1. Literary Background of the Early Modern Pashto “Mirrors for Princes”

The art of ruling belongs to the oldest and most profoundly explored topics in medieval Muslim literature. From the literary point of view, its roots may be traced in the pre-Islamic Sasanian books of instructions (andarz, pandnāmak) on statesmanship addressed to kings and high-ranking bureaucracy. Many of these writings, like a great body of the Pahlavi secular literature, have not survived in Middle Persian originals and are known to us only fragmentarily through the later works in Arabic and New Persian.Footnote ¹ In emerging Muslim literature this topic necessarily required a new ideological grounding and, following the Hadith tradition, it was authorised by ascribing its formal beginnings to the ordinances and political testaments (waṣiyya) of the first caliphs, primarily ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb (d. 644). Towards the middle of the 8^th Century precepts for rulers evolved first into a distinct branch of Arabic epistolary writings and then in the shape of a separate literary genre, very close to universal moralistic didactics (adab) and similar to that of “Mirror for Princes” (Fürstenspiegel) in European literatures. Key contributors to the creation of this genre were the court secretaries ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (d. 750) and Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 756), the latter's works betraying undisguised links with statecraft traditions and the andarz literature of the Sasanian times. Though in classical Arabic and Persian literatures “Mirrors for Princes” lacked a specific genre designation, these writings may be conveniently defined by the term naṣīḥat al-mulūk (“advice for rulers”), taking into account a few important works which shared this generic title, e.g. the books by al-Māwardī (d. 1048), the acknowledged theoretician of the Islamic administrative law, and al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), the eminent Muslim theologian and philosopher.Footnote ²

In the vast territories of the Persophone world, which towards the late Middle Ages stretched from Asia Minor to East India, thematic scope and formal criteria of the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre were outlined by two major and exemplary “Mirrors for Princes” – Qābūs-nāma (or Naṣīḥat-nāma) (1082) and Siyar al-mulūk (or Siyāsat-nāma) (1091/2 or 1107). Written within a short span of time in the early Saljuq period, these Persian works established two main types of discourse on the art of ruling. While the former, authored by a local Mazandarani ruler, the Ziyārid prince Kaykāvūs ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī (b. circa 1021), may be described as a didactical essay with belletristic elements; the latter, traditionally attributed to the grand vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (d. 1092), but more likely compiled by another person from the Saljuq secretary office, is a collection of diverse texts, obviously conceived as a technical treatise, a kind of a courtier's guide with historiographical excursuses.Footnote ³

Deeply entwined with the general moralising strand of the classical Persian literature, the naṣīḥat al-mulūk motifs regularly surfaced in poetry and prose of many other genres. Throughout the centuries various aspects of the art of ruling were touched upon in Persian historiography and belle-lettres with a steady focus on the ethics of an ideal sovereign. The very concept of an ideal righteous ruler, in fact, implicitly underlies each standard Persian panegyric addressed to a man of power. Directly and thoughtfully this concept is discussed in a number of Persian top classics, such as the Sanāʾī Ghaznavī’s philosophic-didactical poem Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa (circa 1130), or the Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s narrative Iskandar-nāma (1194 or 1202), or Saʿdī Shīrāzī’s brilliant collections of edifying stories and admonitions Būstān (1257) and Gulistān (1258). In the latter the opening chapter is unequivocally entitled Dar sīrat-i pādshāhān (“On the Way of Kings”) which echoes aforementioned Siyar al-mulūk (“Ways of Rulers”).

The latest visible upsurge of the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre in Persian literature occurred during the Mughal period in the 16–17th Centuries.Footnote ⁴ It was in this Golden Age of Indo-Muslim culture and within its geographical space that the literature in the Pashto language came into being. Unlike cosmopolitan Persian literature, mature and refined, local Pashto writings were initially intended for a very small readership and for different reasons imbued with noticeable ethno-cultural peculiarities, which in the case of the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre manifested in shifting the subject from statesmanship to chieftaincy and dealing with particular ad hoc matters rather than all-purpose concepts and precepts.

In its formative period, which lasted over a century from the middle of the 16th to the late 17th Century, Pashto literature developed predominantly within two elite social groups: tribal spiritual leaders and military-administrative rulers. Texts produced by a number of Muslim preachers, tutors, and scholars of various backgrounds and doctrinal views, on the one hand, and by chieftains, on the other, strongly differed both in terms of ideology and functionality. While the former were quite expectedly homiletic writings in the form of religious handbooks or theosophical treatises, either prose or poetic, which often in a code-switching manner followed conventional Persian patterns, the latter at the very outset aimed at recording tribal legacies related to genealogies, supremacy and property regulations, and therefore best of all fall under the category of chronicles (tārīkh). Though the earliest extant writings in Pashto are religious texts, viz. Khayr al-bayān (“Best Manifest”) by Bāyazīd Anṣārī (d. circa 1572) and Makhzan al-Islām (“Treasury of Islam”) (1605) by Akhūnd Darweza (d. 1618/19 or 1638/39), there are trustworthy indications that the first Pashto books were the Yūsufzay chronicles written between 1535 and 1550 and attributed to Shaykh Malī and Khān Kajū.Footnote ⁵ Though original texts of these books were lost in consequence of repeated redactions and translations into Persian and back into Pashto, their contents partly survived in the later work Tawārīkh-i Ḥāfiẓ-Raḥmat-Khānī (1767) compiled on the order of Ḥāfiẓ Raḥmat Khān Barets (d. 1774), a Pashtun local ruler (nawwāb) in North India, with an implicit aim of legitimising his own political authority.Footnote ⁶ Certain elements of the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre in “The Chronicles of Ḥāfiẓ Raḥmat Khān” are discernible in a laudatory portrayal of the old-time Yūsufzay rulers, including Shaykh Malī and Khān Kajū, and accounts of their memorable military and administrative accomplishments.

2. “The Book of the Turban” by Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak: a Training Programme for a Pashtun Chieftain

A person who made the largest contribution to the progress of Pashto secular literature replete with strong national overtones was the Khaṫak chief Khushḥāl Khān (1613–1689). In emulation of the ever popular Persian Qābūs-nāma Khushḥāl Khān composed in Pashto his own “Mirror for Princes” entitled Dastār-nāma (“The Book of the Turban”).Footnote ⁷ The book was dedicated not only to the author's descendants, i.e. the members of the Khaṫak ruling clan and potential chieftains, but to everybody “worthy to wear the Turban”, regarded by Khushḥāl and his compatriots as a symbol of power, knowledge and moral virtues. After a short praise to God Almighty the book begins with an epigraph, a quotation from Khushḥāl's poem Firāq-nāma (“The Book of Separation”): “Those who wear turbans are thousands; men [worthy] of the Turban are [few] in number”.Footnote ⁸ A conceptual idea of the book, aphoristically formulated in this verse, is explained then in two introductive sections: “On the true meaning of the Turban” and “On faculties and aptitudes, listed as arts (hunarūna) and qualities (khaṣlatūna), which determine the capability of [wearing] the Turban”. In two following chapters Khushḥāl Khān at length expounds on twenty arts and twenty qualities required of a ruler and any good nobleman.

