Dost Mohammad Khan

Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai (23 December 1792 – 9 June 1863) was the founder of the Barakzai dynasty and Emir of Afghanistan from 1826 to 1839 and again from 1843 until his death. The English article gives his birth year as 1792; the Arabic article and the older English tradition give 1793, and the variant is recorded in the data file. ^{1 2}

By the end of his reign he had united the separate principalities of Kabul, Kandahar and Herat into a single Afghan state, a feat the article compares to the work of Ahmad Shah Durrani. ¹

He was the eleventh son of Payandah Khan, chief of the Barakzai Pashtuns, who was killed by the Durrani king Zaman Shah. After the fall of the Durrani dynasty he established himself at Kabul in 1826, first as Sardar of Kabul; in 1834, having defeated the exiled Durrani king Shah Shujah's attempt to return, he took the title of Emir, with the style Amir al-Mu'minin, Commander of the Faithful. In March 1823 the Afghans had already lost the Peshawar valley to Ranjit Singh's Sikh army at Nowshera. ¹

His search for a balance between British India, Persia and Russia ended in the First Anglo-Afghan War: the British deposed him in 1839 and restored Shah Shujah, and in 1840 he surrendered and was exiled to India, at Mussoorie and then Calcutta. ^{1 2}

The Afghan rising of 1841–42, led in Kabul by his son Wazir Akbar Khan, destroyed the British position, and Dost Mohammad was released and restored to the throne in April 1843. He reached a working agreement with the British in 1855, retook Kandahar, and in May 1863 captured Herat, the last of the great principalities. ^{1 3}

He died at Herat on 9 June 1863, days after taking the city, and was buried there at the Shrine of Khwaja Abd Allah, known as Gazur Gah. His son Sher Ali Khan succeeded him. ¹

No article text names a school for him. The English article's infobox gives his religion as Sunni Islam and the Arabic article's infobox gives Ahl al-Sunna wa'l-Jama'a; both are structured values of a single attestation family, and the Urdu article names no religion. Under the museum's two-source rule the record therefore stays unknown, with the structured attestations preserved in the data file. ^{1 2 3}

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