Pashtun names: given names, titles, pen names and tribal endings

At a glance

• Most Afghans have traditionally had one personal name, sometimes made of two words such as Ahmad Khan, and many have no family name. [6]

• Tribal names such as Yusufzai are built on -zai, which Raverty glossed in 1860 as "Son of", and a clan inside a tribe is often an ancestor's name plus -khel. [2]

• Some tribal names carry neither ending: Afridi, Ormur and Wardak. [5]

• Titles become names. Malik, Khan, Haji, Shaikh and Sayyid are all found in front of or behind a name, and poets add a pen name of their own. [2, 3]

• In Afghanistan a woman's own name has often been left unsaid in public. Since 18 September 2020 the law lets a mother's name appear on her child's national identity card beside the father's. [7, 9]

One name, and what is added to it

Afghan names, the Cultural Atlas published by the Australian broadcaster SBS says, traditionally consist of a first name alone, which may be a compound such as Ahmad Khan. Children take their father's surname where one is used, and a woman does not take her husband's. [6]

That habit changed on paper in the 1970s. Ch. M. Kieffer writes in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that the republic of 1973 to 1978, trying to ease tension in an ethnically mixed state, discouraged reference to ethnic or tribal origin and prohibited personal names that evoke an ethnic group. His examples are Afridi, Ahmadzay, Ormur, Nurzay, Popalzay and Wardak. [5] A Pashtun could be a Popalzai by descent and could not, for those years, put the word on a form.

Olaf Caroe, a British administrator who wrote The Pathans in 1958, noted a different kind of reticence. A Yusufzai, he wrote, if asked who he is, will always answer "I am an Afghan", and will not say "I am a Pakhtun", though he speaks Pakhtu. [3] A name of origin is also a choice of which word a man uses for himself.

Names from the language

Many first names are ordinary Pashto words. Gul, in Raverty's dictionary, is a rose or a flower in general, and it is used in compounds such as gul-rukh, "rosy-cheeked". Raverty also lists "Monday" among its meanings. [2] He gives zalmaey as "a youth, a young man, a bridegroom". [2] Malal, in his dictionary, is "sadness, grief, anguish" and also an adjective, "sad, dejected". [2]

The most famous Malalai is the heroine of Maiwand. Malala Yousafzai was named for her by her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai. In the 2015 film He Named Me Malala, when the director put it to him that he had named her for a girl who spoke out and was killed, "almost as if you said she'd be different", he answered "You're right". Malala herself says in the film: "My father only gave me the name Malala, he didn't make me Malala." [10] Her surname is the tribe's: the Yusufzai.

Cultural Atlas adds that many Afghans give a child a name with a religious, tribal or historical link, and that a first name may mark the time or place of birth by the Islamic calendar. [6] The ritual of the naming itself is a subject for its own article.

Titles that stay in the name

A Pashtun name often carries a title that began as a rank or as a job.

Khan is the commonest. Caroe traces the word to Khagan, the title taken by the ruler of the Avars, which the Ephthalites brought with them from Central Asia. [3] It now sits behind a given name in the names of chiefs, poets and soldiers alike: Khushal Khan, Ghani Khan, Dost Muhammad Khan.

Malik is the title of a tribal elder. Raverty's dictionary gives it as "a king, a chief, a master, the head man of a village", and its derived malik-zadah as "a king's son, the son of a chief". [2] The Afghan chroniclers tell the title as a gift from the Prophet. In the account Caroe gives, the Prophet changed Qais's name to Abdur Rashid, said that as the offspring of Malik Talut his followers should be called Malik, and also gave him the title Pathan. Caroe thought the story "smells of the Delhi lamp", a Persian-writing courtier's joke for the Mughal court at the expense of his Pashto-speaking kin. He observed that malik is a common Arabic word for a king or prince, in use for elders throughout the Afghan tribes and over much of Central Asia and the Punjab. [3] On the chronicle itself, read Origins of the Pashtuns.

Religious titles keep their Arabic meaning. In Raverty's entries haji is "a pilgrim to Mekka", shaikh is "a chief, a prelate, a venerable old man" and also a title of descendants of the Prophet, and saiyid is "a lord, a prince" and "a descendant of Husain, the grandson of Muhammad". [2] A haji's title came by the pilgrimage and a sayyid's by descent; both are written in front of a name. The mullah's title belongs to the work described in the village mosque and mullah.

The elders of Pashtun poetry and religion are known by an affectionate title in place of a name or beside it: Hamid Baba, Rahman Baba, Pir Baba, Kaka Sahib, and for a woman Nazo Ana.