In line with his declared determination to promote learning and letters among fellow countrymen Khushḥāl Khān begins his essay with spiritual matters, quoting a famous Prophetic saying “Who knows himself knows his Lord” and discussing self-knowledge (də dzān maʿrifat) as a basic notion of the Islamic religious philosophy and an essential ground for an individual's proper psychic, intellectual and physical maturation. The second “art” in the Khushḥāl's list is ʿilm interpreted in a broader sense as learning (zda kawəl) in general, rather than only theology, which nevertheless provides a framework and forms the very core of education: “Learning is what attaches a man to faith”.Footnote ⁹ To accommodate these wide-ranging speculations about ʿilm to the specific tasks of his “Mirror for Princes” Khushḥāl Khān makes such a remark: “Education and power are interrelated. Those who yearn for men of learning and education are [going to be] kings”.Footnote ¹⁰

If learning is an “acquirement of perfection” (kasb-i kamāl), its main instrument is writing (khaṭṭ), which goes third in the Khushḥāl's list of arts. Though Khushḥāl Khān accentuates such advanced facets of writing as calligraphy and a scribe's proficiency in rhetoric, it is obvious that the first thing he had in mind was literacy. His high appraisal of writing and his ardent call for its study, on the one hand, emphasizes the lack of formal education among Pashtuns in tribal territories at the time, even within the military-administrative elite. In one of his poems Khushḥāl admits that his father Shahbāz Khān was illiterate (khaṭṭ sawād-ye na wu).Footnote ¹¹ Khushhal's opening statements on writing in Dastār-nāma seem to be addressed to those who were leastwise not much accustomed to everyday dealing with written texts: “Learning is like a wild animal, and writing is comparable to a noose with which that animal is trapped. So many books would not exist if there were not writing… All things in this world are being done by writing… If a man of power and wealth learns it, this is an adornment [for him]; if a poor man learns it, this is his power and wealth”.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, such wording totally agrees with eulogies to Arabic script and writing in the early Pashto poetry of the Roshānī mystics, which proves that Pashto became a written language only in the Mughal times.Footnote ¹³

Other arts described in Dastār-nāma may be grouped into three categories: competences in social affairs and economy, martial arts and physical skills, entertaining occupations. Under the first category falls matrimonial relations (də azwājo muʿāsharat), children upbringing (də awlādo tarbiyyat), treatment of servants (taʾdīb-i khadam aw ḥasham), means of subsistence (asbāb-i maʿīshat), cultivation of land (zirāʿat), commerce (tijārat) (no. 11–16). The second category includes archery (tīrandāzī), swimming (ābbāzī), horsemanship (asptāzī) (no. 5–7). To the third belongs poetry (shiʿr), music (ʿilm-i mūsīqī), backgammon and chess (nard aw shaṭranj), drawing (də naqqāshəy taṣwīr), and hunting (ẋkār) (no. 4, 8, 18–20). The latter, however, according to its place in the list of arts and essential characteristics, was regarded by Khushḥāl Khān as a kind of martial art: “There is a great pleasure in hunting. Those with high spirit do love hunting very much. For rulers hunting is obligatory. Rulers are [destined] for hunting; hunting is [destined] for rulers. Through the practice of hunting skills in warfare are acquired, bravery and courage do increase”.Footnote ¹⁴

Among the arts Khushḥāl Khān considered two items which would, probably, better fit into the list of qualities (no. 9, 10). These are valour (shujāʿat) and generosity (sakhāwat), two basic and universal ethical principles of military aristocracies. While in Muslim tradition in general they partly correspond to such polysemantic notions as futuwwa and muruwwa in the meanings of “chivalry” and “morality,” within the ethical norms of the unwritten Code of Honour, which is an inseparable component of the Pashtun customary law (Pashtunwali), their equivalents are tūra (“blade,” “courage”) and war-kawəl, or baxẋəl (“giving,” “mercy”).Footnote ¹⁵ By ascribing these principles to the arts, Khushḥāl implied their strong connection with a range of practices and customs related to warfare, reconciliation procedures, charity, hospitality, etc. In his discourse on valour, the Dastār-nāma’s largest section, Khushḥāl Khān even makes an extended digression explaining some bad omens, which one has to bear in mind deciding on a military campaign or any other important action.Footnote ¹⁶

Especially noteworthy in the Khushḥāl's list is the eighteenth art defined as a study of ancestry (taḥqīq-i nasab). It is this art that directly links up Khushḥāl's “Mirror for Princes” with the Pashtun historical and social background. The author of Dastār-nāma reiterates the legendary version of the ancient origins of Pashtun people supposed to be the descendants of such Biblical and Quranic figures as Yaʿqūb (Jacob), Ṭālūt (Saul) and Dāniyāl (Daniel), describes his own lineage within the Pashtun genealogical tree and provides folkloric etymologies of the ethnonyms “Afghan” and “Pashtun” (“Pathan”). Apparently dissatisfied with what he “heard and read” about Pashtuns before, Khushḥāl Khān expresses an intention to write his own book about the history of his people: “There is no doubt that before me no one has tried his best to study this matter… I shall write a special [book on] history that is to be widely known”.Footnote ¹⁷ It is very likely that prior to Khushḥāl's Dastār-nāma only one book on Pashtuns’ history existed, viz. Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī, written in Persian in 1612/3 by the Mughal historian Niʿmatallāh Haravī.Footnote ¹⁸ What Khushḥāl Khān left behind were his drafts of such a book in Pashto which contained exclusively materials on his own tribe, the Khaṫaks. These were tribal genealogies with his family's full pedigree, few accounts of the Khaṫaks's history, and the excerpts from his personal memoirs and diaries together with a number of biographical poems. Later these records, either in original or edited and retold form, were included by Khushḥāl's grandson, Afżal Khān (1665/6–1740/1), in the voluminous historiographical compilation Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ (“The Ornamented History”) which is the earliest of this kind of book in Pashto currently at our disposal.Footnote ¹⁹

