Mullah Powindah of the Shabi Khel Mahsud (died 1913)

At a glance

• Mullah Powindah (Mulla Powinda, Muhiyuddin) was a Shabi Khel Mahsud religious leader of Marobi, near Makin in Waziristan. He died in 1913. [2, 4]

• He took the title Badshah-i-Taliban, "King of the Seekers (after knowledge)". [8]

• British officials say he planned the night attack on the Wana camp of the Waziristan boundary commission in November 1894. The commissioner's own report says only that it was rumoured he stayed in the hills. [3, 5]

• In 1900 the Government of India sanctioned him a secret allowance of 100 rupees a month. [1, 4]

• During the Mahsud blockade of 1900 to 1902 the Commissioner of the Derajat wrote of him, "In a way he is what we should call a patriot." [1]

• His son Fazl Din took the name Mullah Powindah after him. [5, 6]

A wandering student from the Mahsud hills

The longest early account is in the official Frontier and Overseas Expeditions from India (1908), compiled from British files. It says he was a Shabi Khel Mahsud, then "between forty and fifty years of age", who had been well known in Bannu district as a talib-i-ilm, a student of religion going from door to door. [2] Olaf Caroe, a later governor of the North-West Frontier Province, adds that he was an Alizai of the Astonai sub-section: a Mahsud, like the tribe he came to lead. [4]

The same history tells of a crime in 1886 or 1887. Two of his associates, jailed in Bannu as vagrants, murdered the jail's darogha, Allahdad Khan, after their release and took 600 rupees, which it was said they gave to the Mulla. There was no proof against him, though he was strongly suspected. He fled to the hills and lived at Idak in Lower Dawar under a malik named Nasarband, and became a disciple of a Dawar mullah, Gulab Din. [2] At the start of 1894 he asked the Deputy Commissioner of Bannu for leave to cross British land to visit the Mulla of Manki, a follower of the late Akhund of Swat, and received it. On his return he settled at Marobi. [2] (On the Akhund's line, see the Akhund of Swat.)

The sources name different teachers. Sana Haroon, a historian of frontier religion, lists him among the followers of Mulla Hamzullah of Waziristan, citing the 1914 Who's Who of the North-West Frontier Province for the statement that Hamzullah was his pir and that the two had fallen out. [6] Evelyn Howell, a political officer in Waziristan who later wrote the government's monograph on the Mahsuds, called him a man "without any inherited advantages", with "very meagre sacerdotal pretensions", who could not read: his letters came from a secretary. [4]

The maliks and the five prisoners, 1893

Waziristan was administered through maliks, headmen who drew government allowances and were expected to answer for their sections. In June 1893 a Public Works officer named Kelly was shot near Mughal Kot. [5] The maliks helped bring in five suspects, who were convicted and given sentences of up to seven years. [4] Caroe says the tribesmen who resented this were led in action by Jaggar, with the Mulla as "counsellor", and that three maliks were killed and two driven out. [4] The official history says the maliks were killed at the Mulla's instigation and that he became head of "the young Mahsud party", whose aim was to embroil the maliks with the government and free the prisoners. [2] Commissioner Bruce was told by loyal maliks that the discontented factions, kinsmen of the five, had "set up one Mullah Powindah of the Shabi-Khel section as their spiritual adviser and leader". [3]

The night attack at Wana, November 1894

The British were marking the Waziristan stretch of the Durand Line. A boundary commission under Bruce, with an escort brigade under General Turner, camped at Wana, the country of the Ahmadzai Wazirs, on the invitation of those Wazirs. [8] Wana lay outside Mahsud land. [4] Caroe says Bruce received letters from the Mulla asking for the five convicts' release and for no troops at Wana, and answered that he would speak to nobody except through the maliks. [4]

Bruce's own account has messengers from the Mulla arriving on 2 November. He had no wish for hostilities, they said, if the prisoners were freed and the British stayed out of Mahsud limits. Bruce replied that he would deal only with the tribal jirga and told the Mulla to go home. [3] Maliks had reported that the Mulla was at Torwam in the Khaisora with 800 to 1,000 men. [2, 3]

Before dawn on 3 November, Davies's date, the camp was rushed from the ravines on its left, where the 1st Gurkhas lay. [5] Bruce heard "a regular roar of voices, shouting, beating of drums, and firing" and called the attack "as plucky and daring a one as had ever been made on our frontier". [3] The attackers got into the centre of the camp before Gurkhas, the 20th Punjab Infantry and the 3rd Sikhs cleared it with the bayonet, and cavalry rode down the retreating Mahsuds. [2] Bruce counted 205 enemy dead; the official history estimated about 350. [2, 3] British losses were 45 killed and 75 wounded. [2]

Who led it depends on the teller. The Imperial Gazetteer says the escort was attacked "by the Mahsuds under the Mulla Powinda". [8] Davies says he instigated it against the wishes of the subsidised maliks. [5] Caroe makes Jaggar the commander, wounded in the camp. [4] Bruce wrote that the Mullah "was not himself present. It was said that his followers would not allow him to expose his saintly person". [3]

