Khalilullah Khalili

Khalilullah Khalili was born in the year 1907 and died in the year 1987. He was the foremost poet of Afghanistan in the 20^th century. He is also a noted historian, university professor, a royal confidant and a diplomat. He was the last of the great classical Persian poets and among the first to make the introduction of Persian poetry and Nimai style to the people of Afghanistan. He is also skilled in Khorasani pattern and was a follower of the Farrukhi Sistani. Nearly alone among the poets of Afghanistan, he enjoyed a following in Iran, and there his chosen poems have been published. His works have been praised by some known literary figures and intellectuals of Iran. Much people see his to be the greatest modern day poet of the Persian language in Afghanistan. Also he is known for the main work he has done, ‘Hero of Kharasan’, a controversial biography of Habibullah Kalakani Emir of Afghanistan in the 1929.

 

source of picture: en.wikipedia.org 

Life

Khalili was born in the province of Kabul and came from the same village as Habibullah Kalakani. He utterly wrote in the Persian language and is at times linked to the Tajik nationalist ideology. He is of the Pashtun Safi Tribe of Kohistan. His father, Mirza Mohammad Hussein Khan was the finance minister of King Habibullah and he has mansions in Kabul and Jalalabad. Though was later sacked and hanged by son of Habibullah, Amanullah Khan who happened to be the successor of the father. Khalili’s mother was the daughter of Abdul Qadir Khan who is a regional tribal leader of Safi. She died when Khalili was 7 years of age.

Khalili lived and went to school in Kabul until he turned 11, when the king of Afghanistan, Shah Habibullah Khan was assassinated, ostensibly at the order of his reformist son Amanullah Khan that quickly arrested and killed the father of Khalili among the others that are linked with the previous regime of his father. Orphaned and not needed in Kabul, Khalili spent the turbulent years of the reign of Amanullah in Shamali Plain north of the city, Kabul, it was there that he studied classical literature and some other traditional science with the leading students and started writing poems. In the year 1929, when Habibullah Kalakani who is a local Tajik from Kalakan, deposed Amanullah Khan, Khalili joined his uncle Abdul Khan Safi who is the new governor of Herat and he stayed there for over ten years.

In the early part of 1940s, Khalili followed his uncle, who had was appointed to be the deputy prime minister, to Kabul. His stay in Kabul was minimized in the year 1945, when some elders of the Safi Clan rebelled and he was imprisoned together with his uncle. After spending a year in prison, Khalili was released and sent on an exile to Kandahar and there he progressed as a poet and a writer.

In the 1950s, Khalili was permitted to make a return to Kabul and there he was chosen to become the minister of culture and information and he started teaching in the University of Kabul. He was made the confidant to the King Zahir Shah whom he always followed to hunting mission.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, Khalili was good in the Arabic language; he worked as an ambassador of Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He became a member of the 1964 Constitutional Assembly and also he became a representative from Jabal-al-Siraj.

With the Communist coup that took place in the country in April 1978, Khalili took Refuge first in Germany and then in the United States and there he wrote most of his major poetry about the war in his country. In the later part of the 1980s, he relocated to Islamabad in Pakistan, and there he spent his remaining years. He was buried in Peshawar next to the tomb of the renowned Pashto poet called Rahman Baba.

Works

Khalili was a good writer, who was manufacturing over the course of his profession an eclectic repertoire that ranged from fiction to history to poetry and to biography. He published over 35 volumes of poetry and this included his celebrated works like the ‘Askha wa Hunha’, which was composed during the Soviet occupation. His poems are not known by the English speaking student.