Between Afghan "Idolography" and Kafir "Autoethnography": A Muslim Convert Describes His Former Religion.

• Author: Arbabzadah, Nushin

INTRODUCTION

The so-called Kafir, or infidel, peoples of the Hindu Kush mountains have been aptly described as among "the last 'pagans' of the Indo-European world." (1) Despite the progressive Islamization of the adjoining areas, in highland isolation their "enclaved culture" survived into the modern era in what is now Afghan Nuristan and Pakistani Chitral. (2) The crucial turning point in their history came with the signing of the Durand Line Agreement of 1893, followed by the collaborative Afghan-British cartographic survey from 1894 to 1896 that delineated the border between British India and Afghanistan. Consequently, after the valleys occupied by three of the four main Kafir culture groups were apportioned to the Afghan side of the new border, in the winter of 1895-96 Afghan Kafiristan was conquered, and its occupants forcibly converted to Islam, by the armies and state mullahs of Amir 'Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880-1901). As nonliterate societies, the Kafirs had produced no written documentation of their culture to survive its eradication, meaning that its sole written records comprise what Alberto Cacopardo has called "periethnopsis," or "the view from the surroundings," by way of Kafiristan's neighboring literate societies. (3)

On the imperial British (and subsequently Pakistani) side of the border in Chitral, which fell under British suzerainty in 1885, the Kalasha Kafirs survived to become the focus of considerable ethnographic attention in the twentieth century. By contrast, the cultures of Afghan Kafiristan were only directly observed and described in detail by a single witness: the British medical officer George Scott Robertson, who in 1890-91 spent around a year among the Kom Kafirs in the village of Kamdesh at the southern end of the Bashgal valley (known locally as Landay Sin), from where he made brief forays among the Kafirs of the Parun valley. (4) The decades preceding Robertson's residence saw a few other, albeit far shorter descriptions produced by British and Indian surveyors operating under the aegis of imperial frontier policy. But rather than ethnographic, their concerns were primarily geographic and cartographic, or evangelical in the case of the Pashtun Christian converts sent by the Church Missionary Society. (5) Accounts by literate members of neighboring Muslim communities have proven far more elusive. Aside from brief generalized mentions in well-known works such as the Baburncima, the most detailed accounts consist of Persian campaign narratives detailing the Mughal and more successful subsequent Afghan attempts to conquer the highland valleys they called Kafiristan. (6)

There is also another small category of texts that lies between the outsider and insider account, by way of mediated accounts of Kafirs themselves that were translated into Persian by envoys from adjacent regions sent by European investigators. The two main examples are sections of the Persian Sayr al-bilad (Journey through the lands), a work of frontier geography written around 1790 by the Indian Mughul Beg at the behest of the Calcuttabased orientalist Francis Wilford (1761-1822); (7) and the responses of Tak and Shamlar, two Kafirs from Kamdesh, to a questionnaire on their beliefs and lifeways prepared in 1838 by the renegade French general Auguste Court (1793-1880) and translated into Persian by his Muslim assistants. (8)

As for direct accounts by Kafirs themselves that break through the "periethnopsic" view from the surroundings, scholarship to date has only identified one: the Urdu autobiography of Shaykh Muhammad "Abdullah Khan Azar (ca. 1889-ca. 1948), a Kata-vari-speaking Kafir who fled the Afghan conquest of the Bashgal valley as a young child. (9) Taking refuge in Chitral on the other side of the Durand Line, Azar later joined the British Indian Army. which exposed him to both Islam and Urdu, the language in which he penned his memoirs around 1908. Therein he retrospectively recorded what he could remember of the cultural environment of his childhood and what he had observed on subsequent visits to his home region during periods of military leave.

Amid this scarcity of "insider" documentation, any firsthand account by a Kafir assumes-at least potentially--magnified importance, particularly if it originates from the Afghan side of the Durand Line and dates from before the conquest and conversion of Afghan Kafiristan. This article presents one such previously unknown source by way of a purported description of several Kafir sacred sites by Wan, a recent Kafir convert to Islam, which appeared in February 1874 in one of the earliest issues of the pioneering Afghan newspaper. Shams al-nahar (Morning Sun). This was two decades before the conquest and conversion of Afghan Kafiristan and thirty-four years before Azar wrote his account in the distant Punjabi city of Jalandhar. Since specialists on Kafir cultures are trained in the Nuristani and Kalasha languages rather than the Persian in which Wan's words were recorded (and presumably translated) in Shams al-nahar, the text is translated below in its entirety, followed by a commentarial analysis that attempts to read through its linguistic and generic layering toward a more solid base stratum of autoethnographic data.