The terms followed. Eighteen leaders were to be given up as hostages, the stolen rifles and horses returned, and the Mulla kept out of the country until the boundary was marked. [2, 3] Sir William Lockhart's Waziristan Field Force of three brigades marched in December. [2] On the march to Makin, which it reached on 21 December, it destroyed the Mulla's village of Marobi, and he was reported to have fled towards the Darra valley. [2] By January he had left the country, and his return was made to wait until every other term was met. [2] Lockhart also had his two houses at Idak destroyed. [3] In 1896 South Waziristan became a political agency. [8]

A mullah the government would not meet

The official history says that after 1894 his "influence seemed to have waned". [2] South Waziristan was quiet in 1897, when other frontier tribes rose. [8] Davies notes that the Mulla was at Shaktu when the Madda Khel attacked the Maizar post that June, and that the Government of India first thought the attack planned and then dropped the idea for lack of evidence. [5]

From the summer of 1898 outrages grew, and the official history traces them to the influence of the Mulla. [2] Political Officer Watson was positive the Mulla was behind the serious offences. Commissioner Anderson asked why a man who wanted a settlement would stir up offences, and noted that the Mulla had more than once at once sent word that his men were not involved, yet he also wrote that the Mulla "appears to be playing a double game". [1]

For six years the government had refused to deal with him, a policy Caroe calls a mistake. Bruce wrote that he always sent the Mulla the same answer. [3, 4] In February 1900 Watson met him, the first time the government recognised him; he would not take an allowance then and spoke only of the grievances of the Mahsuds and the Shabi Khel. [2] In June he asked Merk, the new Commissioner, for one, and the Government of India sanctioned 100 rupees a month. [1]

The files show doubt in Simla. Merk wanted to give him a present of 1,000 rupees, and the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab thought it could do only harm. The Government of India answered that a secret approach might have been worth 1,000 rupees or more, but that the dealings had been so openly discussed that a gift would be taken as "an acknowledgment of him as a leader and a power in the tribe. This is precisely the position which the Government of India desire to avoid". [1] Caroe says the Mulla let it be known that he would accept an allowance if it were paid secretly, and that the sum was more than three times what any other individual in the tribe received. [4] A mail robbery in the Tiarza ravine on 20 May 1900 complicated it: the bags were said to be in his house, and the Punjab Government wanted payment held back until he cleared himself. [1]

The blockade of 1900 to 1902

On 1 December 1900 the government blockaded the whole Mahsud tribe until fines, which Merk reported at 1,87,000 rupees, and looted rifles were paid and returned. [2, 8] Merk himself explained the Mulla's standing in July 1900: it came from "the power that Mullah Powindah has as the opponent of Maliks who would sell their country", and from the maliks' lack of influence among the clansmen, who "by no means long for our advent". [1]

On 26 January 1901 Merk wrote that there were "three political parties in the tribe", the maliks, the tribesmen and the Mulla, "the third being the agent and leader of the second against the first". At the Id gathering at Makin some 2,500 men were said to have come. The leading maliks stayed away, and the Mulla upbraided the Mahsuds for recent offences and told them to pay. [1] In May Merk wrote that the Mulla and the maliks "just balance each other", a state of things he did not think existed anywhere else on the frontier. [1] Davies says the maliks encouraged fresh raids when the Mulla pressed the tribe to pay, hoping to force an expedition that would discredit him. [5]

In December 1900 Merk wrote that he "seems to be the only business man in the tribe", and in July 1901 wrote that "in a way, too, according to his light, he is, I think, what we would call a patriot". [1] The Mulla wrote to him about how the fine should be shared between the tribe's three divisions, and about an Afghan summons: "Letters have come from the Amir asking me to tell him what I and the Mahsud tribe want? Whether to be allowed to go towards Kabul or towards Sarkar (British territory)." He added: "First I will do your service (khidmat) then that of the Amir." [1] Merk read this as a bluff to win easier terms. He told his superiors that the Governor of Birmal had advised the Mulla to send his sheikhs to Kabul, and noted that an earlier visit to Kabul had brought "no benefit" to him or to his tribe. [1]

Columns entered the Mahsud valleys in November 1901. The official history counts 32 British killed and 114 wounded in the whole blockade, against an estimated 126 Mahsuds killed and 250 wounded, 64 towers destroyed and the defences of 153 villages levelled. The blockade ended on 10 March 1902 when the jirga promised to keep outlaws out of Mahsud limits. [2] Caroe says Merk then scrapped the malik system for dealings with a great jirga of the whole tribe, a plan reported unworkable within months of his leaving. [4]

