How Islam came to the Pashtuns: tradition and the record

At a glance

• In the Pashtun telling, written down in Persian in 1609–1611, Qais Abdur Rashid met the Prophet at Medina, accepted Islam and went back to Ghor to spread it. The same book says that some stories told about him are "not confirmed by traditions" and leaves the truth to God. [4]

• Arab governors from Sistan reached Zabulistan and Kabul in the 660s. The local rulers, the Zunbils and the Kabul Shahs, took the ground back, and the Arabs collected tribute from them only "as well as they could". [1, 8]

• Ya'qub the Saffarid raided through Zabulistan to Kabul in 869–870. The Zunbils, in Bosworth's words, "remained a barrier to the penetration of Islam through their lands". [9]

• The Hudud al-Alam of 982 still counts idol-temples at Kabul and says Ghor "in the days of old" was pagan. [2]

• Mahmud of Ghazna sent expeditions into Ghor in 1011 and 1020 and left teachers there. Nuristan, then called Kafiristan, was made Muslim in the 1890s. [7]

• Olaf Caroe, who set the tradition out in full, called it a myth and wrote that the advent of Islam in the region "was actually delayed for about four centuries". [8]

The account the Pashtuns tell

The long version is in Origins of the Pashtuns and Religion among Pashtuns. In outline, Khwaja Nimatullah of Herat set it down in the Makhzan-i Afghani for the Mughal court. When the Prophet's mission began, Khalid ibn al-Walid wrote to the Afghans, who had lived in the mountains about Ghor since Nebuchadnezzar drove out the Israelites, and several of their chiefs set out for Medina. The greatest was Qais, who accepted Islam under Khalid's guidance and was named Abdur Rashid. [4]

In Dorn's translation the Prophet "dismissed Abd Ulrashid to return to Ghor and the adjacent Kohistan, there to propagate the new faith, and to direct the infidels to it". Qais died in the year 41 of the Hijra, aged eighty-seven. [4] The tradition gives the Afghans two roles: first Muslims of their country, and its first missionaries.

For this passage Nimatullah names his books, Mustawfi's Tarikh Guzida and the Mujmal al-Ansab. And he does not claim certainty. He adds that several stories are told of Qais which, "although not confirmed by traditions, have found a place in several histories", among them a shirt sent to the Prophet and a comb sent to Sheikh Ali Lala of Ghazni, and he closes with "God knows the truth best". [4]

The Makhzan goes on to the religion of the descendants. Its third book, "Memoirs of the Afghan Saints", is arranged by the three sons of Qais. Bitan, the second, reached sainthood through devotion and austerity and was called Sheikh Beit. His son Ismail, adopted by Sarban, became Sheikh Ismail Sarbanni, whose tomb, Nimatullah says, lies on the Koh Suleiman near the place of Khwaja Khizr, and to whom people came from distant countries for prayers. [5] The list of Sarbanni saints opens with Khwaja Qutb ud-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki and runs to more than twenty names, among them Sheikh Mati Khalil and Sheikh Hassan Kasi. [5]

One more Afghan account concerns Mahmud's army. Vansittart's treatise on the Afghans, quoted by Dorn, tells that in Mahmud's reign eight descendants of Khalid ibn al-Walid came to Ghazna and were made commanders. "Wherever they were stationed, they obtained possession of the country, built mosques, and overthrew the temples of idols," and the Afghans grew so many that Mahmud's army was chiefly Afghan. [4] Dorn, weighing this with the other accounts, concluded that Mahmud "attacked and subdued to him part of the Afghans", while those in the mountains kept their independence. [4]

Kabul and Zabulistan in the Arab chronicles

The earliest written record of the country between the Helmand and Kabul is Arabic: the chapter on Sijistan and Kabul in al-Baladhuri's Futuh al-Buldan. It does not use the word Afghan. It names Arab governors, local rulers and the towns of Zaranj, Bust, Rukhkhaj, Zabul and Kabul. [1]

'Abd al-Rahman ibn Samura took Zaranj and then surrounded the enemy on the mountain of the Zur, who soon surrendered. He entered the temple, found a golden idol with two rubies for eyes, cut off its hand and took the rubies. Then he told the satrap: "Keep the gold and the gems. I only wanted to show you that it had no power to harm or help." [1] At Kabul he besieged the city for some months with catapults, and the Arabs got in when a wounded elephant fell at the gate the garrison had sallied from, so that it could not be closed. [1]

The conquest did not hold. Baladhuri says the Kabul Shah gathered a force and drove out every Muslim in Kabul, and Ratbil, the ruler Caroe calls the Rutbil or Zunbil, took Zabulistan and Rukhkhaj as far as Bust. [1, 8] 'Ubaidallah ibn Abi Bakra bought peace from Ratbil for a million dirhams. [1] Later the Kabulis killed the Arab commander Yazid ibn Ziyad at Junzah. [1] When al-Hajjaj sent 'Ubaidallah back, he made a treaty for 500,000 dirhams with three sons of the Kabul ruler as pledges, was urged to fight instead, and lost his army to thirst and hunger in the desert of Bust. [1]