Short as it is, Wan's account has two levels of scholarly interest. First, it forms what is currently the earliest Kafir autoethnography to have been placed before the scholarly public. Here we are using the term "autoethnography" in its broad sense of an emic account of a culture, albeit in this case by an informant who had recently rejected it in favor of the religion of the community he was addressing. This latter point leads to the text's second level of interest. For insofar as the Persian rendering of Wan's verbal description of Kafir qua "infidel" temples appeared in Afghanistan's sole and state newspaper, it lends rare insight into how Afghan officialdom pictured the religious culture they would subsequently eliminate twenty years later. This is of no small significance, because as we will see, on the Persian linguistic surface Wan's account describes a powerful cult of "idol worship" (but-parasti) flourishing within the boundaries of an emirate in which Sunni Islam was increasingly enforced as a state religion. (10)

In this respect the text can also be considered a work of Afghan "idolography." We use this term to capture the generic form of writing about idols (Persian but, Arabic sanam, watan) that reaches back to Kitab al-Asnam (The book of idols) of Ibn al-Kalbl (d. 204/819 or 206/821) and ultimately to the Quran. (11) Insofar as idolography focused on the visible and material appearance of idols rather than the invisible and intellectual content of beliefs, it was distinct from the more widely recognized genre of Islamic heresiography. This distinction from the latter genre of false belief afforded a degree of multivalence around the representation of such material images, particularly in Persian poetry where the idol and idol temple (but-khana) were sometimes treated more positively. (12) Yet whether representations of idols were negative or positive, they remained generic and nonspecific, as we will see with the Persian account of the idols worshipped in Kafiristan.

The intersection of these two modes of expression--autoethnographic and idolographic--had a direct impact on the text that was published in Shams al-nahar. For as we will argue below, the consequence was to conceal a foundational stratum of autoethnography--the voice of Wan--beneath at least two layers of idolographic representation via the voice of his translator and the pen of the correspondent who wrote down the published report. For this reason it must be stated from the outset that the text is problematic in multiple ways. What Max Klimburg has written of Azar's Urdu memoirs is even more pertinent to Wan's Persian testimony: it "is one of those rare, generally somewhat distorted documents authored by natives of illiterate societies in a written (and thus foreign) language." (13) Consequently, Wan's statement is couched in at least two layers of idiom by way of his own, as not merely a Kafir informant but a recent convert to Islam, then by way of the translator and journalist who mediated his testimony for an official newspaper aimed at a Muslim readership.

On a first reading, the text may appear utterly implausible, whether through willful exaggeration, loss in translation, anti-infidel defamation, or the tropes of the "weird and wonderful" Cajib u gharlb) that long typified Perso-Islamic literary exotica. Even Azar's more empirically reliable Urdu autobiography was framed in this way and presented as a record of "weird and wonderful conditions and events" ('ajlb u gharlb halat u waqi'at) by the literate scribe who wrote it down. (14) But as we will see in the commentarial section, through a closereading in relation to the ethnographic, material, and documentary evidence of Kafir religiosity, Wan's report contains many elements that can be comparatively corroborated. While some elements (particularly with regard to sizes) remain implausible and impervious to even the most sympathetic reading, attention to some of the linguistic issues of transmission and intended audience will help us bracket these problematic elements to recover what was after all an emotionally experiential rather than soberly empirical account of Kafir sacred sites by someone who had recently rejected his former religion.

THE TEXT AND ITS CONTEXT

Wan's testimony appeared under the title Khabar-i Badakhshan (News from Badakhshan) as a report in the recently established Shams al-nahar newspaper on Thursday, February 3, 1874 (panjshamba 15 shahr-i Dhl al-hijjat al-haram 1290). As Afghanistan's first newspaper, Shams al-nahar was published for four short years between 1873 and 1877 during the second reign of Amir Shir 'AlI Khan (r. 1868-1879). The Amir had founded the newspaper...