Nanawatai: refuge and forgiveness in Pashtun custom

At a glance

• Word: nanawatai, from the Pashto verb for going in. Raverty's dictionary of 1860 prints the noun as ننواتہ (nanawātah). [9]

• Two acts carry the name. A pursued man asks a householder for shelter, and a wrongdoer or a beaten side goes to the injured party to ask pardon. [8–10]

• Hard to refuse. Olaf Caroe says sanctuary "cannot be refused even to an enemy who makes an approach according to Nanawatai". [5]

• Used to end feuds. A mullah, elders and sometimes women go with the offender, a sheep is killed, blood money is paid and the revenge stops. [3, 6, 8]

• Limits: Elphinstone says protection ends at the village or tribe's land, and a 2024 Austrian report says Pashtuns expel a murderer who asks for refuge. [1, 11]

The word

Nanawatai (ننواتې) is the spelling most English writers use today. Elphinstone wrote nannawautee and said it came "from two Pushtoo words, meaning 'I have come in'". [1] Raverty's dictionary gives the verb ننوتل (nana-watal) as "to enter, to go in, to come into", and a second sense, "to take refuge with a person, to throw one's-self on the protection of another". His noun has three senses: entrance or admission; "taking refuge or sanctuary in the house of another and refusing to eat or drink until one's request be complied with, and which it is considered a point of honor to accede to"; and "shelter, refuge, asylum". A man who has taken refuge is a nanawātaey, a woman a nanawāti. [9]

Writers spell it as they heard it: Ahmed nanawatee, Spain nanavati, Caroe Nanawatai, M. Jamil Hanifi nanawātay in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Lutz Rzehak nanawāta. [3, 5, 6, 8, 10] Rzehak glosses the word as "entering [the house of the offended party]". [8]

Elphinstone and Raverty disagree on one detail. Elphinstone compared it with the Indian dharna, in which both sides fast, and said that in nannawautee "there is no restraint on either party's eating, and the force of the practice bears on the honour alone of the person to whom it is directed". [1] Raverty's gloss has the petitioner refusing to eat or drink. [9]

Shelter for a man in flight

Elphinstone keeps the fugitive apart from nannawautee. In his account the laws of hospitality protect "every individual who has entered the house of an Afghaun": a man's "bitterest enemy is safe, while he is under his roof". From that principle, he writes, "arises the obligation of protecting and defending a fugitive, whatever may be his crime", and so murderers found refuge and eloping couples fled from one tribe to another. [1] By Raverty's day the one word covered shelter as well, and Hanifi and Rzehak use it for asylum today. [8–10]

For the British it was the outlaw problem. Caroe says almost every tribal agreement included a promise not to harbour outlaws, and the promise was never kept, because "the denial of sanctuary is impossible for one who would observe Pakhtu". He calls nanawatai "an extension of the idea of Melmastia, hospitality, in an extreme form, stepped up to the highest degree". He illustrates it with a composite figure, "Muhammad Umar Khan of Shabqadr, we will say", who has fallen foul of the law, whether by an honour killing or by a crime Pakhtu does not excuse, sees the hills "where the stupid British writ did not run" and crosses at night to the hujra of a Mohmand malik who "could not turn him away". The guest is fed for a day or two, "all food found and no expenses". If he stays he becomes a client, living "in the shadow" of his protector, and is expected to work for the tribe. [5] The hujra is where that arrival happens.

Akbar S. Ahmed found the same arrangement among the Mohmand in his fieldwork. Outsiders live in the Mohmand Agency only under a patriarch's direct protection, as clients (hamsaya), and they may arrive "escaping agnatic competition or the arms of the law in the districts". Their honour is tied to that of their host. [3] In an earlier book he glosses nanawatee as "the granting of asylum to anyone, including an enemy, who seeks it". [4] James Spain, writing in 1962, put the order of duties plainly: "melmastia takes precedence over badal", and "even the enemy who comes seeking refuge must be granted it and defended against his pursuers". [6]

Refuge could be chosen with care. Fredrik Barth, writing about Swat, says a man escaping blood revenge often goes to his mother's brother's men's house, picked as an asylum "precisely because he is not involved in the feud", so that an attack on it would add to the avengers' enemies. He also says the houses of the local religious families, whom he calls Saints, were sanctuaries in war, and that some fifty years before he wrote six chiefs were chased into Saints' houses at Thana and killed, a breach remembered in a ballad. [7]

Refuge was also a move in local politics. Thorburn, the British settlement officer of Bannu, describes the district before British rule, where a runaway "under any circumstances, by Pathanaki, or the custom of the Pathan nation, must be hospitably received and admitted". When a dependent of Mir Alam Khan fled to the fort of Dilasah Khan, Dilasah, if he felt strong enough, rode out and shouted for the man's wife and goods, and if they were handed over he took the chief's tenth of the runaway's crop. If Mir Alam was the stronger, the runaway could be fined and taken back, or killed. [2]

Going in to ask a favour

The other use is a request. Elphinstone's definition is the standard one: a man with a favour to ask "goes to the house or tent of the man on whom it depends, and refuses to sit on his carpet, or partake of his hospitality, till he shall grant the boon required". The host's honour "will incur a stain if he does not grant the favour". A man overmatched by his enemies might go nannawautee and ask another to take up his quarrel, "which the other is obliged to do, unless he is utterly unable to interfere with effect, or unless some circumstance render his interference obviously improper". [1]

A stronger appeal was for a woman to send her veil. Elphinstone says Timur Shah's queen won the help of Sarfaraz Khan, whom he calls the father of the vizier of his own day, for the accession of Zaman Shah. [1] The account of Timur Shah and Zaman Shah tells how the succession went.

