Khushhal Khan Khatak

(also Khushal Khan Khattak). Born June 18, 1613, in Akora; died 1689 or 1691. Leader of the Afghan Khatak tribe and ruler (from 1641) of the Khatak principality of Akora, a dependency of the Great Moguls. Poet and writer.

Khushhal Khan annexed part of the lands of the Yusufzai tribe to his principality. He compiled a cadastre that formalized and strengthened the feudal ownership of land. Suspected of disloyalty by the Great Moguls, he remained under arrest from 1664 to 1668. From 1672 to 1675, Khushhal Khan, with the leaders of the Afridi tribe, led Afghan tribes in an anti-Mogul uprising; after the rebellion was crushed, he continued to fight against the Moguls.

A major theme in the work of Khushhal Khan, a secular feudal poet, is the Afghan liberation struggle against domination by the Great Moguls. The patriotic character of his poetry has exerted a positive influence on Afghan literature. The heritage of Khushhal Khan has yet to be thoroughly studied. He wrote more than 300 works, which vary in content and genre. Khushhal Khan’s poetic works have been collected in his Kulliyat, which contains more than 40,000 bayts (distichs); they are written in traditional meters to which the poet added his own variations. As a poet, Khushhal Khan excelled in the ghazal genre, but he was also renowned as a master of the short philosophical poem, the amatory lyric, and the lyric landscape poem.

The prose writings of Khushhal Khan are mainly translations from Persian and Arabic. Of particular value is The Book of the Turban (1665), a treatise on the importance of observing the traditional Muslim rituals; the work also discusses, from the point of view of an enlightened feudal lord, various social questions, including problems of ethics and the moral foundations of society and the relation between artistic creation and life.