Kateb spent his youth in Qarabagh District, tutored in Arabic and the Quran by local mullahs, in 1880 he and his family moved first to Nawur and then, because of sectarian strife, to Qandahar in the same year.

[4] During the reign of Aman Ullah Khan (1919–29), the Iranian minister in Kabul Sayyed Mahdi Farrokh compiled a “who’s who” of contemporary Afghan leaders.

His sketch of Kateb characterizes him as a devout Shia Muslim, highly regarded by the Qizilbash community of Kabul, as well as a leader among his people, the Hazaras, and an important source of information for the Persian mission about what was going on in the capital.

During this uprising Kateb, who spent almost the entire period inside the city, kept a journal which was the basis for an unfinished monograph entitled Kitab-e Tadakoor-e Enqilab which he began shortly after the fall of Habib Ullah Kalakani.

However, he and the mission's leader, Noor al-Din Agha, a Qizilbash Shiʿite from Kabul, paid a heavy price for this: both were sentenced to death by beating.

The first was a history of Afghanistan entitled Tohfat ul-Habib (Ḥabib's Gift) in honor of the amir, but Habib Ullah Khan deemed the finished work unacceptable and ordered Kateb to start over.

A farman issued by the latter announced that Kateb had been ordered to complete the Siraj and then begin work on a chronicle of the reign of Aman Ullah Khan to be entitled Tarikh-e Asr-e Amaniya.

[1] In the late 20th century, an American scholar Robert D. McChesney extensively researched Kateb's life and written works, in particular the Siraj al Tawarikh.