If the Persian author of Qābūs-nāma only briefly highlighted the royal descent of his family in the Foreword with a reference to the Sasanian kings,Footnote ²⁰ Khushḥāl Khān insisted on regarding the study of tribal genealogies as a special discipline to be learned by a ruler and a nobleman. Among Pashtun lineage, basically the knowledge of ancestors’ names at least up to seven generations, was a major “certificate” which legitimised an individual's social and legal status within a tribe. The genealogical section in Dastār-nāma better than any other indicates true addressees of this book. Afżal Khān, who supervised the transcribing of the Dastār-nāma’s text from his grandfather's archives into a clean copy, made an evident interpolation in the family lineage adding his own name as the latest link in the chain of the Khaṫak rulers. In 1665, when Dastār-nāma was written, Afżal was at best a one-year-old child, and for many reasons, e.g. because of the high rate of infant mortality, Khushḥāl Khān, who had twenty eight (!) sons at the time, would have been unlikely to insert the name of a particular grandson in his own pedigree. Of course, by such an interpolation Afżal Khān aimed at documentarily confirming his claims to chieftaincy in the Khaṫak tribe long after his grandfather's demise.

Twenty qualities are arranged and characterised in Dastār-nāma less coherently than arts, but they may be divided into three groups as well. One of them includes religious notions, such as confidence in God (tawakkul), awe of God (khawf aw rajā), obedience to God (ṭāʿat aw waraʿ) and repentance (istighfār) (no. 11, 13, 19, 20). The largest group comprises thirteen moral qualities: resoluteness (ʿazīmat), taciturnity (khāmūshī), honesty (rāstī), modesty and reserve (sharm aw ḥayā), kindness (khulq-i nīkū), nobleness (muruwwat), forgiveness and mercy (ʿafw aw karam), differentiation and measured assessment (tamyīz aw taʾānī), justice and sincerity (ʿadl aw inṣāf), fortitude (himmat), gentleness (ḥilm), dignity (ghayrat), prudence and discreetness (ḥazm aw iḥtiyāṭ) (no. 2–10, 15–18). Three qualities pertain to administrative abilities: acceptance of counsels (mashwarat), selectivity in patronage (tarbiyyat aw sharm də khpəl nawāzish), and regulation of the estate affairs (də mulk intiẓām) (no. 1, 12, 14). While some of these qualities, such as himmat, ghayrat, ʿafw, directly relate to the Pashtun Code of Honour, combined they clearly portray an ideal tribal ruler who abides the laws of Pashtunwali. For those who were not apt to follow his instructions about the required arts and qualities Khushḥāl Khān added a few passages in the closing section of the book, where he briefly commented on harmful effects brought about by stupidity (ḥimāqat) and ignorance (jahālat).

The only inventory of the arts and the qualities discussed in Dastār-nāma may not exhibit at once any salient specificity of the Khushḥāl Khān's Pashto “Mirror for Princes”. Even a cursory comparison of the tables of contents in Dastār-nāma and Qābūs-nāma will immediately disclose few obvious parallels. However even the most conventional topics addressed by Khushḥāl were not so much borrowings from classical texts as the products of the author's personal examination of common social practices and ethical categories. To figure out distinct peculiarities of Dastār-nāma one has to consider it with regard to Khushḥāl Khān's biography and literary legacy. Khushḥāl's personality in the discussion of quite standard issues comes to light much more clearly when Dastār-nāma is read with references to the author's numerous biographical poems and narratives from his memoirs and diaries in that part of Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ which is to be identified as “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle”.Footnote ²¹ In this case Dastār-nāma will be correctly understood as not just a local Pashto version of a typical “Mirror for Princes” but as the mirror of Khushḥāl's individual life experiences, comprehensions and feelings. Dastār-nāma was inspired by Qābūs-nāma but written downright independently of this and other possible Persian sources.

Suffice to mention that the first known episode from Khushḥāl's biography is the story of an incident on the Kabul river in 1618/19 when at the age of six the future author of Dastār-nāma almost drowned during bathing.Footnote ²² “If someone does not know how to swim, a great mischief may happen”, writes Khushḥāl Khān in Dastār-nāma.Footnote ²³ These words would appear as just a general observation if they do not resound in “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle” where we find also another account about an incident on the river, now the Indus, in the autumn of 1661 when Khushḥāl barely survived in the water after his boat crashed against the rocks.Footnote ²⁴ The section on the swimming in Dastār-nāma consists but of a few phrases. Nevertheless, Khushḥāl is very precise here in specifying the ways of swimming which were in use among Pashtun highlanders in his times. Besides “free-hand” swimming (təsh-bāzū), which he considers basic, Khushḥāl mentions three other kinds with such accessories as leather bag (shanāz), leather bottle (gaṙay) and pumpkin (kaḋū). In his brief and rather commonplace advices one feels the author's personal experience: “If [a swimmer] does not know [well] the free-hand manner, shanāz and all other things, if known to him, are nothing… A swimmer, even if he is a very good one, should not parade his prowess in big and deep waters!”Footnote ²⁵

Even more convincing in this respect is the much larger section on hunting.Footnote ²⁶ The contents and the wordings of this professional treatise tell of Khushḥāl Khān's full expertise in the subject and wholly agree with his similar poetical works. The largest part of this section deals with technical aspects of falconry which Khushḥāl regarded as the most exquisite kind of hunting and practiced it all his life as a favourite entertainment. “[In childhood] I spent one hour at classes and twenty at hunting. / Whether hunting did ever let me go for acquiring perfection? // All the world's knowledge would have been mine, / if I had not been occupied with hunting [all the time]. // Still now, when my beard is white and the teeth have fallen out, / I wander in mountains with a falcon on my hand:” sings Khushḥāl in one of his poems written in 1683.Footnote ²⁷ Besides lyrical verses on falconry Khushḥāl Khān left behind few teaching texts, such as the large poetical treatise Bāz-nāma (“The Book of Falcon”) (1674) and a number of smaller pieces of similar content which are included in his dīwān.Footnote ²⁸

What also makes Dastār-nāma a mirror of Khushḥāl Khān's individual accomplishments is the author's numerous remarks and digressions which may be interpreted only in the context of his life and other works. For example, in the discourse on valour Khushḥāl observes: “God knows that all these wars in the past were waged with half a heart, except for two days in the whole life: one is the attack on Haytam, another is the big war with Jagtā when all his army had assaulted our trenches…”Footnote ²⁹ Details of these events are reported only in “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle:” the attack on Haytam, a village of the Yūsufzay clan Akāzay, occurred in January 1641, its dramatic aftermath being the death of Khushḥāl's father Shahbāz Khān of a fatal wound in the head. The big war with Jagtā, the Rajput Prince Jagat Singh, took place in the autumn of the same year near the town of Tārāgaṙh in Punjab where Khushḥāl Khān, with his Khaṫak posse, fought in the army of the Mughal Emperor Shāhjahān (r. 1627–58).Footnote ³⁰

