Khalilullah Khalili

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Khalilullah Khalili
Khalilollah Khalili on the cover of "Deewaan-e Khalilullah Khalili"
Khalilollah Khalili on the cover of "Deewaan-e Khalilullah Khalili"
Born1907
Died1987
LanguagePersian
Nationality Afghanistan
GenrePoetry
Notable worksHero of Khorasan

Khalilullah Khalili (1907 – 1987; Pashto/ Persian: خلیل‌الله خلیلی - Ḫalīlallāḥ Ḫalīlī; alternative spellings: Khalilollah, Khalil Ullah) was Afghanistan's foremost 20th century poet as well as a noted historian, university professor, diplomat and royal confidant. He was the last of the great classical

Habībullāh Kalakānī, Emir
of Afghanistan in 1929.

Life

Khalili was born in

Pashtun from eastern Afghanistan. [3]
He was from Kohistan [a district of kapisa ]. His father, Mirzā Muhammad Hussein Khān, was King Habibullah Khan's finance minister and owned mansions in Kabul and Jalalabad, but was later dismissed and hanged by Habibullah Khan's son and successor, Amanullah Khan.[1] His mother was the daughter of Abdul Qādir Khān, a regional Safi tribal leader. She died when Khalili was seven.

Khalili lived and attended school in Kabul until he was 11, when

reformist son Amānullāh Khān, who quickly arrested and executed Khalili's father among others associated with the previous regime. Orphaned and unwanted in Kabul, he spent the turbulent years of Amānullāh's reign in the Shamālī Plain north of Kabul where he studied classical literature and other traditional sciences with leading scholars and began writing poetry. In 1929, when Habībullāh Kalakānī – a local Tajik from Kalakan – deposed Amānullāh Khān, Khalili joined his uncle Abdul Rahim Khan Safi, the new governor of Herat
, where he remained for more than 10 years.

In the early 1940s, he followed his uncle Abdul Rahim Khan Safi, who had been appointed a deputy prime minister, to Kabul. His stay in Kabul was cut short when, in 1944, some elders of the Safi-Clan rebelled and both uncle and nephew were imprisoned.[4] After a year in prison, Khalili was released and exiled to Kandahar where he flourished as a poet and writer.

In the 1950s, Khalili was allowed to return to Kabul, where he was appointed as minister of culture and information and began teaching at

Zahir Shah
whom he often joined on hunting expeditions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Khalili, who was fluent in

Arabic, served as Afghanistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Iraq
. He was a member of the 1964 Constitutional Assembly and a representative from Jabal al-Siraj.

Following the April 1978

Pashto poet Rahman Baba
. His remains were moved to Afghanistan in 2016. Burial: Kabul University mausoleum Kabul Kabul, Afghanistan

Works

Khalili was a prolific writer, producing over the course of his career an eclectic repertoire ranging from poetry to fiction to history to biography. He published 35 volumes of poetry, including his celebrated works "Aškhā wa Ḫūnhā" ("Tears And Blood"), composed during the Soviet occupation, and "Ayyār-e az Ḫorāsān" ("Hero of Khorasan"). With the exception of a selection of his quatrains[6] and the recent An Assembly of Moths,[7] his poetry remains largely unknown to English-speaking readers.

References

  1. ^ a b L.R. Reddy, Inside Afghanistan: End of Taliban Era, APH Publishing Corporation, 2002, p. 74
  2. ^ David B. Edwards, Before Taliban, University of California Press, 2002, p. 312
  3. ^ Lynch, Stephen (2003) "Tulips in a Minefield" Afghan Relief p.3 Archived 2011-07-24 at the Wayback Machine, originally published, on 12 October 2003 in the Orange County Register, last accessed 17 January 2009
  4. ISBN 978-81-7648-319-3
    .
  5. ^ "Khalilullah Khalili Dies at 79; Afghan Poet and Ex-Official" New York Times 14 May 1987, accessed 17 January 2009
  6. OCLC 11289418
  7. OCLC 283802813

External links

See also

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