Mohammad Ayub Khan

Ghazi Mohammad Ayub Khan Barakzai (1857 – 7 April 1914) was a Barakzai prince who was briefly Emir of Afghanistan, from 12 October 1879 to 31 May 1880. He is remembered in Afghanistan as a national hero, the Victor of Maiwand, for his defeat of a British-Indian army at the Battle of Maiwand during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. ¹

He is a different person from Ayub Khan, the later president of Pakistan, and he was the son of the Emir Sher Ali Khan — and therefore the grandson, not the son, of Dost Mohammad Khan, as both articles' accounts of his parentage show. ^{1 2}

He was born at Kabul in 1857, a son of Sher Ali Khan and of Qamar Jan, daughter of the Mohmand chief Sa'adat Khan of Lalpura; his full brother was Mohammad Yaqub Khan, who preceded him on the throne. He served as governor of Herat before his brief emirate. ¹

When his brother Yaqub Khan's concessions to Britain brought on his deposition, Ayub Khan took the throne in October 1879 and led the Afghan forces in the war. On 27 July 1880 his army overwhelmed a British-Indian brigade at Maiwand, one of the worst defeats of a British force in the century; the Afghan folk heroine Malalai is said to have rallied the fighters there, a connection of shared battle presence which this museum records in prose only. On 1 September 1880 General Roberts defeated him at Kandahar, and his emirate was over. ¹

He briefly held Herat and tried again for Kandahar in 1881, was defeated by the new emir Abdur Rahman Khan, and fled to Persia. ^{1 2}

After negotiations in 1888 he became a pensioner of the British Raj and settled at Lahore, where he lived until his death on 7 April 1914. He was buried at Peshawar, in the Durrani graveyard near the shrine of Sheikh Habib; the Arabic article gives Peshawar as his place of death, and the difference is recorded in the data file. He had eleven wives, fifteen sons and ten daughters. ^{1 2}

No article in the museum's languages names a religion for him: neither the English nor the Arabic article carries a religion field, and no text names a school. The only structured attestation seen anywhere is the Russian article's infobox, which gives Islam of the Sunni tendency. A single structured value is one attestation family, so under the museum's two-source rule the record stays unknown, with that attestation preserved in the data file. ^{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.