Khushḥāl Khān wrote Dastār-nāma in 1665 when he was imprisoned by the Mughal imperial authorities in the jail-fort of Rantambhor (now Ranthambhore Fort in Jaipur). In the afterword he apologises to readers for all possible flaws in the contents and style of this work, justifying himself by asserting that he had not books at his disposal and was compelled to rely mostly on memory. Even if this claim is slightly exaggerated, since in Firāq-nāma (1665/66) Khushḥāl states that reading books was a popular pursuit among Rantambhor prisoners, the text of Dastār-nāma testifies to the author's excellent education and strong individuality emphasised by his almost declarative self-identification as a Pashtun chieftain.

3. The Art of Ruling in Khushḥāl Khān's Poetry

Dastār-nāma was the Khushḥāl Khān's largest, but not his only contribution to the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre. His other literary works containing both direct and implied didactics abound in advices and ruminations on the art of ruling as it is viewed by a Pashtun chieftain. We may only guess that such themes found their way into the Khushḥāl's poetry after his accession to chieftaincy in the Khaṫak tribe in 1641. In a poem written somewhere in the 1650s and intoned as a semi-ironical repentance (tawba) Khushḥāl Khān enumerates his everyday activities to which his “lower soul” (nafs) caused him to stray from the spiritual path. These activities, in fact, encompass what is elsewhere described by Khushḥāl as the required conduct of tribal rulers. The poet expresses here much “regret” for following the laws of honour (nang) which forced him to fight incessantly with other tribes, occupy other's lands, and kill innocent people, for serving imperial authorities, sometimes with shameful obsequiousness, for being wholly absorbed by mundane matters like increasing property and estates, building new houses and planting gardens, for spending much time in love with women, for composing poetry, hunting, wasting money on falcons, listening to music and singing, even for paying too much attention to good clothes.Footnote ³¹

However, such ingenious depiction of a tribal ruler's way of life stands apart from Khushḥāl's other verses where he treats the art of ruling with no equivoques. This topic appears central in over thirty poems from his collected lyrics (dīwān), and it is here that we come across the full Pashto equivalent of the very notion “the art of chieftaincy”, viz. də sardārəy hunar.Footnote ³² Khushḥāl considers this topic also in some fragments in his masnawī-poems Firāq-nāma and Swāt-nāma (“The Book about Swat”). In the last section of Firāq-nāma, written along with Dastār-nāma in the Rantambhor jail, Khushḥāl Khān comments on the status and powers of a chieftain emphasising the importance of one-man ascendancy; in Swāt-nāma, composed as a poetical diary of his visit to the Swat valley in 1675, he refers to the art of chieftaincy obliquely in the satirical verses addressed to the Yūsufzay khans.Footnote ³³

Two of Khushḥāl's poems in the dīwān may be regarded as concise charters of tribal rulers. One of them, a qaṣīda of forty distiches, is a true “Mirror for Princes” in verse.Footnote ³⁴ Khushḥāl wrote it in 1681 for his third son Bahrām Khān (d. 1712) after the latter was elected chief by the Khaṫak tribal assembly (jirga). Since 1672, Bahrām Khān had openly confronted Khushḥāl Khān and his elder brother Ashraf Khān (d. 1694/95), Afżal's father, in the struggle for supremacy in the tribe. A few episodes from this struggle, which evolved into a bloody fratricidal war, were related by Khushḥāl in his diaries.Footnote ³⁵ In 1681 the Mughal authorities of Peshawar arrested Ashraf Khān and deported him to India where he died after fifteen years of incarceration in Gwaliyār (now Gwalior Fort in Madhya Pradesh). Bahrām, who reportedly stood behind his brother's arrest, seized an opportunity to consolidate his supporters in the tribe and lay claims for chieftaincy. For various reasons Khushḥāl Khān at the jirga voted for Bahrām and soon sent him instructions on ruling in the form of a qaṣīda. The first distich of this poem clearly speaks of the author's uneasy feelings about his decision and the current situation in the tribe: “My heart does not get along with anybody, Bahrām; / my dealings with all others are against my will”. Such gloomy prelude notwithstanding, Khushḥāl Khān then formulates a number of maxims directly related to the art of chieftaincy. Assembled in one poem these maxims overlap with most other Khushḥāl's statements on the subject in his lyrics.

The list of instructions in this chieftains’ charter predictably begins with an order to adhere strictly to Islamic norms. However, this order is unexpectedly confined to a single line after which the author immediately turns to the concepts of Pashtunwali calling for unconditional abidance by the rules of the Pashtun Code of Honour (lit. “honour and reputation” – də pashtānə nang-u-nām): “While you have enough strength and God's assistance, / do not step back for a moment from the Pashtun laws of honour!” Though moral and behavioural prescriptions of Pashtunwali target each Pashtun, Khushḥāl specifies in the poem that he addresses a chieftain (sardār): “A good chieftain needs the treasure of reputation, / even if he does not have anything else”. As everywhere in his works Khushḥāl Khān accentuates here two fundamental principles of a tribal ruler's conduct, named “arts” in Dastār-nāma: “Giving (war-kawəl) and fighting (tūre wahəl), these are two things / that are needed for the affairs of chieftaincy (sardārī) to be accomplished”. According to him, the generosity of a ruler must be pragmatic and any expenditures have their reasonable limitations: “Eat, feed, but save [something in] a bundle for an occasion…” Khushḥāl makes a few remarks on the importance of military force and arms, e.g.: “Even if a chieftain can master thousand arts, / his governance over people will not succeed without a sword”. The poet advises to patronise faithful and steadfast subalterns, “brave lads” (ẋə dzwānān), who would be unfaltering assistants in administrative affairs and comrades-in-arms in wars. He cautions against excessive reliance on tribal assemblies (jirga, maʿraka) which are rather contemptuously characterised as ineffective governmental bodies and insists on the mandatory obedience of subjects ever inclined to blame rulers for excessive cruelties, praises persistence in achieving set goals and keeping to the law of retaliation: “Even if a man all the time suffers from blades and arrows, loses battles, / he will never let [a desire of] revenge cool down in his heart”. As a vassal of the Great Mughals Khushḥāl Khān requires loyalty to imperial powers, but, through memory of his own experience, warns local rulers not to trust kings’ ordinances too much. In many lines of this poem Khushḥāl sharply criticises his own tribe the Khataks, for continuous discord and conflicts. Without any embarrassment the poet calls his fellow tribesmen ungrateful beasts and states that only thanks to his family, i.e. the ruling clan (khelkhāna), the Khaṫak tribe has not fallen apart. Then he points to dissents between his close relatives that threaten integrity of the tribe and calls for unity (ittifāq), persuading Bahrām Khān, the addressee of the poem, to accept peacefully the most unpleasant criticism of his brothers.

