24G An account of Upper and Lower Suwat. [No. 3, 
Such is the true history, and such the faithful portrait of the 
terrible, fanatic, plotting Akhund of Suwat, the bugbear of Pesha¬ 
war. 
That he made the mutineers of the late 55th Kegt. Bengal N. E. 
Musalmans is totally untrue. They fled into Suwat, and remained, 
as travellers generally do, for a few days, as his guests ; but, at the 
end of this time, he advised them to make the best of their way out 
of Suwat, although Akbar, who is known as the Saiyid Badshah, 
wished them to remain. In this case the Akhund indeed persisted 
that they should not be permitted to remain in Suwat; so the rebels 
set out towards Kashmir, on the road to which they were cut of!" by 
the Deputy Commissioner of Hazarah. Other mutineers also came 
from Murree, all of whom he dismissed as quickly as possible to 
Kabul. 
It is necessary to explain who this so called Badshah was. He 
was not an Afghan, but a Saiyid, named Muhammad Akbar Shah, 
a native of Satanah (burnt last year by General Sidney Cotton) 
near Pakhli, above Attak. Some years since the Akhund Sahib, as 
the spiritual chief, was requested to appoint a Badshah, that is to 
say a Saiyid, not a king , for the word means also a great lord or 
noble, or head man, but as a sort of high-priest, or rather legate, to 
whom the zakat and aceashar , certain alms, and a tithe sanctioned 
by the Kuran, might be legally paid ; and who must be a Saiyid. 
He died about a year since, # on which his son, Mubarak Shah, wished 
to be installed in his father’s place; but as the Suwatis were not 
willing to pay tithes, the Akhund declined to do so. All Saiyids 
are called Shah or Mf an ; and Shah and Badshah signify a king 
also, but here it merely meant a high-priest. At Peshawar, one 
hears of Gul, Badshah, and there is a gate of the city called after 
him ; but it does not follow that he was a king, for no such king 
ever did exist, any more than Saiyid Akbar Shah was a king in 
Suwat. It was the word Shah, no doubt, which has been magnified 
into Badshah, as if the words could not possibly mean anything else 
than a king !f 
* August, 1857. 
f On referring to Captain Conolly’s “Notes on the Eusofzye Tribes,” already 
referred to, 1 find, that the king of Suwat, set up specially by the Akhund, 
for the Delhi tragedy, existed twenty years before. I copy Captain Conolly’s 
own words—“ The tribes of JBooneer and the neighbouring hills, may be said to 
