Religion among Pashtuns: Islam, Sufism and the Roshaniyya

Overview

Islam is the religion of almost all Pashtuns. The Library of Congress country study of Afghanistan describes Pashtuns as generally Hanafi Sunni Muslims, with some following Twelver (Ithna Ashari) Shia Islam. [5]

Religious life sits alongside Pashtunwali (پښتونولي), the Pashtun code of conduct. The same country study notes that some elements of this customary code are in tension with Islamic law, which helps explain why religious scholars and tribal custom have sometimes pulled in different directions. [5]

Shia communities

Shia Pashtuns are concentrated in particular areas rather than spread evenly. The scholar Mariam Abou Zahab described the Turi of Kurram as the only Pashtun tribe that is wholly Shia. Among the Bangash, the clans of Lower Kurram are Sunni, while other Bangash clans are Shia, Sunni or mixed. She also estimated that 10 to 15 per cent of the Orakzai tribe is Shia. [3]

In Kurram, around 40 per cent of the population was Shia at the time of her 2009 study. She noted disputes over land and water between Sunni and Shia tribes, sporadic communal violence since the 1930s, and a demographic shift caused by the arrival of Afghan refugees in the 1980s. [3]

Sufi orders and shrines

Sufism has long been a major strand of Pashtun religious life. A project supported by the UCLA Library's Modern Endangered Archives Program and led by Waleed Ziad has documented manuscripts from Sufi lodges and shrines in the Pashtun tribal regions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. These include a Qadiri library in Peshawar and Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi lodges in North Waziristan and Malakand. [4]

The project shows that such shrines were centres of learning as well as devotion. Their collections, in Persian, Pashto, Arabic and Urdu, include biographies, letters, works on theology and law, and poetry. [4]

Bayazid Ansari and the Roshaniyya

The most debated religious figure of the 16th-century Pashtun borderlands is Bayazid Ansari, called Pir Roshan (پير روښان, "the enlightened guide") by his followers. He was born in Jalandhar in the 1520s; historians differ on the exact year. He grew up partly in Kaniguram in present-day South Waziristan, where his father was a religious scholar and local qazi. [1] [2]

After long periods of meditation, Bayazid declared himself a Pir-i-Kamil, a perfect spiritual guide, and gathered disciples. His teaching drew on the idea of wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, and set out stages from sharia to deeper spiritual realities. His followers became known as the Roshaniyya. Historian Himayatullah Yaqubi notes that his works, such as Khair al-Bayan and Maqsud al-Muminin, made an important contribution to Pashto literature. [2] [1]

The movement also took on a political edge. After his followers attacked a caravan travelling to Kabul, the Mughal governor Mirza Hakim acted against Bayazid, and the Roshaniyya became associated with resistance to Mughal power. Yaqubi argues that the movement was essentially religious and Sufi, and that later writers gave it a nationalist colour. [1] [2]

Relations with the Mughals were not simply hostile. According to Khan and Yaqubi, Bayazid early on sent a disciple, Khalifa Dawlat, to the court of the emperor Akbar, where he was received warmly. After several of Bayazid's sons were killed in fighting, his youngest son Jalala was taken to Akbar and later went with him to Agra. [1]

Akhund Darweza and the opposition

Bayazid's leading critics were the Sufi saint Syed Ali Tirmidhi, known as Pir Baba, who settled among the Yusufzai in Buner, and his disciple Akhund Darweza, born in 1533. Pir Baba was born in Qunduz in 1502 and trained in Ajmer under Shaikh Salar Rumi before coming to the Yusufzai country, where he had already opposed two other local pirs whose practices he considered un-Islamic. They regarded Bayazid's teachings as contrary to Islamic law and held public debates with him in Hashtnagar, near present-day Charsadda. [1]

During this conflict, Bayazid's opponents turned his title around, calling him Pir Tarik, the "dark" guide, in place of Pir Roshan. Darweza set out his case in his book Makhzan. Some writers have claimed that Pir Baba and Darweza acted as Mughal agents, but a 2017 study by Shahbaz Khan and Himayatullah Yaqubi concludes that the evidence points to religious, not political, motives. [1] [2]

A lasting debate

The memory of this dispute still shapes how Pashtuns discuss religion and identity. Yaqubi notes that the word tariky, used for Bayazid's followers, remained in use among Pashtuns. Some modern writers celebrate Bayazid as an early Pashtun leader, while others see him mainly as a controversial mystic. Historians continue to weigh his own writings against those of his critics. [2] [1]