Laaltain

Living under Threat

27 نومبر، 2014

The small eth­no-reli­gious Kalasha minor­i­ty is often used as a glar­ing exam­ple of the notice­able diver­si­ty found in Pak­istani soci­ety. It is the only pagan tribe in the coun­try, prac­tic­ing its unique kind of poly­the­ism. How­ev­er, the said com­mu­ni­ty now faces the grow­ing threat of Islamiza­tion.

Their land, com­posed of 3 adja­cent val­leys – Birir, Rum­bur and Bam­boret – which are col­lec­tive­ly also called “Kafiris­tan”, is sit­u­at­ed in the north­ern­most dis­trict of Chi­tral in the north­west­ern Khy­ber Pukhtoonkhwa province of Pak­istan. Kafiris­tan bor­ders Afghanistan from where the Kalash face an immi­nent threat of forced con­ver­sions.

Ever since the time of an ear­li­est Mus­lim invad­er Mah­mud of Ghazni, suc­ces­sive Mus­lim rulers have wished to con­vert the Kalash to Islam. Amir Abdur Rah­man of Afghanistan actu­al­ly con­vert­ed them by the sword while they lived in the north­ern region of Afghanistan. He also renamed their land from Kafiris­tan to Nuris­tan, mean­ing the land of light. Today, they once again find them­selves fac­ing the for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge of resur­gent Islamiza­tion in Pak­istan, includ­ing in their own val­leys. It is a threat to sur­vival of their cul­tur­al, reli­gious and social life.

They face increas­ing social and psy­cho­log­i­cal pres­sures to con­vert to Islam in an intol­er­ant soci­ety which looks down upon those that do not con­form to main­stream beliefs.

Since the 11th cen­tu­ry AD to this day, there has been much fas­ci­na­tion of this race, per­haps more than with any oth­er in Cen­tral and South Asia. For­eign schol­ars have vis­it­ed them, lived among them and writ­ten about them. A num­ber of British colo­nial rulers have been under the roman­tic spell of Kalash Val­ley. Oth­ers have even report­ed­ly con­sid­er­ing the Kalash com­mu­ni­ty to be their Euro­pean brethren (believed to be descen­dants of Alexan­der the Great’s troops), and have been wor­ried about the threat of their extinc­tion at the hands of Mus­lims.

The Kalash are under a per­sis­tent influ­ence of Islamiza­tion. Their val­leys now have 4000 Mus­lim inhab­i­tants along with ten mosques. They face increas­ing social and psy­cho­log­i­cal pres­sures to con­vert to Islam in an intol­er­ant soci­ety which looks down upon those that do not con­form to main­stream beliefs.

As a result, many have found them­selves con­vert­ing with or with­out their free will, to have bet­ter prospects in per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life, as well as to escape the stig­ma of being Kafir (infi­del) in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Mus­lim soci­ety.
There was a time when they ruled over vast areas of land in their region, and were socio-polit­i­cal­ly influ­en­tial. Now they are a lone­ly, tiny, pow­er­less minor­i­ty group num­ber­ing in thou­sands whose cul­ture is at the verge of extinc­tion, and who live in an area which is hard to access, fur­ther strength­en­ing their iso­la­tion from the rest of Pak­istan.

The Kalashs’ pecu­liar reli­gion, cus­toms and social life devi­ate dras­ti­cal­ly from what is preva­lent else­where in Pak­istan. Their aggres­sive Mus­lim neigh­bors find their prac­tices so anath­e­mat­ic that the Kalash have tend­ed to leave some of them with the pas­sage of time. Exam­ples are their wine fes­ti­vals, and the bodalak insti­tu­tion which is com­plete­ly dead as it involved promis­cu­ity. Even their names, dress­es, speech and cus­toms are also going through change in order to con­form to those of the Mus­lims. This sit­u­a­tion has forced them to feel self-con­temp­tu­ous in spite of their great racial pride.

Con­tin­u­ous­ly, pros­e­ly­tiz­ing efforts have been going on in the Kalash val­leys. But, every action has a reac­tion. There­fore, in the face of these endeav­ors by local Mus­lims, cou­pled with recent media atten­tion and sym­pa­thy from for­eign­ers, Kalash elders have mobi­lized their peo­ple to resist con­ver­sion to Islam and revive pride in their own cul­ture. Such counter-efforts have seen some suc­cess.

The Kalash suf­fer from a poor qual­i­ty of life. Basic neces­si­ties such as hygiene, edu­ca­tion, bal­anced diet, med­ical facil­i­ties and elec­tric­i­ty are almost or com­plete­ly miss­ing from their val­leys. Hard­ly any gov­ern­ment pays atten­tion towards doing some­thing for these unfor­tu­nate cit­i­zens of Pak­istan. Only the Zul­fiqar Bhutto’s gov­ern­ment built a jeep­able road into Kafiris­tan to improve their acces­si­bil­i­ty to the rest of the coun­try; and after­wards, the Zia-ul-Haq regime set up a Kalash Foun­da­tion to assist them. But these mea­sures are too insuf­fi­cient to ful­fill the needs of the com­mu­ni­ty.

Emi­nent Pak­istani anthro­pol­o­gist and for­mer civ­il ser­vant Akbar S. Ahmed pro­pos­es an ami­ca­ble solu­tion to the prob­lems faced by the Kalash. In his book titled ‘Pak­istan Soci­ety: Islam, Eth­nic­i­ty and Lead­er­ship in South Asia’, he argues that for a thou­sand years, they have been encoun­ter­ing the so-called aggres­sive face of Islam in the form of fire­brand mul­lahs hurl­ing threats, or con­querors using brute force of the sword to con­vert them. But as a mat­ter of fact, this fero­cious aggres­sion is not the real face of Islam. Its real face is that which the gen­tle Sufi sages showed us. They applied the two great­est names of Allah in their lives: the Benef­i­cent, and the Mer­ci­ful. This, accord­ing to Ahmed, is exact­ly what the Mus­lims of today need to do: fol­low the path of the Sufi mas­ters and believe in ‘peace with all’, includ­ing the Kalash!

The gov­ern­ment too, needs to do its utmost to pro­tect this lone­ly group which, along with Ismaili Mus­lims, recent­ly received a threat from Tal­iban to con­vert or face death. Instead of just pub­li­ciz­ing pic­tures of the Kalash cel­e­bra­tions for pro­mot­ing nation­al tourism, while prac­ti­cal­ly allow­ing Islamist groups to intrude their val­leys and smash their idols, the gov­ern­ment should con­sid­er the com­mu­ni­ty part and par­cel of the nation and address its needs, so as to pro­mote real sense of nation­hood.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *