The village mosque, the imam and the mullah in Pashtun villages

At a glance

• A Pashtun village mosque is run by one man, the mullah or imam, who leads the five prayers, teaches the village children to read the Quran, prays over the dead and writes amulets. [2, 6, 7]

• He is not ordained and is usually paid in kind. In the Durrani villages Elphinstone knew, he took "a portion of grain from every man in the village"; in Khost and Paktia in the last century he lived on zakat and sarsaya paid in wheat, in a house the village lent him. [3, 7]

• His standing is mixed. A proverb calls the mullah a taker, "you wife of a mullah" was a jeer in Swat, and the hujra, not the mosque, was where men tested each other politically. In a crisis a mullah could still gather very large followings. [4, 6, 7]

• Women were taught the Quran at home by an older woman, the bibi; in Ghani Khan's account, the women of a house were the first to send for a holy man and his amulet. [1, 9]

• Since 1979 the village mullah has changed more than in the century before: madrasa study in Pakistan, loudspeakers, a seat in government. [7, 8, 11, 12]

The mosque beside the hujra

Elphinstone, the British envoy who led a mission to Peshawar in 1808 and published his account in 1815, wrote that there was "at least one mosque in every Dooraunee village, and often more". [3] The village's men met in the mosque, in the hujra or in the guest room, he added, and smoked, took snuff and talked about crops, flocks and the politics of the kingdom. [3] Raverty's dictionary of 1860 glosses the Arabic jama'at as "A crowd, an assembly, a troop, a meeting, a congregation, a masjid". [10]

The two buildings did different work. Akbar Ahmed, a Pakistani anthropologist, wrote in 1976 that the growth of the hujra in Pashtun society "created a structural balance with the village mosque". In the Punjab, where there are no hujras, the mosque is the village's meeting place; in Pashtun areas the hujra is where men test each other politically. [6] The hujra itself is described in the hujra and the qala.

The word hujra does not mean the same thing everywhere. Sharif Akram, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network in 2025 about the south and south-east of Afghanistan, uses it for a small room next to a mosque, used both to host guests and to teach, where a village mullah gave informal religious lessons to children and young men. [8] In his interviews that kind of hujra has now almost gone, replaced by madrasas. [8]

Land paid for the building. James Spain, an American diplomat who wrote on the Pashtuns in 1962, described the Yusufzai system of land shares: of each village's shares, "a portion was set aside for the support of the mosque and its Imam (priest)". [5]

Who becomes a mullah

Pashtuns have no ordained clergy, as Religion among Pashtuns says. What is added here is how a man is made. Elphinstone's mullahs were made by an assembly of other mullahs, who examined a man who had finished the course of study and bound the turban round his head. [2] Boys who meant to be mullahs studied Arabic grammar for years, then went to Peshawar or another city known for its teachers to study logic, law and theology. [2]

In the twentieth century most village mullahs did not go that far. Akram's interviewees in Khost, Paktia and Ghazni said that becoming a mullah was a family trade: "My father was a mullah because my grandfather was also a mullah. Likewise, I'm a mullah because my father was a mullah." [7] Sometimes a family gave a son to the mosque in fulfilment of a vow. [7] One interviewee described how little it took: "If you have a paj [white turban], long clothes, know some Arabic texts and understand a few basic elements of Islam, Congratulations, you're a mullah." [8] The books they studied were short manuals of prayer and Hanafi law, and Pashtun mullahs in the south-east also read Persian poetry, including the Panj Kitab, because Persian was the language of administration. [8]

The mullah was often a stranger. Spain noted that among the Yusufzai the priestly craft was left to men from outside the tribe, unlike the Mahsud, who had many mullahs of their own. [5] Akram's interviewees said the same of the south-east: when villages were far apart a mullah moved to where he was wanted, and was thought impartial because he stood outside the village's family quarrels. [7]

What he does

The mullah leads the prayers. He also teaches. Elphinstone wrote that Afghan children "are sent in their infancy to a Moollah for education", that every village and camp had a schoolmaster kept by a piece of land and a small contribution from his pupils, and that the schoolmaster's office was sometimes joined with the priest's, though more often separate. [2] Among the Berdurrani, the eastern Pashtuns of the Peshawar side, a boy might be sent young to a distant village and live in the mosque on alms. [2] Thorburn, a British officer who served in Bannu, reported in 1876 that every village mosque there had three to twelve talib-ul-ilm, "seekers after knowledge", studying the Quran under the mosque's priest and fed by the community. [4] In the south-east of Afghanistan, Akram writes, boys and girls aged seven to twelve studied particular religious texts with the village mullah, often with no set curriculum, in the mosque, a hujra or a house. [8] See also education in the Pashtun lands.

He is also present at the turning points. Elphinstone described a dying man attended by a mullah, who urged him to repent and say the creed; after death the mullah led the funeral prayers, and a rich family paid mullahs to read the Quran at the grave for days. [2] Akram's interviewees list the same duties: nikah (the marriage contract) and janaza (the funeral prayer), plus help in settling disputes as "independent and respected members of the community". [8] Ahmed puts it as the sum of the job: "He runs the village mosque, teaches children and conducts village ritual." [6]

The mullah also writes amulets. Raverty glosses the word ta'wiz as "Having recourse to the Deity, asking protection. 2. A charm, an amulet". [10] Akram says amulets, often a Quranic verse, are used to heal or bring a wish such as pregnancy or success in an exam, and that their use is disputed among Muslims; some of his mullahs now charge more for them than their fathers did. [7]

Ghani Khan, a Pashtun poet and the khan of his own village, wrote about this trade with contempt in The Pathans, published in 1947. He told of his tenant Meher, a farmer, dying of typhoid while his mother insisted that doctors had failed because it was black magic. [1] The man her family fetched was not a village mullah but a holy man, Shah Sahib, who "traced his descent to a famous saint", wore the white turban of the priest, found a buried cloth doll full of pins, burnt it, and took the family's savings as "thanksgiving money", without which "the charm would not work". [1] Meher died the next morning, and Ghani Khan paid for the funeral. [1] His verdict on all such men was that "the magician, the priest and the charmer are the greatest enemies of man. They pour darkness into the soul and deaden intelligence." [1] That is one Pashtun's view, written to shock; the families he describes believed in the cure.

How he is paid

The mullah usually owned little land and lived on what the village gave. Elphinstone put it simply for the Durrani villages: the mullah who read prayers took "a portion of grain from every man in the village, besides what he earns by teaching children to read". [3] He added that the Islamic duty of giving a share of income in charity covered "even the regular stipends of the Moollahs". [2] Raverty gives a verb meaning "To collect the bread or other contributions for the travellers or mullas of the masjid, from the different houses", and a Friday gift made by schoolboys to their master. [10]

Akram's interviews of 2024, with mullahs and elders from Khost, Paktia and Ghazni, describe the same arrangement in the villages of the twentieth century, and they are the fullest account from the mullahs' own side. One man from Paktia, then 45, said his father "would spend one year in a village in return for zakat [the Islamic tax on the harvest] and sarsaya [a poll tax on individuals]". [7] The village gave him a house, usually the worst one, close to the mosque. [7] "The zakat we received wasn't in cash but in kind – wheat, beans, potatoes and other things. Sarsaya was also given as wheat." [7] A mullah from Khost's Gurbaz district said his father held the imamate of many villages, and "the mullah had no land and no other work". [7] A mullah with a large village got more, and sold some of the grain for other goods. [7] Mullahs, Akram concludes, were often the poorest people in the village. [7]

This dependence shaped what the mullah could say. Akram's interviewees said that mullahs who lived on the village's grain were careful not to offend anyone with influence, and left customs they knew to be un-Islamic, such as giving a girl in marriage to end a blood feud (baad), alone. [7] A mullah from Paktia put it this way about the change that came with money: "When the mullah had nothing and relied on his congregation [for his livelihood], he'd be very careful not to piss them off." [7] The other side of this was independence from the state: village mullahs were not on any government payroll, which Akram says kept them out of government control and won them goodwill where officials were distrusted. [7] After 2001 the villagers began paying in cash, and some mullahs opened shops or sent sons to the Gulf. [7]

His standing

Two views of the mullah run through the sources. One is the proverb that an interviewee gave Akram, from a story of a mullah stuck in a stream who would not give his hand to the man rescuing him until told to take the villager's: "A mullah never gives something to someone; he is only ever a taker." [7] Thorburn's collection of Pashto proverbs, published in 1876 in English only, has three that touch the priest, the word he uses for the mullah. "On a poor priest's call (to prayer) no one repeats the creed even", he glosses, means that a poor man is disregarded even when he reminds us of our duty. [4] "What the priest says, that do; what the priest does, that don't do" needs no gloss. [4] And "All the blame be on the priest" he calls a Persian saying "now in every Pathan's mouth", used first when a man who feared his clothes were unclean asked the priest if he might join the prayer, and the priest absolved him. [4]

The other view is that the mullah is not a leader. Ahmed wrote that religious leaders of any kind appeared as leaders in a great crisis against non-Muslim forces, and otherwise "the 'mullah's' role is institutional, functional and humdrum": he "may be respected but is rarely held in awe". [6] He quoted Fredrik Barth, who lived among the Swat Pashtuns in 1954, for one of their favourite jeers: "you wife of a mullah". [6] Ahmed also says that religious men were "not allowed a voice in the 'jirga'". [6] Elphinstone saw it differently in the early 1800s: the mullah, he wrote, was a "great frequenter" of jirgas, where his learning gave his order "much weight in civil matters". [2] The two accounts are more than 160 years apart and come from different districts, and may both be true of their own time and place.

