Khalilollah Khalili
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Khalilullah Khalili (1908-1987) was Afghanistan's foremost 20th Century poet as well as a noted historian, university professor, diplomat and royal confidant. He was the last of the great classical Persian poets and among the first to introduce modern Persian poetry and Nimai style to Afghanistan. He had also expertise in Khorasani style and was a follower of Farrokhi Sistani. Almost alone among Afghan poets, he enjoyed a following in Iran where his selected poems have been published. His works have been praised by renowned Iranian literary figures and intellectuals. Many see him as the greatest contemporary poet of the Persian language in Afghanistan. He is also known for his major work "Hero of Khorasan", a controversial biography of Habibullah Kalakani.
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[edit] Biography
Although he wrote exclusively in Persian and was sometimes associated with Tajik nationalist causes, Khalili was born into a prominent Persian-speaking Safi Pashtun family. His father, Mirza Mohammed Hussein Khan, was Amir Habibullah Khan's finance minister (mustufi ul-mamalik) and owned mansions in Kabul and Jalalabad. His mother was the daughter of Abdul Qadir Khan, a Safi khan of the Kohistan region. She died when Khalili was seven.
Khalili lived and attended school in Kabul until he was 11 when Habibullah was assassinated, purportedly at the behest of his reformist son Amanullah Khan, who quickly arrested and executed Khalili's father among others associate with the previous regime. Orphaned and unwanted in Kabul, he spent the turbulent years of Amanullah's reign in the Shomali Plain north of Kabul where he studied classical literature and other traditional sciences with leading scholars and began writing poetry. In 1929, when Habibullah Kalakani deposed Amanullah Khan, Khalili joined his uncle, the new governor of Herat, where he remained for more than 10 years.
In the early 1940s, he followed his uncle, who had been appointed a deputy prime minister, to Kabul. His stay in Kabul was cut short when, in 1945, the Safi tribesmen rebelled and both uncle and nephew were imprisoned. After a year in prison, Khalili was released and exiled to Kandahar where he flourished as a poet and writer.
In the 1950s, Khalili was allowed to return to Kabul where he was appointed as minister of culture and information and began teaching at Kabul University. He became a confident to King Zahir Shah whom he often joined on hunting expeditions.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Khalili, who was fluent in Arabic, served as Afghanistan's ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He was a member of the 1964 Constitutional Assembly and a representative from Jabal al-Siraj.
Following the April 1978 Communist coup, Khalili sought asylum first in Germany and then in the United States where he wrote much of his most powerful poetry about the war in his native land. In the late 1980s, he moved to Islamabad, Pakistan, where he spent his final years. He was buried in Peshawar next to the tomb of the Pashtu poet Rahman Baba.
[edit] Works
Khalili was a prolific writer, producing over the course of his career an eclectic repertoir ranging from poetry to fiction to history to biography. He published 35 volumes of poetry, including his celebrated Ashk-haa wa khoon-haa composed during the Soviet occupation. With the exception of a selection of his quatrains and the recent An Assembly of Moths, his poetry remains largely unknown to English-speaking readers.
[edit] Sources
[edit] External Links
- http://www.geocities.com/athens/7261/Khalili/khalili-info.html
- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4464341
- http://hometown.aol.com/mbeve10258/Eulogy.html
- http://www.spyoftheheart.com/c2.php