In “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle” Afżal Khān, a Bahrām's political rival, provides us with a detailed, if one-sided and very tendentious, account of his uncle's rule in 1681–92.Footnote ³⁶ He states that already around 1685 Khushḥāl Khān lost any expectations of positive developments in the tribe under the Bahrām's chieftainship and expressed his regrets in a poem (ghazal) which sounded like an afterword to his earlier admonitions. The ghazal begins with a straightforward accusation: “You have not learned the art of chieftaincy, Bahrām! / You discredited chieftaincy by your rule!”Footnote ³⁷

Khushḥāl's other, much smaller poetical charter of a tribal ruler dwells on the same two basic tenets of chieftaincy – valour and generosity.Footnote ³⁸ Within these tenets, exhibiting his habitual pragmatism, the poet highlights such aspects as peacefulness and prudence. He preaches that there should be no weakness in defending honour and fighting, but living in peace is preferable, for “one is not a turnip or a cheese to expose himself to a knife”. Khushḥāl employs similar mundane metaphors in his reprobation of unwise squandering (tabẕīr). According to him, one should breed only able retrievers and not waste money on mutts. Even a brief survey of Khushḥāl Khān's two charters of chieftaincy indicates that he voiced rather authoritarian views trying to reconcile strict adherence to old customary laws with an evident departure from the traditional egalitarianism of tribal society.

The contents of Khushḥāl's other verses on chieftaincy may be perfectly summarised by a maxim articulated in the first line of a didactical ghazal: “The one who gains, consumes and bestows is a [true] man; / the one who follows the law of valour is a [true] khan”.Footnote ³⁹ Time and again Khushḥāl Khān identifies the primary function of tribal military-administrative elites with the trade of war. He teaches that any chieftain first and foremost is a military commander whose personal bravery must be combined with skills of a troop leader and an expert in battlefield tactics. He advocates the love of arms, singing in a quatrain that without “a blade of wrath” a chieftain would resemble a snake without poison and “would never be remembered neither in village, nor in town”.Footnote ⁴⁰ In one poem Khushḥāl goes as far as to confess that “the tree of the chieftain's rule bears fruits only [if watered] by enemy's blood and faeces”.Footnote ⁴¹ Most laconically the idea of correlation between administrative power and military profession is worded in a motto “Throne or funeral board!” (yā takht dəy yā takhta da), i.e. “Rule or die!”Footnote ⁴² Khushḥāl Khān pays no less attention to generosity which is understood foremost as a chieftain's duty to support his fellow tribesmen with livelihoods. A chieftain has to be a wealthy person, instructs Khushḥāl, for it is “gold” (zar) that makes a ruler potent, but truly powerful (dawlatmən) is the one “from whose river the canals of other [people] branch off”.Footnote ⁴³

That valour and generosity were considered two major criteria in assessment of a Pashtun chieftain's morals is confirmed also by Khushḥāl's brief eulogies to his ancestors who are praised for having exactly these qualities. Khushḥāl's father Shahbāz Khān is portrayed in such verses: “For the sake of his honour / he would always sacrifice himself and his family… // He always aspired for bravery, / until he went to grave. // He gained and bestowed, / these were his only deeds and nothing else. // He won hundreds and spent thousands, / he was never free from debts. // He was a sharp archer / and had strong love for hunting”.Footnote ⁴⁴ The same characteristics Khushḥāl Khān ascribes to his grandfather Malik Akoṙay, whose status as a Khaṫak ruler was validated in the 1580s by the ordinance of Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605): “He fought bravely with sword / and was a sharp archer. // His enemy when appeared, / quickly found himself in a grave. // He had both sword and cauldron, / he was both severe and generous”.Footnote ⁴⁵ These laudatory verses are corroborated by a brief note in “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle:” “It is said that in fighting [Malik Akoṙay] was a very valiant and brave warrior. And he was generous to such an extent that if he had something in the morning, there was nothing left in the evening, and if something appeared in the evening, it was not saved for tomorrow morning. Everything that came to his hands he spent on his companions and poor people”.Footnote ⁴⁶

In his sporadic self-praises (fakhriyya) Khushḥāl Khān evaluated himself according to the same criteria. He underlined his social origin and status as a person belonging to tribal aristocracy and vigorously dissociated himself from all other strata – peasants, merchants, artisans, clergymen. His profession, inherited from the ancestors, he called figuratively “the clink of blades” and added: “If [money] comes to my house in thousands, / it goes away in all directions… // Gold is good for [making] the name, / in grave it is not needed”.Footnote ⁴⁷

It goes without saying that negative qualities, opposite to valour, generosity, and other virtues of a righteous ruler, are consistently reproved in Khushḥāl's verses. As the antipode to the ideal sovereign, and a regular target of his poetical vilifications (hajw), Khushḥāl Khān chose Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1659–1707), with whom he exaggeratedly associated all his own misfortunes of imprisonment in Rantambhor and later dissents in the Khaṫak tribe. Besides a dozen of deprecating verses addressed directly to Aurangzeb, Khushḥāl wrote a number of poems with abstract criticism of tyrants, though the image of this particular Mughal Emperor is often easily recognised in such aphoristic portrayals of a despot (sitamgar) as: “With the same knife he takes to sharpen a pen (qalam) for copying Quran, / he cuts the throat of his brother”.Footnote ⁴⁸

