Pro. Mohammad Hasan Kakar

A Life Devoted to History

Prof. Kakar was born in 1927 in Dewa village of Laghman Province, eastern Afghanistan, and held a B.A. from Kabul University and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in history from the University of London. He was a visiting Fulbright fellow at Princeton University (1971–73) and Harvard University (1973–76), where he continued research and turned his doctoral dissertation into a book. For many years he taught history at Kabul University, where in 1981 he became a professor. He also served as chair of the history department there. In 1982 the communist regime arrested him for his opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International declared Prof. Kakar a “prisoner of conscience.” Along with other human rights groups, Amnesty International, the International PEN, and scholars and human rights activists in Europe and the United States (among them the late Professor Joseph Fletcher of Harvard University, Dr. Crystal A. Leslie of the Medical Center of Boston University, and, in particular, Professor Felix Erma Cora, the special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Commission on Afghanistan) pressured the Kabul regime by continually writing to it about him.

After his release from prison, Professor Kakar with his family took refuge in Peshawar, Pakistan. There, as a member of the Writers’ Union of Free Afghanistan, he served as an analyst of Afghan political developments. Before immigrating to the United States in 1989, he was elected the first president of the Association of the Professors of the Universities of Afghanistan (in exile). In the United States he served first as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii and then taught at the University of California, San Diego. Meanwhile, as chair and a founding member of the Movement for a Representative Government in Afghanistan, he kept abreast of current Afghan affairs and wrote about them for Afghan journals.

In the US, his work focused on raising awareness of the situation in Afghanistan. He wrote and published several works including The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982, published by the University of California Press in 1995, and A Political and Diplomatic History of Afghanistan, 1863–1901, published in 2006 by Brill Publications. Prof. Kakar also was briefly a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught Afghanistan history.

Prof. Kakar authored more than ten books on diverse historical, political, and social subjects in Dari, Pashto, and English, and translated a number of books from English into Pashto and Dari. He spent the last years of his life contributing to the education of young Afghans by making the thoughts and ideas of Western philosophers available to them in Pashto. These works set the standard for translation of scholarly classics into Pashto. He also published several articles in academic and public journals, including the Modern World Encyclopedia, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Asia Society, and the Wall Street Journal.

Prof. Kakar passed away at the age of 87 in San Francisco, California, and his body was laid to rest near his birthplace in Surkhakan, Laghman Province, Afghanistan. He is survived by his wife, Maryam, their two sons Kawun and Sabawun, and their daughters Palwasha, Wagma, and Khwaga, and several grandchildren.