Translation and Transformation: The “Autobiography” of ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan, Amir of Afghanistan

The acclaimed “autobiography” of the late nineteenth-century ruler of Afghanistan, Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. July 1880–October 1901), The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, G.C.B., G.C.S.I., has had a remarkably long and influential, if unexamined, history. Published in 1900 in two volumes, it was to include in its first volume a translation of Pandnāmah-i dunyā wa dīn, a genuine composition of the amir published in Kabul circa 1304 a.h. (1886–1887 c.e.). The Pandnāmah or Book of Advice, an unfinished 140-page work, recounts his life from the age of nine to the age of thirty-seven, just before he came to the throne in the summer of 1880. The English version found a receptive audience and was itself translated very quickly into Russian and back into Persian in 1901 and 1903. The fundamental question this paper raises: is the first volume of The Life of Abdur Rahman a translation of “every word of the Amir’s own narrative of his early years” as Sultan Muhammad (Mahomed), its editor, claimed?