Islam and Pashtunwali: where they meet and where they differ

At a glance

• Pashtuns do not treat Pashtunwali and Islam as two rival laws. Bernt Glatzer found that Pashtuns understand Pashtunwali "as an expression of practical and true Islam", while adding that other Muslims may see it differently. [9]

• Lutz Rzehak, working from books by Afghan authors, reports that Pashtuns accept the sharia and follow the Hanafi school, with family law settled by it and crime and inheritance settled by custom. [8]

• Akbar S. Ahmed's Mohmand informants all agreed that refusing women their inheritance and taking interest were un-Islamic. They explained the practice as riwaj, custom. [6]

• Jirgas draw on both: Ahmed records decisions "based on a combination of Islamic law and Pukhto custom", and oaths sworn on the Quran. [6]

• The Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan wrote in 2021 that giving girls in marriage to settle a feud is against the Quran and the Sunna. [3]

• The Taliban of the late 1990s called some Pashtun customs un-Islamic and forbade them. By 2010 their rulebook told members to send disputes to a jirga first. [8]

Muslim and Pashtun at once

Ahmed lived among the Mohmand of the Peshawar plain and the Gandab valley in the 1970s. He found the mosque and the hujra together at the centre of every settlement, built at the same time and usually sharing a wall or a courtyard. In his words: "The Pukhtun accepts religion without doubts or questions, there is no conflict between his Code and Islam. Indeed he sees the Code as embedded in Islam." [6] Religious argument, his informants told him, was for the mullahs and the mians. A Pukhtun is a Muslim by definition, "just as by birth he obtains the inalienable right to Pukhtunness". [6]

The belief rests on a story of origin. In the genealogy Glatzer recorded, Qais Abdurrashid, ancestor of the Pashtuns, heard of the Prophet from his mountains, travelled to Arabia and became one of the first disciples, so Pashtuns claim to be genuine Muslims and not converts. [9] The older article on how Islam came to the Pashtuns sets that tradition beside the historical record. Rafiuddin Mehsud of South Waziristan put the same sense of self in one sentence in Dawn in 2015: "I have been a Pashtun for 5,000 years, a Muslim for 1,400 years and a patriotic Pakistani since 1947." [11]

Glatzer saw the claim tested in the Afghan war of the 1980s. Arab fighters criticised their Afghan comrades for practices they judged un-Islamic, and bloody quarrels followed, he writes, "e.g. when Arabs tore down flags at Afghan graves". [9] The flags at graves belong to the world of the shrines.

Where the two work together

Several parts of the code are stated in the language of faith. Ahmed's Mohmand glossary describes nanawatai (refuge and forgiveness) as something an enemy asks for "usually with the Holy Koran in hand", and says it must be answered with reciprocal magnanimity. [6] Melmastia and the jirga are older Pashtun institutions that Islam did not replace. Ahmed describes jirga decisions as built on "a combination of Islamic law and Pukhto custom". [6]

Rzehak gives the division of labour. Besides customary law, he writes, Pashtuns accept the sharia and follow the Hanafi school. Traditionally the sharia "addressed several aspects of family law primarily whereas cases of crime and inheritance disputes were settled according to customary legal norms", and no opposition was felt between the two until the Taliban of the mid-1990s. [8] Marriage is an example Fredrik Barth recorded in Swat in 1954: a marriage was concluded by a declaration repeated three times before a mullah and two witnesses, and the Swat Pathans said they followed Islamic law in its Hanafi form, though the guardian's powers went further in practice than the law allows. [7]

Ahmed shows how the two systems were used side by side in one dispute. Disputants could take a case to religious scholars (alim) for a decision from the Quran and the sharia, or to a jirga of equal numbers from each side deciding by Pukhto lar, "the path of Pukhto", or hand the decision to a political agent or a body of their choosing. [6] In the Shati Khel Mohmand village of Bela, two factions that both asked for "shariat law" got a panel of mullahs who walked the disputed fields, heard both sides "after much reading of Koranic verses" and gave a date for the decision. The losing man challenged it. [6]