If Aurangzeb plays in Khushḥāl's poetry a stereotypic tyrant liable to be accursed for any possible vice (injustice, meanness, cruelty, violence, hypocrisy, self-interest, etc.), a number of individuals of the poet's own social milieu, including his closest relatives, are disparaged as unworthy rulers according to the moral standards of Pashtunwali mostly with reference to actual events in the Khaṫak territories. In his verses written after the beginning of military confrontations among the Khaṫaks in 1672 Khushḥāl Khān pitilessly blamed his elder sons and main political contestants Ashraf and Bahrām above all for the lack of true valour and generosity. An exemplary specimen of such a satire is a fragment from the Khushḥāl's longest autobiographical qaṣīda composed in 1680 on the peak of his disagreements with Ashraf Khān: “He is over forty years old now, / but no arrow has ever hit him. // Everywhere he faces a war, / he always flees from battlefield. // He girds a gilded sabre about his waist, / spurs exquisite horses, // but neither did he make use of his sabre, / nor was his horse's armour damaged. // While his house is full of money, / a guest leaves it hungry. // If he spends something at all, / that is only on buffoons and pimps. // He is busy with calculating [money] / all the time like a Hindu. // He thinks and speaks only of money, / collects silver and golden coins”.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the same way, with a deliberate shift from cursing to mocking, Khushḥāl Khān attacked with critical verses his counterparts from the neighbouring Yūsufzay tribe. Most of these verses together with parallel passages in Swāt-nāma date back to the years of the big Mughal-Afghan war of 1672–6 when the Yūsufzay clans in the mass backed out of participation in armed clashes with imperial armies. Khushḥāl took this as an opportunity to accuse the Yūfzay chieftains of breaking the laws of honour: “Do they really know what Afghan honour is? / They are Kashmīrīs, Pakhlīs, Laghmānīs (i.e. anyone but not Pashtuns)”, or “I am the only one among them who cares about honour, / whilst the Yūsufzays repose being occupied with husbandry”.Footnote ⁵⁰ Apart from down-to-earth personal invectives against certain Yūsufzay chieftains (“Ṭālay looks like a hen, an effeminate / with a cockscomb and screechy shouts”) Khushḥāl depicts in his poems a collective image of a Yūsufzay malik as a yokel whose major attributes are cowardice and miserliness, i.e. two qualities contrary to valour and generosity.Footnote ⁵¹ It is noteworthy that Khushḥāl Khān, well aware of inveracity of his exorbitant reproofs concerning alleged military disability of the Yūsufzays, preferred to underscore their avarice and parsimony: “Money is their religion, / they think only of silver and gold. // To make somehow two coins of one // is what they are busy with, other things they do not know”, “Whether he is the chief of a village, or of a tribe, or of many a people / does he ever slaughter a chicken for a guest?” etc.Footnote ⁵²

Undoubtedly, such satirical verses were aimed not only at defaming and deriding particular people in particular circumstances, but also at propagating ethical values of the Pashtun Code of Honour. Therefore, we have every right to regard them, together with the laudations of ancestors, as a kind of illustrative attachment to the Khushḥāl Khān's discourse on the art of chieftaincy in Dastār-nāma and didactical poetry.

4. Afżal Khān Khaṫak on Political Power

Another even greater portion of illustrative material on the art of chieftaincy may be extracted from “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle”. In fact, the very notion of chieftaincy underlay the key ideological implications of this collection of miscellaneous texts authored by Khushḥāl Khān and Afżal Khān, the Khaṫak hereditary rulers. The common thread running throughout “The Chronicle”, which begins with the lineage of the Khaṫak ruling family and then recounts the history of conflicts related mostly to the contest for supremacy in the tribe, is the succession of power by the right of primogeniture.Footnote ⁵³ Written largely in the form of diaries and memoirs, rather than historiographical narratives, “The Chronicle” presents a detailed picture of how the Khaṫak rulers applied the art of chieftaincy in practice. Echoing theoretical premises outlined in Dastār-nāma the stories from “The Chronicle” forthrightly describe military and administrative activities, everyday occupations, attainments, and ethics of Pashtun chieftains. Inasmuch as the main subject of narration in “The Chronicle” is conflict, the issues pertaining to the art of chieftaincy, warfare skills and valour seem the most discussed ones. Within the context of the struggle for political power these issues are often interpreted in line with a Khushḥāl's slogan “Throne or funeral board!” once quoted by Afżal Khān.Footnote ⁵⁴

The central idea of “The Chronicle” becomes clear with consideration of the Afżal's general introduction to Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ. Besides a brief explanation of the goals and contents of the book, the introduction contains the author's discourse on the concept of political power (iqtidār). Factually, this is an independent work, a small treatise (risāla), in which Afżal Khān examines theoretical aspects of power and administration.Footnote ⁵⁵ Afżal regularly supports his arguments with references to Dastār-nāma and quotations from his grandfather's poetry, while allusions to Quran and Muslim traditions are much less frequent and any other sources are not mentioned at all. It has to be stressed that this kind of scholarly essay, entirely dedicated to the notion of political power, was pioneering in the Pashto language.

The core postulate in Afżal Khān's exposition naturally follows basic Muslim tenets maintaining the divine nature of power. Afżal reiterates a prevailing idea that God exercises his power over people by selecting among them the most worthy and capable individuals, i.e. kings (bādshāhān). Disobedience to kings equals disobedience to God, so everybody should obey earthly rulers even if they are usurpers like Żaḥḥāk, a sinister personage from Firdawsī’s Shāh-nāma, or tyrants like Quranic Firʿawn (Pharaoh). According to Afżal, God sends villainous kings to punish people for infidelity, apostasy, and ungratefulness. At the same time Afżal Khān states that power is a test for kings who in order to pass it and win the favour of God have to abide by laws of justice (ʿadl) and mercy (iḥsān).

