Fayzabad is a city in northeastern Afghanistan and the administrative center of Badakhshan Province. It lies at an elevation of about 1,200 metres, at the head of a small intramontane basin in the middle valley of the Kokcha River, on a narrow alluvial terrace on the river's right (north) bank. It should not be confused with other places of the same name, such as Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, India.
The original settlement stood about 5 km west at Khamchan (Kuri), where remains from the Sasanian to Timurid eras are found. In 1680 Mir Yari Beg, a Naqshbandi leader ruling southern Badakhshan under nominal Bukharan suzerainty, moved his capital to a new town 5 km upstream, first called Jawzan or Jawzgun ("walnut place"). It was renamed Fayzabad ("blessed abode") after a shrine was built there in 1697–98 to house the supposed cloak of the Prophet, which Mir Yari Beg had intercepted en route from Samarkand to India; the cloak was moved to Kandahar after Ahmad Shah's conquest of Badakhshan in 1768. The town was taken and destroyed by the Uzbek leader Morad Beg in 1829, its inhabitants deported to Qataghan, and it was rebuilt only in the 1860s.
Historically Fayzabad was a nodal point where caravan routes crossing the central Hindu Kush toward China and India converged with routes from Darwaz and Qataghan. Its economy has rested on administrative functions and trade, serving customers from across Badakhshan, alongside local salt, cumin, walnuts, apricots, and metal, leather and textile handicrafts. Population growth was long slow—about 4,000 in 1886 and barely over 9,000 in 1979—reflecting a weak economy and the city's inaccessibility, with the nearest paved road 260 km west in the late 1970s. It has eight congregational mosques and several ziarat, described as numerous but of little architectural distinction.