Raverty's dictionary also lists lakab, "a title, a surname, a byename", with the verb "to give a surname or nickname to any one". [2] A byname of that kind is how many Pashtuns are remembered. Mirwais Hotak is Mirwais Nika to the people of Kandahar.

Pen names of poets

A Pashto poet usually signs his verse with a second name. Raverty's dictionary records one under shaida, "mad, deeply in love": "the name of an Afghan poet, Muhammad Kazim Khan, surnamed Shaida, a descendant of Khushhal Khan". [2] See Kazim Khan Shaida.

Ashraf Khan, Khushal's eldest son, wrote as Hijri, "of separation". Misri Khan of the Khyber is known by his pen name, Khatir Afridi. Ghani Khan used one for his satire. In The Pathans, printed in 1947, he prints verses with a note that they are "from the works of Lewanae Falsafi", of whom, he says, "you have never heard", a young Pathan poet who "has published nothing though he has written much". [1] The name, "the Mad Philosopher", was his own, and the note is his joke on himself; the article on Ghani Khan tells how the name was signed to his newspaper column.

The ending -zai, and -khel

Raverty's dictionary has zai as "'Son of', a word applied to Afghan surnames, to denote the tribe or clan", and compares it to Mac, Ap and O', with Yusufzai as the example, "the tribe or clan of Yusuf". [2] Bellew, a British surgeon-officer writing in 1880, lists the Durrani clans in the same form: Saddozai, Popalzai, Barakzai, Achakzai. [4] The Saddozai kings and the Barakzai amirs of Afghanistan are named for two of them. See the Durrani confederation.

Khel works one level lower. Raverty speaks of it as the word "applied to the subdivisions of a clan". [2] Bellew names Ghilzai subdivisions Kuttakhel and Kattikhel, and suggests that they keep the trace of an older people, the Katti. [4] Caroe writes of the Ghoriah Khel and the Khakhay Khel, and of the district near Kalabagh on the Indus now called Isa Khel. [3]

Where the words come from is less settled. Raverty, a British officer who argued in his dictionary that Pashto has an affinity with the Semitic languages, called khel "a Hebrew word", and gave no further evidence in the passage. [2] The sources agree on what the endings do and not on where they come from.

Not every tribe has an ending. Afridi, Ormur and Wardak appear among Kieffer's examples of names that evoke an ethnic group, and none has -zai or -khel. [5] The Afridi, the Ormur and the Orakzai each have their own article, and the tribe genealogy sets the clans out under each.

Names of districts make a third kind. Raverty's dictionary lists an affix "applied to nouns in forming patronymical adjectives", with the district of Buner and the people of Buner as its example. [2] The people of Buner are called after their land, as the people of other districts are.

Women's names and the unspoken name

In Afghanistan a woman's given name has been left out of public speech. Shirin Jaafari reported for PRX's The World in August 2017 that publicly revealing a woman's real name is taboo, and that men refer to female relatives with substitutes such as "Black-headed", "Milk-sharer", "Mother of Children" and "My Household". [7] Noorjahan Akbar, who founded Free Women Writers, told her that "Black-headed" casts a woman as someone to pity, since black is tied to grief. Some men say a woman's name is too sacred to be said in public. Akbar named another reason in the same report: men threaten each other through the women of the other's family, and a name makes the threat more real. [7]

That year Afghan women began a social media campaign called Where Is My Name? (#WhereIsMyName) for the use of their names in public. [7] Reuters names Laleh Osmany, then 28 and a graduate of religious studies, as the woman who launched it in 2017; she was still pressing for mothers' names on children's identity cards in 2020. [8] On 18 September 2020 President Ashraf Ghani signed an amendment to the Citizens Law that put the mother's name on birth certificates and national identity cards beside the father's; until then only the father's name was printed. His spokesman, Sediq Sediqqi, tweeted that the mother's name "is officially included in the national identity cards, along with other personal details". [9] Human Rights Watch called it "a major victory for Afghan women's rights activists". [9]

Reuters reported the opposition in the same week. Said Akbar Agha, a former Taliban-era official, said at a reconciliation gathering in Herat that putting the mother's name on electronic identity cards "would be a disgrace and a dishonour for Afghans". [8] Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, confirmed the group's opposition: "Mentioning the names of mothers, wives, sisters and daughters is not culturally tolerable in our society." [8] Osmany told Reuters that her campaign had met "insults, humiliation, threats" and that she would go on. [8] Some readers who commented on Dawn's copy of the story said the campaign took attention from women's schooling, health and dowry. [8]

The sources describe Afghan custom as a whole. For the position of women in Pashtun life, read Pashtun women today.