Elphinstone met the custom as a target. In 1809, at Peshawar, ministers of Shah Shuja, whose army had been beaten in Kashmir, pressed him night after night to promise British money. The threats were that the queen would send her veil to him, and that Akram Khan, away in Kashmir, "would certainly come nunnawautee to my house". Elphinstone writes that the pressure ended when Akram Khan returned and made direct proposals instead. [1]

Going in to ask forgiveness

Elphinstone describes the second use without naming it. In a case such as murder the offender may leave the country, or, if he will not leave his tribe, "determines to submit and obtain forgiveness". He goes as a suppliant to the house of a considerable man and asks him to intercede. "A suppliant can seldom be refused", and the man must agree. He gathers respected men, mullahs and sayyids, and they go together to the injured house. The injured man, if unwilling, may leave before they come or hide. When he is found, "the criminal appears dressed in a shroud, puts a naked sword into the hand of his enemy, and tells him that his life is in his power", while the chiefs and mullahs beg pardon. It ends with pardon and compensation. [1]

Rzehak, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network in 2011, calls it "the most famous custom", a ritual of forgiveness used when one side is too weak to take revenge or blood should be avoided. The offender comes to the house of the opposing party to admit guilt. A mullah may be sent ahead, or the offender may arrive unannounced, "usually accompanied by a mullah, tribal elders, an elder woman or several women". In the past he bound a cord round his neck and held a tuft of grass in his mouth. A Pashtun must accept it, Rzehak says, because the man repents. Willi Steul, who collected material in Khost in the late 1970s, found that some informants remembered the cord and grass but could give no particulars. [8]

Spain's version is the harshest. A feud, he says, too often ends only when one or both families are wiped out. Very rarely the weaker side throws itself on its enemy's mercy, which he calls nanavati and "the ultimate humiliation": the appeaser goes with his women unveiled, "carrying the Koran upon their heads", to offer a few sheep and ask pardon. [6] Ahmed's Mohmand informants describe it as an enemy who comes to sue for peace, usually with the Quran in hand. The act "implies supplication and must be honoured by showing reciprocal magnanimity", and in his glossary an enemy who asks for it "explicitly admits defeat and submission". [3]

Barth describes a Swat version without using the word. A weaker party who wants to beg pardon must find a Saint. The two choose a holy night and go to the enemy's house or men's house, where the Saint guarantees safe passage, because "without him the suppliant would be shot outright", and speaks for the suppliant. The terms normally include no compensation but almost always a girl given in marriage (swara). [7] Rzehak also says a family may give girls instead of money, which lowers the blood money. [8]

Three cases

The oldest is a Yusufzai story from Bajaur that Caroe retells from the tribal chronicle, without a date. Malik Haibu, chief of the Umr Khel Dilazaks, refused land to Yusufzai newcomers and was killed in the battle that followed. The Yusufzais and the Khalils then divided Bajaur and fell out, and the Khalils won the first battle. At that point "the Bajaur Yusufzais went in nanawatai to the sons of Malik Haibu", throwing themselves on Dilazak protection and asking forgiveness. The sons forgave them and sent a force to join them, and the Khalils were beaten in a battle near Nawagai. [5]

In Bannu in 1871 the Muhammad Khel, a Darwesh Khel Wazir clan outlawed after an ambush that killed seven men of a British detachment, came back after fifteen months in exile. Thorburn says the whole clan, men, women and children, went to the Deputy Commissioner's house in Edwardesabad. The men came "with heads bare and turbans and ropes tied round their necks", threw their arms at the officers' feet and "begged for pardon". He does not call it nanawatai, and the British set terms of their own: six headmen jailed and a fine of 7,000 rupees. The men of Dawar had given the clan food and shelter during the exile. [2]

Ahmed gives two cases among the Shati Khel Mohmand. Mazullah sought nanawatai from Shahzada after his village of Ranra was occupied. Later Shahzada's son and grandsons fired on Mazullah at Mian Mandi, and Shahzada "swallowed his pride and asked for nanawatee rather than see one of his offspring killed". Both times it was granted "with the traditional slaying of goats and cows". [3] In the village of Bela a quarrel over a snuff box left in the mosque turned into a fight. Hussain Khan went to Shashti Gul and asked for nanawatee, saying his sons had been rough on Shashti's brother. Shashti refused until elders persuaded him, and the two sides settled for compensation. Badshah Gul would not forgive, the women of two households fought the next day, and both sides ended at the police station. [3] Nanawatee opened the way to a settlement, and the settlement did not hold.

