Mahmud Tarzi

Mahmud Tarzi (23 August 1865 – 22 November 1933) was an Afghan politician and intellectual, known as the father of Afghan journalism. He became a key figure in Afghanistan's history, working for modernisation and strongly opposing religious extremism and obscurantism, and he was the father of Queen Soraya and the father-in-law and foreign minister of King Amanullah Khan. ¹

Tarzi was born on 23 August 1865 at Ghazni, an ethnic Pashtun; his father was Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi, leader of the Mohammadzai royal house of Kandahar and a poet, and his mother Sultanat Begum belonged to the Popalzai tribe. ¹

In 1881, shortly after Emir Abdur Rahman Khan came to power, the Tarzi family was expelled from Afghanistan; they lived at Karachi from January 1882 to March 1885 and then moved to the Ottoman Empire. ¹

Tarzi made a pilgrimage to Mecca, visited Paris and toured the eastern Mediterranean, and in Constantinople he encountered Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, whose conviction that a progressive interpretation of the tenets of Islam would encourage the modernisation Muslim countries required persuaded him. In Damascus in 1891 he married the daughter of Saleh al-Mossadiah, a muezzin of the Umayyad Mosque, his second wife; he stayed in Turkey until the age of thirty-five and became fluent in Pashto, Dari, Turkish, French, Arabic and Urdu. ¹

A year after Abdur Rahman Khan's death in 1901, Habibullah Khan invited the Tarzi family back to Afghanistan, and Mahmud Tarzi was appointed chief of the Bureau of the Royal Court, tasked with keeping the Emir informed of events in the Muslim world and Europe. ¹

He urged the Muslims of Afghanistan to learn science and technology, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and geography, stressing that Islam emphasised both religious and secular education, attacked the notion of the inferiority of women and promoted women's education, and guided the Young Afghans constitutionalist movement. ¹

After Amanullah's accession he became foreign minister, serving from February 1919 to June 1922 and again from September 1924 to January 1927, with an ambassadorship in Paris between the two terms; he established Afghan embassies in London, Paris and other capitals, and headed the Afghan delegation at the peace conferences of Mussoorie in 1920 and Kabul in 1921 that normalised relations with Britain on the basis of Afghanistan's independence. ¹

Tarzi's most influential work, and the foundation of journalism in Afghanistan, was his newspaper Seraj al-Akhbar, published bi-weekly from October 1911 to January 1919, which served as the forum of the Afghan modernist movement and of the basic tenets of Afghan nationalism; he also published Seraj al-Atfal, the first Afghan publication for children. ¹

He was the first to introduce the novel in Afghanistan and translated many English and French works into Persian, among them Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and The Mysterious Island, and wrote works including the Account of a Journey and Travel Across Three Continents in Twenty-Nine Days (1914). ¹

When the reforms of Amanullah, especially the changes to women's status, provoked revolt and civil war and Amanullah escaped to India in 1929, Tarzi followed him into exile, leaving Afghanistan first for India and then Europe and Turkey. He died on 22 November 1933, at the age of sixty-eight, at Istanbul, of liver cancer, and Istanbul is given as his resting place. ^{1 2}

Tarzi's daughter Soraya married King Amanullah Khan and became Queen of Afghanistan, playing a significant role in his policy towards women. This museum records the family only so far as understanding his work requires. ^{1 3}

No source names a religion or school for him: the article carries no religion value, there is no Arabic article on him, and Wikidata carries no religion value. His pilgrimage to Mecca and the pan-Islamist ideas he absorbed from al-Afghani are practice and ideas, not an attestation of a school, so under the museum's two-source rule the record is unknown, as the data note explains. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.