The Ghilzai: a major Pashtun confederation

One of three great confederations

The Ghilzai, more accurately transliterated from Pashto as Ghalzai, are one of the three major Pashtun tribal confederations in Afghanistan. The other two are the Durrani (formerly the Abdali) in the west and the Karlanri, who live on both sides of the border with Pakistan. [1] The first historical mention of the Ghalzai as a culturally distinct people is in early sixteenth-century chronicles, including the memoirs of Babur. [1]

In the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry published in 2001, M. Jamil Hanifi estimated that the Ghalzai made up about two-fifths of the roughly eight million Pashtuns he counted in Afghanistan. They are concentrated between the Durand Line on the southeast and a line running from Kandahar through Ghazni to Kabul, and eastwards to Jalalabad. [1] These are estimates given in that entry, not census counts.

Doing Pashto: identity among the Ghalzai

In Afghanistan the Ghalzai are known for their strict adherence to Pashtunwali, the Pashtun code of social conduct. Hanifi notes their insistence on the three duties of having Pashto, doing Pashto and speaking Pashto (Pakhtu larel, kawel and wayel): that is, taking Pashtun tribal values to heart, acting on them, and speaking the language well. [1]

Olaf Caroe, the British frontier official whose 1958 book The Pathans is still widely quoted, observed that Pashto's two main dialects divide the Ghalzai: the great majority speak the soft variant, with only a few near Jalalabad using the hard one. [4]

Where do the Ghalzai come from?

Tribal genealogies, written down mostly in the centuries after the events they describe, give the Ghalzai a distinctive ancestry. In the usual account, Ghalzoy, ancestor of the Ghalzai, is the son of Shah Husayn, a prince of the Ghurid line, and Bibi Mato, a descendant of Qais Abdur Rashid, the traditional ancestor of all Pashtuns. In another version the father is Mokarram Shah, a Pashtun prince from Ghor, and the mother is the daughter of a Persian notable. In both versions the child is born before the marriage, and the name is explained as Pashto gal, thief, plus zoy, son. [1]

Caroe read this story as a clue rather than as history. He pointed out that early Afghan tradition did not regard the Ghalzai as Afghans of the "true" line, since the supposed father is a foreigner, and he suggested the tale mirrors an old memory that the Ghalzai include a foreign stock which imposed itself on Afghan families and took on their language and customs. He added that this stock need not have been Turkish. [4]

Some historians have argued for a Turkish origin, linking the Ghalzai to the Khalaj, a Turkic-speaking people recorded near Kandahar and Ghazni in the tenth century, or to the pre-Islamic Hephthalites. Hanifi cites Caroe among the few who consider the Ghalzai descendants of the Hephthalites, but his own judgment is more sceptical: the Ghalzai speak Pashto, an Iranian language, and show cultural and linguistic features unlike those of the Khalaj or other Turkic groups, and he finds no systematic, conclusive evidence connecting them to the Hephthalites, the Khalaj, or the Turkic Khalji and Lodi dynasties of northern India. [1] [4] The question is therefore best described as open.

Branches and ways of life

Most genealogies make Ghalzoy the father of two sons, Burhan (also called Ibrahim) and Turan. The descendants of Turan are the Western Ghalzai, whose main tribes are the Hotak, Tokhi and Kharoti. Burhan is the ancestor of the Eastern Ghalzai, among whom the Sulaiman Khel, Ali Khel and Taraki are prominent. Several segments of the Eastern Ghalzai are pastoral nomads, who move between the central highlands of Afghanistan in summer and the plains of the Indus beyond the border in winter. [1]

Merchants and nomads

A 1911 encyclopaedia entry, written from the viewpoint of British India, describes the Ghilzai as a large and widespread tribe extending from Kalat-i-Ghilzai in the south to the Kabul river in the north and from the Gul Koh range in the west to the Indian border in the east. It records that the main body of the povindah merchants, who carried goods between Afghanistan and India, came from some of their most influential clans, such as the Sulaiman Khel, the Nasir Khel and the Kharoti. [5] The same entry repeats the then popular theory that the Ghilzai descended from a Turkish tribe, the Kilji, brought into Afghanistan by Sabuktagin in the tenth century. That is a theory, not an established fact, and it is the one Hanifi's more recent entry weighs and doubts. [1] [5]

Rivals and rulers

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Safavids and Mughals competed for Kandahar. The Abdali were the Safavids' chief local supporters, while the Ghalzai organised the opposition to Persian rule. When Shah Abbas I moved the Abdali from Kandahar to Herat, the Ghalzai, especially the Hotak, became dominant in the city. [1] Early in the eighteenth century, pressure from the Ghalzai in turn drove the Abdali, or part of them, to take refuge in the mountains near Herat. [2] The Hotak revolt of 1709, the capture of Isfahan in 1722 and the fall of Kandahar to Nader Shah in 1738 are told in the article on the Hotak dynasty. [1] [3]

After 1738 Nader Shah returned to the Abdali the lands they had lost to the Ghalzai in southern Afghanistan. [2] Hanifi points out that from Nader Shah's death in 1747 until 1978 the central government was in the hands of various Persianised Durrani figures, and the Ghalzai opposed that rule through large armed uprisings in 1801, 1803, 1839–42 and 1886. He notes that these episodes ended in setbacks for the Ghalzai, including mass forced deportations in the 1880s to northern Afghanistan. [1] Daniel Balland's account of the political history agrees that the Ghalzai could not easily accept Durrani sovereignty in the nineteenth century, and that the Ghalzai insurrection of Abdur Rahman Khan's reign lasted until 1887. [3]

The Ghalzai also figure in the Anglo-Afghan wars. During the First Anglo-Afghan War the Jabar Khel, a branch of the Eastern Ghalzai, inflicted the heaviest casualties on the retreating British army between Kabul and Jalalabad in the winter of 1842. During the second war some Ahmadzai chiefs were prominent in British operations in the southeast. [1] In April 1929 an attack by the Ghalzai at Ghazni forced Amanullah, who had abdicated and fled to Kandahar, to turn back from his attempt to retake Kabul. [3]

The twentieth century

The Ahmadzai supported Mohammad Nader when he took Kabul in 1929 and was proclaimed king. [1] In 1978 a coup brought Nur Mohammad Taraki, whom Balland describes as a Ghalzai of rural and provincial background, to the head of a new government. [3] Writing in the early 2000s, Hanifi counted three of the four presidents of the post-1978 republic as Ghalzai, from the Taraki, Kharoti and Ahmadzai tribes, and noted that Ghalzai were also prominent in the leadership of the Taliban movement, which had controlled much of Afghanistan since 1996. [1]

What "confederation" means

Scholars do not agree on which social groups should be called a tribe and which a confederation. Richard Tapper's Iranica entry on tribal confederations notes that definitions are made harder by the many local terms in use, and that some very large groups, such as the roughly two million Durrani Pashtuns, have been called tribes because of a shared ideology of common descent. [6] The Ghilzai, like the Durrani, are called a confederation here because that is how the Encyclopaedia Iranica and most of the literature describe them. [1] [6]

Sources and spellings

The same names appear in different spellings (Ghilzai, Ghilji, Ghalzai, Ghalji, Gilzai), and the dates of events differ by a year in some accounts. This article follows the Encyclopaedia Iranica for dates and Hanifi's spelling Ghalzai in the sections on the tribe's own history, and the more familiar Ghilzai in headings. [1] [3] [5] [6]