Then Afżal Khān identifies and characterises three main forms of acquiring administrative authority (riyāsat): “consensual” (ijmāʿī), “hereditary” (mīrāsī, or mawrūsī), and “appropriative” (taghlībī). The first form presumes a consensus of people over the candidature of a ruler and somehow corresponds to the ideas of electivity and social contract, it agrees with a procedure of electing chieftain by tribal assembly (jirga); the second one means succession by right of blood relationship and is the transfer of authority within the ruling clan (khānkhel) ; the third one implies “self-nomination” of a group leader through exhibiting personal skills and qualities,Footnote ⁵⁶ and primarily means acquisition of power by force. According to Afżal, all three forms are legitimate. Whatever bookish sources of these theoretical views may have been, the very forms of acquiring supremacy mentioned by Afżal Khān reflected real practices in social and political interactions in Pashtun tribes and conformed with common rules of lawful acquisition of the status of a chieftain. To illustrate the “appropriative” form Afżal Khān mentions the circumstances of two Pashtun dynasties, the Lodis (1451–1526) and the Suris (1540–55), came to power in the Delhi Sultanate. However, in the late 16th century Afżal Khān's own ancestor Malik Akoṙay seized leadership in the Khaṫak tribe through “appropriation”, or “self-nomination”.Footnote ⁵⁷ “Appropriation” of power naturally requires military force and valour (tūra). Afżal accentuates this idea, but stipulates that the power appropriated by force may be acknowledged as legitimate only if “the life of people becomes better than it was before”.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the Khaṫak tribe, after the formation of the ruling clan at the turn of the 17th century, there was a certain balance between the “consensual” and the “hereditary” forms of acquiring supremacy. Although de jure priority remained with the first form, which was an exponent of tribal patriarchal democracy, de facto during few decades the chieftaincy in the tribe with the jirga’s consent regularly passed from father to eldest son. With the beginning of internal tribal conflicts in 1664, when Khushḥāl Khān was imprisoned by the Mughals, the established order of power succession by the right of primogeniture proved to be insecure. In 1681 the jirga elected as a chieftain “self-nominated” Bahrām Khān, Khushḥāl's third son, and after 1712 the “legitimate” chieftaincy of Afżal Khān, who came to power in 1692, was challenged first by his younger brother Nāmdār and later, in 1724, by the clan of the Khaṫak sheikhs. In his essay Afżal Khān does not advocate openly the priority of hereditary transfer of power, but it is this concept that dominates the ideology of “The Chronicle”. The author's true political attitudes leak out only in such a remark on the hereditary power, “One should not oppose it except with the consent of the people (pə ittifāq də khalqo)”.Footnote ⁵⁹

A claimant to supremacy, i.e. chieftaincy, according to Afżal Khān, must meet the following requirements: impeccable reputation, descent from a noble family of a ruling stratum (“not a man of religion, or an alien, but a head of a kin and a descendant of the old-time rulers”), local (waṭanī) origin (“a person who belongs to his land and his people cares more about the honour and dignity of his homeland (waṭan) and his compatriots (mutawaṭṭinān)”), adulthood, maturity, administrative experience, intelligence and education.Footnote ⁶⁰ Then Afżal enumerates ten moral qualities obligatory for a ruler: 1) gratitude towards parents, teachers, and all other benefactors, 2) self-control, 3) vigour and diligence, 4) truthfulness, 5) resistance to worldly passions, 6) modesty and decency, 7) lack of extreme suspiciousness, 8) imperturbability, 9) valour, 10) generosity.Footnote ⁶¹

His discourse on power and politics Afżal Khān concludes with contemplations over the main causes of social disturbances and mutinies. Such causes he sees in tyranny, despotism, violence and all kinds of misuse of administrative authority. He states that successful ruling may be accomplished through the denial of violent methods of governance, on the one hand, and providing a balance in relations between three social groups, namely ordinary subjects (raʿāyā), nobility (makhṣūṣān) and army (sipāhiyān). Afżal's comments on the treatment of ordinary people reveal his social status and attitudes: “Lest the subjects might go out of control, one must be more merciful to them than to his own children… However, at the assembly (majlis) one should not allow them to be impudent (gustākh). Ordinary people are unwise and short-sighted. Either they may commit an unseemly act which will cause a ruler's anger, though one should not be angry at subordinates without guilt, or may fall into impudence…”Footnote ⁶²

Like his grandfather's teachings in Dastār-nāma, Afżal Khān's theoretical speculations on power in the introduction to Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ can be correctly interpreted as an outcome of his own administrative experience only through the study of “The Khaṫaks’ Chronicle” which offers plenty of factual material on the Afżal's ways of exercising political authority in the capacity of the Khaṫak chieftain in 1692–1724.

5. Real Politics in the Epistles of the Khaṫak Chieftains

Among the documents included in “The Chronicle” there are two pieces which may be attributed to the naṣīḥat al-mulūk genre. These are epistles composed by Khushḥāl and Afżal in 1666 and 1719 respectively in connection with actual developments in the Khaṫak tribe.

The epistle of Khushḥāl Khān is quoted under the title “The Testament” (waṣiyyat-nāma) which recalls an old literary tradition going back as far as to the times of the first Muslim caliphs. Khushḥāl wrote it in the Rantambhor prison on March 16, 1666, as an instructive letter to his eldest son Ashraf Khān who replaced him as the Khaṫak chieftain by the right of primogeniture with the sanction of the Mughal authorities. Thereby it appears that the document was called “The Testament” not so much because of some deliberate historical allusions, but for the simple reason that Khushḥāl expected his incarceration to be a life sentence.Footnote ⁶³

“The Testament” is not a legal document concerning disposal of property or imposition of an obligation but a political declaration with the guidelines for the members of the Khaṫak ruling family, “friends and well-wishers” on what policy should be pursued towards particular clans and factions which took part in the internal tribal conflict after the author was arrested by the Mughals in January 1664. Khushḥāl Khān figuratively called this document “the seven-thread (owə-prəka) testament” explaining that it would deal with seven “groups” (qism) which “are involved in the schism among the people” (də oləs pə tafriqa dākhil dī). In the opening passage of “The Testament” the author immediately tells of a distinction within these groups between “the relatives” (khpəl) and “the strangers” (pradī), namely the Khaṫaks and the neighbouring Yūsufzays. Such a remark signals the inborn dichotomy of a Pashtun chieftain's ethno-social consciousness with regard to the fundamental differentiation between “self” and “other” and once more ascertains the meanings of these notions in the minds of Pashtuns in pre-modern times. Along with other numerous evidences in “The Chronicle” and Khushḥāl Khān's works this statement indicates that by the word khpəl the Khaṫak chieftains always meant only their fellow tribesmen, while the word pradī in their lexicon referred mainly to Pashtuns of other tribes.

The very wording of “The Testament” is rather intriguing in the sense that the author chose to designate the groups under consideration with invented metaphoric names, thus demonstrating his personal attitude towards them. Three groups of “the strangers” are the Yūsufzay clans Bāyīzay, Rāṅīizay and Kamālzay, respectively nicknamed “Bābāzay” (bābā “father”), “Raḥmatzay” (raḥmat, “mercy,” “gratitude”), and “Kamẕātzay’ (kamẕāt “of bad nature”). The first two, as their sobriquets indicate, are declared friendly since Khushḥāl Khān was married to a daughter of a Bāyīzay chieftain, and after his imprisoning in Rantambhor, both clans took him under their protection and sheltered his family.Footnote ⁶⁴ In “The Testament” Khushḥāl instructs that they should be treated in a most generous way according to the laws of Pashtunwali: “One should not spare life and property for them when it is needed”. With the Kamālzays, who in 1641 killed Khushḥāl's father Shahbāz Khān in a skirmish, the Khaṫak rulers had been permanently in the state of feud since the times of Malik Akoṙay. Unrest among the Khaṫaks caused by Khushḥāl's imprisonment, gave the Kamālzays an opportunity to attack and rob the lands of their southern neighbours. Khushḥāl Khān does not specify in his epistle what policy exactly should have been adopted towards the Kamālzays, but the general course is implied in a diatribe, “in such hard times they committed such a low deed, assaulted our family, disgraced Pashtun women!”

