Kashmir shawl, attributed to Muhammad Azim Khan Barakzai, the Pashtun governor of Kashmir between 1813 and 1819

 

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Persian text stitched onto the shawl, which reads:

 یا حسین
فرمایش نواب اشرف والا
محمد عظیم خان

‘O Hussain; ordered by the most noble governor Nawab Mohammed Azim Khan’

 

Mohammed Azim Khan Barakzai was one of the last Pashtun governors of Kashmir, between c. 1813 and 1819. He was a younger brother of Fath Ali Khan Barakzai, the king’s wazir, who had obviously appointed his younger brother to the governorship in Kashmir. However, Fath Ali Khan was tortured to death (blinded, flayed and dismembered) in 1818 on the orders of the king, Shah Mahmud Sadozai. Upon hearing the news of his elder brother’s death, Mohammed Azim Khan left his position in Kashmir and managed, together with his many other Barakzai brothers, to oust Shah Mahmud and his Sadozai clan and take charge of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

A few years later, in 1823, Azim Khan intended to battle Sikhs at Nowshera east of Peshawar but he abandoned his local Pashtuns allies and retreated to Kabul, and soon afterwards he died of dysentery in the Lataband Pass, just east of Kabul. His son, Habibullah Khan, succeeded him in Kabul, but he was soon pushed aside by his uncles. One of these, Dost Mohammed Khan, would by c.1825 take charge in Kabul and gradually extend his control, until, by his death in 1863, he would rule almost all of what today we recognize as the republic of Afghanistan. Source

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