The Quran also enters the jirga as an oath. Rzehak describes a jirga acting as a trial court over a disputed pasture: each party swears that under patrilineal succession he is the legal heir, and a false oath is believed to bring God's punishment. If both swear, the land is divided. [8] A truce deed that two parties of Gandab signed at the political bungalow in 1940 had the same structure: for a murder at night, the complainant side could choose ten persons to swear on the Holy Koran to the accused's innocence, and if they failed to swear the accused paid a fine. [6]

Barth saw a holy man use the book to close an argument. A saint in Swat whose verdict was resented would pick up his Koran and shout: "This is Islamic law, go and ask your mullah!" Barth adds that such tricks fail without force behind them. [7] A saint, he wrote, acts as father confessor and lawyer together, because he is trusted for both his ties to the next world and his knowledge of the sharia. [7]

Where they part: a daughter's share

The sharpest gap is over what women inherit. The Quran gives a son twice the share of a daughter, and says that men and women alike have "an obligatory share" of what parents and close relatives leave. [4] Ahmed found that in the Mohmand villages of the 1970s, "contrary to Islamic law neither women nor their daughters inherit property". A widow without sons was left to the mercy of her husband's brothers, who might marry her or send her away. [6]

Ahmed writes that from 1933 the North-West Frontier Province assembly passed legislation that Islamic law should replace custom, so that wives and daughters could inherit, in the ratio of two sisters to a brother. He says the change was rarely practised in the village he studied. [6] His informants did not defend the custom as Islamic. In the formal questionnaires every one who answered accepted that refusing women their rights was un-Islamic, and they explained it as Pukhto riwaj, with the words Ahmed gives: "Yes there is contradiction, we are wrong, but can a Pukhtun be anything but a Muslim?" [6]

He offers a reason that has little to do with belief. Land belongs to the sections and clans that settled it, and a daughter's share would leave the lineage when she married out. [6] The exception in his case studies was a Mohmand family with educated sons, whose 750 acres were divided between a widow and eight sons and daughters "according to Islamic law". Ahmed called that perhaps the most critical departure from Pukhto custom in a family that had broken with it in other ways too. [6]

Divorce shows the same gap. Under Islamic law, Ahmed notes, a woman may seek divorce and has rights in divorce (haq mehr), but among Pukhtuns a divorce is socially impossible, and he knew of no case. [6]

Where they part: badal, qisas and forgiveness

Badal asks a family to answer a killing in kind. Islamic law allows retaliation, but only in limits. Barth wrote that as Swat tribal councils and religious experts interpreted Islamic law, a killing was justified as talion revenge or for adultery (when both guilty parties had to die), and "in other cases, blood revenge is not legally justified". A man who took revenge for an insult could be fined by a lineage council or the Ruler of Swat, and his prestige rose all the same. [7]

The Quran says retribution is prescribed for those murdered, and then opens the door to the heir: whoever overlooks the killing from his brother, a "suitable follow-up and payment" should follow, "an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy". [4] Another verse allows an equal answer to an evil act but promises a reward from God to whoever pardons and makes reconciliation. [4] The Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan quotes a hadith in Abu Dawud (number 4496): a man whose relative is killed may retaliate, forgive or take compensation, and whoever goes beyond that earns a painful punishment. [3]

Pashtun practice made room for the second path, if only sometimes. Ahmed records Daulat, a Mohmand elder whose father was the first man killed in a feud, who "waived his right to take badal by forgiving the murderers", and Afzal, who forgave a cousin who had killed his father. Ahmed explains it partly by what revenge cost both sides. [6] Bacha Khan went further. The pledge he drew up for the Khudai Khidmatgar in the 1930s had members promise "to refrain from violence and from taking revenge" and "to forgive those who oppress me or treat me with cruelty". He counted the habit of revenge among the worst Pashtun traits. [2] See Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Swara and baad against the sharia