The Militia murders and the years after

The government raised a South Waziristan Militia and took Mahsuds into it. Howell, in a memoir Caroe prints, wrote that the Mulla saw the Militia and the new roads as a threat to his tribe's independence and "set himself to wreck it": he encouraged mullas to refuse funeral rites to men who died in government service and quietly pushed young zealots to enlist. [4] In September 1904 a Mahsud militiaman murdered the Political Agent, Captain Bowring, in his sleep at Sarwekai. [4] In February 1905 a Mahsud sepoy killed the Militia's commander, Richard Harman, with a bayonet in the officers' mess at Wana. Howell, who was there, wrote that the man belonged to a section "nearly allied to that of Mulla Powinda" and was a "mere tool" of a plot, but that "it was not possible to get legally admissible evidence". [4] The Mahsud companies, nearly a quarter of the Militia, were disarmed and sent home. [4] Davies, citing the Secret Border Report for 1907-8, traced the deaths of Bowring, Harman and a third officer, Donaldson, to the Mulla's "direct instigation", and records 400 Mahsud sepoys disbanded and a fine of 25,000 rupees. [5]

In 1908 raids by two outlaws, Mianji and Surab, were again put down to him. The Chief Commissioner summoned a Mahsud jirga to Tank and, on the Government of India's orders, left the Mulla out; Davies says he "did his utmost to prevent Mahsuds from attending", and only the maliks and their followers came. [5]

Kabul and the pirs

Caroe says the Mulla led the party that went to Kabul and relied on funds and encouragement from Nasrullah Khan, the Amir's brother, to keep a sanctuary free of British encroachment. [4] Merk's papers show the contact from the British side: in January 1901 he heard that the Governor of Urghun, Gul Muhammad Khan, had offered the Mahsuds leave to trade in Afghan territory and an asylum to the Mulla, who was reported to have said that he "would wait to see how things went". [1] (For the Amir's own policy, see Abdur Rahman Khan.)

Haroon places him in a network of mullas. The British believed he ran his own postal service between the faqirs of the Mahsud clans, the headmen of Khost and the cities of Lahore and Peshawar, and the Lala Pir of Khost "forcibly reconciled" him with Hamzullah when they quarrelled. [6] For comparison see Haji Sahib of Turangzai and religion among Pashtuns.

Death in 1913 and his successors

He died in 1913, a year before the First World War. [4] Davies, citing the Secret Border Report for 1913-14, says he nominated his second surviving son, Fazal Din, to follow him, but that the "real successor" was Mullah Abdul Hakim, who "left no stone unturned to preserve the continuity of his late master's policy". The report adds that this meant a united Mahsud country hostile to the British Government. [5]

Caroe, quoting Howell, says a farewell letter from the Mulla was read to the Mahsuds in jirga after his death. It told them to hold their nationality intact, to let neither the British Government nor the Amir encroach on their country, to settle their differences and to give up raiding, so that the government had no excuse to occupy their land. Caroe adds: "So might Khushhal Khan have written." [4] (See Khushal Khan Khattak.)

The name outlived him. Caroe calls Fazl Din "a pale shadow" of his father who "to the end of the British time was regarded as the centre of opposition to any form of closer relations with the government". [4] Haroon writes that Fazl Din did not join the armed mobilisation of the 1920s, that the Faqir of Ipi allied with "the son of his old adversary the Mulla Powindah" in the 1930s, and that in the Second World War Fazal Din said that if war came to India the tribes should fight on the British side. [6]

How he is remembered

Almost everything printed about him in English comes from British officers or from historians working from their files. They disagree on what to call him. Bruce wrote of his "criminal and fanatical following". [3] The official history spoke of "fanatics". [2] Davies called him "the evil genius of Waziristan". [5] Caroe wrote that from the British point of view it was hard to see him "as other than a wily scoundrel who did not shrink from the use of assassination as a weapon. But he was more than that". [4] Howell wrote that those who allowed for his world could not deny him "some tribute of admiration as a determined and astute, though not altogether single-minded, patriot and champion of his tribe's independence", and that his "forceful character, striking appearance and persuasive eloquence" impressed everyone who met him. [4]

Caroe thought British treatment of him had been "so contrary, so vacillating, and so exactly calculated to humiliate by a mixture of cajolery and snubs" that any forceful opponent would have fought back. [4] The Mahsud side reaches the record through British hands: the Mulla's letters in translation, Merk's account of why clansmen followed him, and Jaggar's remark to Howell that the government should "blow us all up with cannon, or make all eighteen thousand of us Nawabs", which Caroe reads as a refusal to be ruled through a few headmen. [1, 4] For the wider story see Anglo-Afghan wars, 1839–1919 and the Pashtun lands.

Pakistani writers read the same events from the tribe's side. Himad Ali, Han Zhibin and their co-authors, in a 2020 study of Bruce's malik system, say that colonial writers confused the Mahsuds' struggle for independence with fanaticism. In their account Mullah Powindah, as a Mahsud, was not an outsider: he persuaded a large jirga to give him the task of dealing with the British and so displaced the maliks. They add that some Mahsud leaders told him "You are a Mullah, stick to your traditional business", but that he stayed popular with ordinary clansmen, and that the local people they interviewed "consider him as a visionary and not a typical molvi". [7]

Mohammad Ali Babakhel, writing in Dawn in 2022, calls him "an icon of the anti-imperialist movement" and says that all anti-British action between 1893 and 1913 was carried out under his patronage. After a visit to Afghanistan in 1910, Babakhel writes, he persuaded his tribesmen to stop enlisting in the army and to resist the new roads, because he thought a communication network harmful to their freedom. [9]