Early Years
Mahmud Tarzi was born in 1865 in the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan. An ethnic Pashtun, his father was Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi, a leader of the Mohammadzai royal house and a well-known poet. In 1881, Emir Abdur Rahman Khan exiled Mahmud Tarzi's father and family – who would end up living in Turkey. On a second trip to Damascus in 1891, Tarzi married the daughter of Sheikh Saleh Al-Mossadiah, a muezzin of the Umayyad mosque. Tarzi would stay in Turkey until the age of 35, where he learned fluent Pashto, Persian, Turkish, French, Arabic, and Urdu.
When Abdur Rahman Khan died in 1901, his son Emir Habibullah Khan invited the Tarzi family back to Afghanistan the following year. Habibullah‘s most important contribution to Afghanistan was the return of Afghan exiles, and specifically that of Mahmud Beg Tarzi around the turn of the century. If there is a single person responsible for the modernization of Afghanistan in the first two decades of the twentieth century it was Mahmud Beg Tarzi. During this time, Mahmud Tarzi's daughter, Soraya Tarzi would marry and become Queen of Afghanistan. It was than that Mahmud Tarzi would take up a critical role in the history of Afghanistan – from famed poet to progressive leader.
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