The clearest case of custom against religion is the giving of girls to settle a feud, called swara in Pashto and vani and other names elsewhere. In 2021 the Federal Shariat Court heard a petition from Sakeena Bibi of Kurram, whose family had been through several jirgas. It wrote that all such practices, "irrespective of the fact whatever name they are called", are un-Islamic and against the Quran and Sunna, and that Muslim jurists agree on it. It quoted the Quranic rule that no one bears another's burden. [3] The court then closed the case because Kurram had been merged into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Pakistan Penal Code now applied. [3]

The code it pointed to is section 310-A, added in 2011: whoever gives a female in marriage or otherwise to settle a civil or criminal matter faces three to seven years and a fine of 500,000 rupees. An earlier amendment in 2005 had already barred a female from being given as badal-i-sulh, and defined that term as compensation in cash or property. [3] The statute uses the word badal in its sharia sense of a settlement paid in property, which is the opposite of the custom.

Their decree of 1998, Rzehak writes, banned the custom by which an offender's clan presents a woman or several women to the victim's clan as compensation, and another decree forbade levirate marriage and gave widows the right to choose a husband. [8]

Mullahs and khans

Ahmed describes the mullah of a Mohmand village as strictly limited to the mosque, leading prayers and teaching children the Quran, and entirely the client of the household that kept him. Most Shati settlements did without one. [6] Barth describes the holy families as the other side of the arrangement: even the local chief rose when a saint entered the room, and saints, credited with greater knowledge of law and morality, were the traditional mediators. [7]

Ghani Khan, the poet and son of Bacha Khan, wrote in The Pathans in 1947 that "All influence in the tribes belonged to the Khan and the Priest", the one lord of this world and the other claiming the next. He was scathing about the village charm-seller, "the magician, the priest and the charmer", and accused the British Political Service of supplying the tribes with priests "who put on the uniform of Allah's servant to serve the devil". [1] Bacha Khan's autobiography gives a plainer account of the quarrel over schools. He says he told the mullahs that Islam makes the pursuit of knowledge a duty, and that if they did not want children in British schools they should build schools of their own. "But the mullahs were not willing to follow my advice." [2]

Clerics also led the other way. Ahmed notes that the Haji of Turangzai opened his call to the Mohmand for jihad with Quranic verses, and that his son Badshah Gul argued in the 1930s that anyone who befriended the British became the enemy of God and his Prophet. [6] See Haji Sahib of Turangzai.

The Taliban and Pashtun custom

Rzehak dates the open quarrel to the mid-1990s, when the Taliban brought "a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam" and declared some customs of the Pashtuns to be against Islamic law. [8] Their decrees against compensation by women and against inherited widows are the examples he gives. [8] Thomas Ruttig, in a 2010 paper for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, argued that the Taliban should be treated as "a primarily political movement with political aims, and not as a tribal one", with a centralised Islamist structure above network-like military structures rooted in Pashtun tribal society. [10]

Their rulebook for fighters of August 2010 says that disputes brought to the Taliban should first go to mediation by peacemaking jirgas, and only if that fails to an Islamic court. Rzehak read that as a strengthening of Pashtunwali, even if the Taliban meant it as a temporary approach. [8] Rzehak also summarises Ruttig's argument that might often trumps Pashtunwali, and that the jirga has lost much of its authority to the less egalitarian shura. [8]

Mehsud, writing in Dawn from South Waziristan, said that since the Taliban appeared the world had come to understand Pashtunwali "in the negative sense", and he went on to describe it as hospitality, redress and refuge. [11] On the post-2021 position see Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021 and the civil war and the Taliban emirate.

Khushal Khan on honour and God

Khushal Khan Khattak wrote of honour and of God in the same poem on his war against the Mughals, which Raverty translated in 1862. Of the Yusufzai, who would not help him, he says:

I alone, amongst the Afghans, grieve for our honour and renown;

Whilst the Yusufzis, at their ease, are tilling their fields.

And:

In my poor judgment, death is more preferable than life,

When existence can no longer, with honour, be enjoyed.

A few couplets earlier he leaves the outcome to God:

But whether it be concord or strife, or folly or wisdom,

The affairs of every one are in the hands of the Almighty. [5]

The English is Raverty's, a literal rendering from the Pashto. [5]