The crisis Ahmed means is real. Elphinstone's account of mullahs round Peshawar, who could cut off prayer and burial and march under the green flag of the Prophet until a quarrel was settled, is in Religion among Pashtuns. Ahmed's own cases were the risings of 1897, led by men such as the Ada Mullah among the Mohmand and the Mastan Mullah in Swat, leaders who, he says, "arise out of nowhere" and then disappear "like bubbles". [6] See the Hadda Mulla, Mullah Powindah and the Faqir of Ipi. Elphinstone's own verdict was that the existence of their order was "beneficial in the present situation of the Afghauns", though it "obstructs the transition to a better state of things". [2]

The mosque as a guest house

For a stranger, the mosque was the first place to go. Elphinstone wrote: "In most villages, travellers go to the mosque or Hoojra; and in common times, the first person they meet entertains them." [3] In a scarce year a subscription from the villagers fed him, or, more often, the man whose turn it was; bread, dried curd and clarified butter were always provided, with meat if a sheep had been killed. [3] Raverty's verb for collecting bread "for the travellers or mullas of the masjid" shows the arrangement from the dictionary's side. [10] More on the table is in Pashtun food and hospitality.

Women at home

A village mosque was a men's building and the women of the house had their own religious life, much less recorded. Tariq Rahman, a Pakistani scholar, wrote in 1999 that village women, though not formally educated, "were taught the Quran and some of the rudiments of religion by an older woman known respectfully as Bibi (lady)", who usually used a Pashto textbook, often in verse. [9] He names one, Rashid-ul-Bayan by Mulla Abdur Rashid (1717), a sermon in verse read by women in their homes. [9] Ghani Khan's story shows the women's side of healing: Meher's mother pressed her husband to send for the holy man, and he went straight to the women's quarters, where, Ghani Khan writes, he "is always happy among women". [1] Raverty's dictionary lists a dawa as an amulet, "a square piece of silver worn round the neck by women". [10]

Akram's interviewees say girls once sat in the village mullah's class as boys did, and that mullahs since 2021 have pressed for women's religious schools and for women to inherit as the Quran says. [8] How much has changed for women is told in Pashtun women today.

Since the 1980s

The Soviet invasion of 1979 sent millions of Afghans to Pakistan. An official who was himself a mullah told Akram that in exile "the khan and the malik lost their influence, the mullah lost his influence". [7] Many mullahs then joined the jihad or began studying in the hundreds of new madrasas, paid for by charities and Gulf states, most of them on the Deobandi pattern and a few Salafi. [7, 8] Mullahs who had known only a few manuals now studied tafsir and hadith, and under the first Taliban government, from 1996, hundreds of private madrasas for boys opened. [8] See civil war and the Taliban.

Pakistan's mosques changed in other ways. On 31 October 2001 Pakistan's government "banned the use of loudspeaker in mosques except for Aazan and Khutba-i-Juma", ordered the provinces to enforce it and threatened to act against those using mosques to spread sectarian hatred. [11] In the 2002 elections an alliance of clerics, the MMA, won "an unexpected number of federal and provincial seats"; the journalist Irfan Husain wrote in 2008 that "Many Pakistanis alleged that this was engineered by the ISI", and that the secular ANP and PPP had now defeated it in the North-West Frontier Province. [12]

In the village the mullah has become better schooled and better paid. Akram's mullahs said that the fees for amulets, marriages and legal papers had risen, that sons of mullahs now became shopkeepers or teachers, and that "In the past, mullahs would teach the religion without asking for a penny, but now, they won't teach a word of Allah without asking for a fee", in the words of a Paktia elder. [7] Some villagers resisted the new learning: a village in Khost whose elders were told by a Pakistan-trained imam that they prayed wrongly answered that they would not change what they had learned from their ancestors. [8] Since 2021, an interviewee said, villages "couldn't find a mullah for our imamat because they're all seeking state jobs and no longer want to be imams". [7] The village mosque still has its mullah, but he now often has a salary, a degree and a government post as well, and fewer of his neighbours' sacks of wheat.