If the groups of “the strangers” in the epistle are particular tribal subdivisions registered in the Yūsufzay genealogies, “the relatives” are political factions within the Khaṫak tribe, i.e. the unions of various clans and families which are much less identifiable because of their figurative appellations. The opening sections of “The Chronicle” contain a full list of the main Khaṫak subdivisions in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁶⁵ Among thirty two Khaṫak clans only a few were the upshots of various kinds of assimilation, such as the Mughalkays whose ancestor was a deserter from the Mughal army, or the Radzaṙs who originated from the Mandaṙ-Yūsufzay tribal coalition. The majority of the Khaṫak clans had long ancestries within the Khaṫak genealogical tree. We may only guess how these subdivisions were divided into four groups described by Khushḥāl Khān in “The Testament”, taking into account that some of them, like the ruling clan Ḥasankhel, may have been split into several factions.

These Khaṫak groups bear the names “Saʿādatkhel” (saʿādat “fortune”), “Nāqiṣkhel” (nāqiṣ “damaged”), “Mardūdkhel” (mardūd “rejected”), and “Muẕabẕabīn” (muẕabẕab “hesitant”), apparently, according to their positions as regards the transfer of chieftaincy in the Khaṫak tribe from Khushḥāl to Asharf. “Saʿādatkhel” is declared loyal and worthy of being granted with certain privileges, such as the exemption from the poll-tax (qalang) and road tolls (rāhdārī). The name of this group, probably, points to its leader, Saʿādat Khān, who was Khushḥāl's second son and Ashraf's full brother. “Nāqiṣkhel” is very likely the party of Khushḥāl's third son Bahrām who contested the supremacy of his elder brother and few years later started against him a military campaign. Khushḥāl reproves this group for breaking “the law of brotherhood” but, nevertheless, recommends maintaining peaceful relations with them. Under the sobriquet “Mardūdkhel” Khushḥāl Khān presumably meant the faction of Żiyā ad-Dīn, the leader of the Khaṫak spiritual clan Yāsīnkhel and the former's son-in-law, who strived for the change of power in the Khaṫak tribe and supported political ambitions of Bahrām. The association of this group with the Khaṫak sheikhs may be inferred from the Khushḥāl's demand that “arrogance and wish of grandeur should be suppressed in them by the blade”. With respect to “Muẕabẕabīn”, who avoided direct partaking in the political conflict and took a wait-and-see position, Khushḥāl Khān recommends a more restrained policy.

“The Testament” is the earliest extant specimen of a written directive of a Pashtun chieftain concerning internal tribal policies. This document demonstrates well the priorities of the tribal ruler's governance. It proves that in the period of political instability interrelations between tribal subdivisions became of foremost importance and ensuring peaceful coexistence of conflicting groups was considered much more preferable to imposing a chieftain's authoritative rule by force. In this respect “The Testament”, as a deliberated political document, sounds much more pragmatic than some of Khushḥāl's impassioned verses acclaiming tough methods of ruling (see above).

Of the same ad hoc nature is the Afżal Khān's epistle which appeared over fifty years later under the neutral generic title “Admonition” (pand-nāma).Footnote ⁶⁶ Afzal composed this document in 1719 in the town of Tsotara on his way to Lakkī, then the southernmost settlement in the Khaṫak territories, where he spent next two years (1720–1) in exile having been temporarily removed from power by his younger brother Nāmdār Khān. Afżal asserts in “The Chronicle” that he was prompted to write “Admonition” by a series of armed clashes and robberies in the Khaṫak domain which displayed Nāmdār Khān's inability to exercise properly his newly acquired authority and guarantee safety for both the Khaṫak tribesmen and transit traders. Intended to be circulated among the members of the Khaṫak ruling family “Admonition” declared Afżal Khān's views on internal tribal conflicts in general and his political confrontation with Nāmdār in particular. By presenting himself as an experienced and responsible ruler who cares about the welfare of his people, Afżal wished to regain the support of his relatives in order to start a legitimate campaign against his brother.

Unlike Afżal's essay in the introduction to Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ “Admonition” is a diplomatic message written in an extremely evasive and equivocal style. The very subject of this document and the circumstances in which it appeared explain why no names, dates, or any real facts are mentioned in it. On the other hand, such elusiveness makes for perceiving this text more as a product of a careful theoretical analysis of a political conflict than a propagandistic petition pursuing only practical goals. Key points of Afżal's reasoning in “Admonition” may be summarised as follows: 1) the divine nature of human virtues expected from a legitimate ruler; 2) bad manners that lead to a schism (tafriqa) among the people; 3) external military and political pressure as an inevitable consequence of an internal schism; 4) neglect of public interest and disregard for the welfare of the homeland (waṭan) as obstacles for claiming supremacy; 5) legitimacy of the author's claim for power (obviously, an implicit reference to principle of primogeniture) and necessity of a reconciliation on his (!) terms. The historical background and the real purpose of “Admonition” are best disclosed in a passage where Afżal Khān compares himself to his adversary: “It is tested through experience that [true] men are not those who hand out money (lit. “gold”), but those who sell their skills and earn money, be they kings or cobblers. When the lord of the homeland (i.e. hereditary estates) ventures to war, everywhere he goes people say either in front of him or behind his back: “If he were a brave man he would defend his power and his homeland. Whether he possesses the homeland or not, if he loses power, his daughters and sisters will be humiliated. Though now, in this age, my soul does not have an ardent desire for chieftaincy (sardārī), for ruling the homeland (waṭandārī), for satisfying other passions, to calm down anxieties about the children, the people (qawm), the tribes (qabāʾil) would be far from the ways of [true] men…”

Afżal Khān's “Admonition” shares with “The Testament” of his grandfather the features of both ad hoc texts performing momentary political tasks and naṣīḥat al-mulūk writings generalising about long-term administrative practices. It is for this reason that Afżal separated “Admonition” from his other correspondence by entitling it as a literary work with the ancient name of a didactical genre (cf. Sasanian pandnāmak). In accompanying remarks he explained that “Admonition” was addressed to everybody (ʿalā ʾl-ʿumūm) and its contents were homilies (waʿẓ) and advices (naṣīḥat).