How a jirga closes a feud

Rzehak describes the sequel. When the ritual is performed the offender gives blood money (khunbaha) to the victim's family. Blood money is reckoned in bride prices: two for a man killed, which makes one khun, and one for a woman, with a scale for injuries. After the ritual is accepted and the money paid, "no further revenge can be taken because the previous balance between the disputing families or clans has been re-established. Any other behaviour would be dishonouring." [8] The arranging often falls to a go-between, and a jirga may sit. In Spain's words the usual road is for a neighbouring chief or the political agent to mediate and for blood money to be taken "in lieu of revenge". [6]

Caroe warns that the money does not always settle it. When the British tried calling an outlaw in on safe-conduct to strike a balance of blood money, he says the idea was sound but "in most cases contrary to Pakhtu to accept blood-money in final settlement of a feud". Rzehak's account, which has blood money as part of the ritual, and Caroe's, which has it as a compromise Pakhtu resists, do not fit together. [5, 8]

Where it stops

Elphinstone limited the protection of hospitality: it "does not extend beyond the lands of the village, or at most of the tribe", and he heard of men from raiding tribes who fed a traveller, sent him off with presents and robbed him when they met again. [1] Rzehak says a woman who presents herself as a guest at the house of the man she wants to marry, against her father's choice, risks starting a revenge cycle and losing face. [8]

A 2024 country report by Austria's asylum office, whose anonymous author cites interviews in Uruzgan and Kabul, calls the principle protection (panah) and says that harming a refugee is forbidden. It also says refuge for a person who has committed a crime like murder "is not acceptable" and gets the asylum-seeker "expelled from the tribe again after a short Jirga". [11] That contradicts Elphinstone, who counted murderers among those who found refuge, and sits uneasily with Caroe's case of the fugitive who kills without cause. [1, 5]

Gulab and Luttrell, 2005

The best-known recent case is told in the language of Pashtunwali. On 28 June 2005 Marcus Luttrell, a US Navy SEAL, was the only survivor of a four-man patrol in Kunar, wounded and hunted by Taliban fighters. [13] Mohammad Gulab, a villager of Sabray, found him and took him in. [12, 13] Gulab told the Daily Beast in 2013: "By rescuing and keeping him safe for five nights in our home we were only doing our cultural obligation." [12] Luttrell, asked on NPR in 2014 whether there was more to it, said "it was just an honorable thing to do and he did it, and stuck to his beliefs". [14] The Taliban commander Qari Moued Safi disagreed that the code reached so far: "Pashtunwali does not extend to helping oppressors and infidel aggressors such as that American soldier who is an enemy of Islam." Another villager, Muhammad Jan, compared Gulab's act with Mullah Omar's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden, which the Daily Beast's reporters called an over-the-top comparison. [12]

The accounts differ on details. History.com says Gulab and three others carried Luttrell to the village, kept him four days and sent Gulab's father with a note to a Marine outpost. The Daily Beast says Gulab sheltered him five nights and that an elderly village chief carried the note. Newsweek, summarising Lone Survivor, says only that "another villager" went. [12, 13, 15] Gulab told Newsweek in 2016 that the book got the fight itself wrong: he said no enemy bodies were ever found, that Luttrell still had 11 magazines of ammunition when the villagers reached him, and that the battle was short. Luttrell's lawyer, Tony Buzbee, replied in a statement: "Everything he wrote in his book is absolutely true." [15] On NPR Luttrell said estimates of the Taliban force ran from 60 to 80 to over 100, and that a villager who had helped save him, and was in contact with the Taliban, put it above 100. [14] None of this changes what the sources agree on: Gulab took in a wounded enemy soldier and kept him through threats, and was driven from his home. [12, 13, 15] Luttrell calls the bond a "life debt". [14]

The reports cited here speak of Pashtunwali, not of nanawatai, and none of them mentions a jirga. What Gulab did is the asylum sense described by Raverty, Caroe and Rzehak: a shelter given to a man in flight, with no petition made.

Nanawatai now

The custom is still performed. In Bara, a 25-year-old blood feud between two families ended in June 2026 through a jirga and "the tribal custom of Nanawatai in accordance with Afridi tribal traditions", according to The News. Men of both families "placed their hands on the Holy Quran, took an oath of reconciliation, embraced one another and publicly declared mutual forgiveness". [16] In August 2023 police in Jamrud, a border town in Khyber district, performed it for two foreign tourists who had been stranded and filmed in the bazaar. They invited them to a meal, slaughtered a sheep, played local music and gave the woman a shawl. Aaj News reported it as the first time the ritual had been performed for foreigners in the tribal region. The same report adds that those offering nanawatai usually bring a sacrificial lamb eaten when the apology is accepted, and that women often carry the Quran above their heads. [17]