Ratbil's own words survive. When an Umayyad governor's agents asked for tribute, he asked what had become of the men who used to come to him "empty-bellied, faces darkened by the sun, their sandals of palm leaves", and was told they had passed away. "They kept their word better than you, and were braver; though you are better-looking," he said. [1] Al-Hajjaj had settled for seven or nine years of peace and then 900,000 dirhams a year in kind. [1] When Kutaiba ibn Muslim's brother pressed Ratbil for coined money, Kutaiba told the army to take goods, "for the frontier is not prosperous". [1]

Under al-Mansur the governor Ma'n ibn Za'ida marched to Rukhkhaj, found Ratbil gone to Zabulistan for the summer, and took about 30,000 prisoners. [1] Of the agents of al-Mahdi and al-Rashid, Baladhuri says they collected tribute from Ratbil "as well as they could". Only when al-Ma'mun was in Khurasan does he record that the king of Kabul "professed Islam and promised obedience". [1]

Caroe reads this record as raiding. In his words the Arabs "did not effectively subjugate either Kabul or Ghazni", and "even Kabul was not conquered by Muslim leaders till late in the ninth century". [8] Bosworth adds that Zabulistan, the country round Ghazni, was "basically Iranian in population" and that before the Turkish commander Alptigin arrived it was "only imperfectly Islamized". [7]

The Saffarids and the Kabul Shahs

Ya'qub ibn Layth, a coppersmith of Sistan (saffar, whence the dynasty's name), was hailed amir in 861. His first care, Bosworth writes, was the country east of Sistan and Bost, now eastern Afghanistan. In 865 he defeated the Zunbil in Rukhkhaj and Zamindawar, and in 869–870 he raided through Zabulistan and the Ghazna region to Kabul, then to Bamiyan and Balkh. The raids brought slaves, idols and temple treasure. [9]

Bosworth is careful about what followed. The Zunbils "exercised power for some time to come, and remained a barrier to the penetration of Islam through their lands", though Ya'qub's campaigns "paved the way" for the later Islamisation of the Indian borderlands. After the fall of Ya'qub's brother 'Amr there was, he thinks, "almost certainly a resurgence of power" for the Kabul Shahs and the Zunbils. [9]

Al-Biruni, writing about 1030, tells who the Kabul Shahs were. The Hindus, he says, had kings in Kabul, "Turks who were said to be of Tibetan origin". The first, Barhatakin, was said to have crept out of a cave in Kabul and been taken for a being of miraculous origin, and his line numbered about sixty. [3] A Brahman vizier took the throne from the last of them, and the Brahman line ended with Trilocanapala, killed in 1021, and his son Bhimapala, five years later. Al-Biruni adds that the dynasty was extinct in his day. [3] Elsewhere he records that when Kabul was conquered by the Muslims and its ispahbad adopted Islam, the ispahbad set conditions, among them that he would not be bound to eat cow's meat. [3]

What the Persian geography saw in 982

The Hudud al-Alam, the Persian geography finished in 982, gives a snapshot of the frontier in Sebuktigin's time. Ghazni was "on the frontier between the Muslims and the infidels". Kabul was a borough with a strong fortress whose "inhabitants are Muslims and Indians, and there are idol-temples in it". Ghor was a mountain province with a king called Ghur-shah: "In the days of old this province of Ghir was pagan; actually most of the people are Muslims." [2]

The same book names the Afghans as a people, at the village of Saul, and names Ninhar, a place "of which the king makes show of Islam". [2] Caroe noted that the king's wives are listed as Muslim, Afghan and Hindi, and wrote: "The distinction between Muslim and Afghan in this passage is not without significance." [8] The passage is given in full in the earliest records of the Afghans.

Ghazni and the push into the hills

Bosworth dates the Ghaznavid push east to Sebuktigin. About 986–987 there was sharp fighting in the Kabul and Lamghan country, in which the Hindu Shahi raja was beaten, and Sebuktigin advanced down the Kabul river towards Peshawar and began to "implant the first seeds of Islam there". [7] Under his son Mahmud the army held many peoples, among them "Indians, Dailamis, Arabs, Kurds and Afghans". [7] Al-Utbi's Afghans are covered in the earliest records.

Mahmud's wars were not mainly about conversion. Bosworth, citing Muhammad Habib, writes that Mahmud's aims "were essentially secular and confiscatory, not the conversion of souls". [10] The one place Bosworth says teachers were left behind is Ghor. Two expeditions, in 1011 and 1020, forced the submission of local chiefs, among them Muhammad ibn Suri of Ahangaran, and "teachers were left to inculcate the rudiments of the Islamic faith". Ghor, he adds, "was never properly subdued by the Ghaznavids, and the spread of Islam there was to be a slow process". [7]

Raverty, translating Minhaj al-Siraj's thirteenth-century history, quotes al-Utbi on the same campaign. Mahmud was angered by the tribes of Ghor, "who were unbelievers", for waylaying caravans, and reached Ahangaran only after hard fighting and a feigned retreat. [6] Minhaj adds that in parts of the country such as Zawulistan the people, "both high and low, noble and ignoble, were not [yet] exalted to the excellence of Islam", and that the followers of Islam and the unbelievers kept up a war "from kushk to kushk". [6]

