes that even the Akora Khattak speak the soft form. Ibbetson records that the tribe was Sunni and carried the salt trade with Swat and Buner. The 1910 Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes counts 24,000 fighting men in the south-east of the Peshawar district and the south and east of Kohat, and names the divisions most people knew: the Akor Khel (the chief's family), the Barak in the south and south-east, and the Seni-Khoumu north and west of Teri.^7,4,10