He became a key figure in the history of Afghanistan, following the lead of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey by working for modernization and secularization, and strongly opposing religious extremism and obscurantism.

An ethnic Pashtun, his father was Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi, leader of the Mohammadzai royal house of Kandahar and a poet.

[3] In 1881, shortly after Emir Abdur Rahman Khan came to power, Mahmud's father and the rest of the Tarzi family were expelled from Afghanistan.

Tarzi stayed in Turkey until the age of 35, where he became fluent in a number of languages, including his native tongue Pashto as well as Dari, Turkish, French, Arabic, and Urdu.

[4] One of Tarzi's earliest works was the Account of a Journey (Sayahat-Namah-e Manzum), which was published in Lahore, British India (now Pakistan).

[5] It played an important role in the development of an Afghan modernist movement, serving as a forum for a small, enlightened group of young Afghans, who provided the ethical justification and basic tenets of Afghan nationalism and modernism under of the very first political party, Party of the Afghan Youth, ideologically secularist, monarchist and state nationalist with a right-of centre political direction, in opposition to the later Constitutional Party, a second political party whose ideologically liberal democratic, reformist, progressive with a constitutional monarchist and left-wing nationalist direction maintaining a strong anticlerical secularist state and within centrist politics.

He translated into Persian many major works of European authors, such as Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, The Mysterious Island, International Law (from Turkish), and the History of the Russo-Japanese War.

In Damascus, Tarzi wrote The Garden of Learning, containing choice articles about literary, artistic, travel and scientific matters.

Another book entitled The Garden of Knowledge (later published in Kabul), concludes with an article "My beloved country, Afghanistan", in which he tells his Afghan countrymen how much he longs for his native land and recalls with nostalgia the virtues of its climate, mountains and deserts.

He was a reform-minded individual amongst his extended family members whom ruled Afghanistan at the beginning of the 20th century and not unlike his father Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Khan Tarzi.

Sir Henry Dobbs led the British delegation to Kabul in January, 1921 – Mahmud Tarzi headed the Afghan group.