Ghor, the Ghurids and the Pashtun claim

Ghor is where the tradition and the record meet most awkwardly. The Makhzan sends Qais home to Ghor in the seventh century to bring the faith. [4] The Hudud, al-Utbi, Minhaj and Bosworth all describe Ghor as still pagan, at least in part, in the early eleventh century. [2, 6, 7, 11]

The Ghurid family told its own origin story. Minhaj preserved a verse genealogy written for the Ghurid sultan 'Ala' al-Din Husain, in which the chiefs of Ghor received Islam from 'Ali and Ghor itself from Harun al-Rashid. [6, 11] Bosworth's verdict in the Iranica is that "we have no concrete evidence for any of this", and that when the Ghaznavids raided Ghor it "was still a pagan enclave". [11] Raverty notes that "by nearly every other writer of authority" the Ghurids had not embraced Islam until the time of Husain, son of Sam, whom Mas'ud of Ghazna made ruler of Ghor. [6] Minhaj, who was brought up in the household of a Ghurid princess, writes that Ghurid rule across Hindustan founded "some thousands of mosques" in place of idol-temples. [6]

Bosworth also describes how Islam spread within Ghor. The Karramiya, an ascetic Sunni sect that stressed missionary work and enjoyed the early Ghaznavids' patronage, may have been active there in the eleventh century, and in the twelfth most of the people are said to have belonged to it. Only the sultans Ghiyath al-Din and Mu'izz al-Din changed over to the Shafi'i and Hanafi schools. [11]

Were the Ghurids Pashtuns? Bosworth says nothing is known of their ethnic stock and "we can only assume that they were eastern Iranian Tajiks". Raverty put it flatly: "although the Afghans are Patans, the Ghuris are not". [6, 11] The Pashtun genealogies connect the two houses differently. In the Makhzan a Ghurid prince, Shah Husain, marries Bibi Mato and fathers Ghilzai and Lodi, as told in Origins of the Pashtuns, and Raverty himself reports the Afghan version of that story as differing from Ferishta's. [6] On a related claim, Bosworth writes that "claims which were made in Afghanistan some decades ago (e.g., Habibi in his ed. of Mohammad Hotak) of the existence of poetry in Pashto from the Ghurid period remain unsubstantiated". [11]

The hills turn Muslim slowly

For the mountains between Ghazni and the Indus the evidence is thin, and it all points the same way. Caroe, reading al-Utbi and al-Biruni together, held that Mahmud "had to fight against infidel Afghans of the Sulaiman mountains", and that when Mu'izz al-Din of Ghor defeated Prithviraj in 1192 Afghan horsemen fought on both sides, so that "all Afghans had not been converted". [8] The Afghan soldiers of the Delhi sultans a generation later are in the earliest records.

Nuristan shows how late a mountain people could stay outside. Bosworth notes that Kafiristan, across the Hindu Kush north of the Kabul river, "did not become Muslim till the end of the 19th century, when the Afghan Amir 'Abd al-Rahman Khan led a force into Kafiristan". Mahmud had raided the Nur and Qirat valleys in 1020 "but no permanent conquest was attempted". [7]

Caroe's own account of who did the converting is about families more than armies. Wherever Muslim power spread from Sistan and Balkh, he says, Arab and other Muslim colonies settled among the local people, and Sayyid families are still found up and down the frontier: at Peshawar, Ismaila in the Yusufzai plain, Batgram, Jarman near Kohat and Buner beside Pir Baba's shrine. He took the Sayyids, "whether or not they are of the blood of the Prophet himself", to be descendants of "Arab colonists or missionaries who came to these parts in the early Islamic centuries". [8] The mians, akhundzadas and sahibzadas beside them, he thought, were of Persian, Turkish or Pashtun origin. [8] That is Caroe's inference, with no named missionary behind it. It fits what Pashtuns say of the holy families in Religion among Pashtuns and Pir Baba of Buner.

Where the accounts part

The two kinds of source answer different questions. The genealogies were gathered by Afghans in Mughal service and set down in Persian; what they record is who the Afghans of 1609 took themselves to be, with an ancestor who met the Prophet and made them original Muslims. The chronicles of Sistan, Ghazna and Delhi were written by outsiders about governors, armies and tribute. They name no Afghans before the Hudud of 982, the first Muslim reference to them, so they say nothing for or against a handful of Afghan chiefs reaching Medina. [8]

What they do contradict is a Ghor, a Kabul and a hill country that were Muslim from the 640s. Caroe, a British administrator writing in 1958, found the early-conversion story contradicted by "reliable Muslim sources" and called the Qais account mythical. [8] His grounds are real: Baladhuri's Kabul, the Hudud's Kabul and Ghor, al-Utbi's Ghor and Bosworth's Zabulistan agree. [1, 2, 6, 7] Nimatullah himself was guarded. The stories about Qais, he writes, are told "although not confirmed by traditions". [4] Caroe, for his part, added drily that "it is seldom the earliest converts who are the most devoted to a faith". [8]