The Yusufzai: the Pashtun tribe of Swat, Buner and the Mardan plain

Where the Yusufzai live

In 1815 Mountstuart Elphinstone, who had travelled to Peshawar a few years earlier, wrote that the northern part of the Peshawar plain belonged to the Yusufzai (his spelling is Eusofzyes), who also lived in the hills of Buner, Swat and Panjkora, and that some Yusufzai tribes extended east of the Indus. [3] That is still the core of Yusufzai country. Olaf Caroe adds the great plain of the Yusufzai Samah, which was an arid waste and now has been turned into corn-land by canals, and the Mardan and Swabi districts. [1] In the 1950s Fredrik Barth found a major section of the Swat valley controlled by Yusufzai Pakhtuns. [2]

Caroe writes that a Yusufzai, asked who he is, will always answer "I am an Afghan", rather than "I am a Pakhtun", and that the Yusufzai, with the Khalil, Mohmand and Muhammadzai tribes of Peshawar, regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as the truest exponents of the Afghan way of life. They speak Pashto in its hard, northern form, which they consider the best. [1] That is an outsider's report of their own view, not a neutral assessment.

Genealogy and the chronicles

In the traditional genealogies the Yusufzai descend from Kharshbun, one of the two sons of Sarbanr, and belong to the so-called Eastern Afghans of the Peshawar valley, with the Mohmands, Khalils, Daudzais and Muhammadzais. [1] Caroe, however, warns that the tribal chronicles are "quite unscientific" and that it is far from certain all the migrations they describe ever took place. [1] He also notes that Babur's memoirs, written in the early sixteenth century, already show the Yusufzai in Swat and the Samah, which makes him wonder how true the stories of their settlement of the Peshawar valley can be. [1]

The story the Yusufzai tell

According to the Yusufzai histories, as Caroe retells them, the Yusufzai and other Khakhay tribes had settled near Kabul and supported the Timurid prince Ulugh Beg, Babur's uncle. After a quarrel, he invited the Yusufzai maliks, about seven hundred of them, to a banquet at which, the chronicles say, all but six were massacred. The date is not given, and Caroe puts it between 1480 and 1490. The dead included the leading malik, Sulaiman, while his nephew Malik Ahmad, then a young man and later the Yusufzai leader, was one of the six survivors. [1]

The survivors, the story goes, went east by the Khyber and appealed to the Dilazaks, who were in possession of the Peshawar valley, and received the fertile tract called the Doaba. Malik Ahmad pointed out that the Doaba was small and that many of his people had been left behind, and the Yusufzai went on to take the plains and Swat. [1] Caroe is careful to say that the story is a tradition: it is not dated, it has been told and retold within the tribe, and the Dilazaks themselves remain, in his word, a mystery. [1]

Babur and Bibi Mubarika

Babur's memoirs are the first dated account of the Yusufzai in their own country. In 1519 Babur entered the hills and married Bibi Mubarika, the daughter of the Yusufzai malik Shah Mansur, whom he calls the son of Malik Sulaiman Shah. Babur himself gives a political reason: he asked for the marriage, he writes, to conciliate the Yusufzai. [1] Caroe adds that the Yusufzai are notoriously reluctant to give their daughters outside the tribe, and relates a romantic story told in Yusufzai hujras of how the prince met the girl at a spring on the Morah pass, which he presents as legend. [1]

The land of Shaikh Malli

One of the best-known Yusufzai traditions concerns land. Barth, who did his fieldwork in Swat between February and November 1954, records that the conquering Yusufzai were said to have had difficulty dividing the spoils and asked a holy man, Shaikh Malli, to do it. He divided the valley into regions matching the Yusufzai sub-tribes and their branches, and because no two pieces of land are equal he decreed that they should be re-allotted regularly: a sub-tribe with two main branches would alternate between its two halves every ten years, and one with three would rotate on a thirty-year cycle. People held shares in the total land of the sub-tribe rather than particular fields, and this meant a large movement of landowners every ten years or so. [2] Barth notes that the tradition is supported by the reported existence of a manuscript, written by Shaikh Malli himself, describing the conquest of Swat and the allotment of the land. [2]

Barth also points out that the non-Yusufzai majority of Swat's population did not take part in these moves, and that groups claiming holy descent held a separate rank, so the Yusufzai were only one layer of a hierarchical society. [2] The Iranica entry on anthropology lists Barth's work among the Yusufzai of Swat and, in the 1970s, Charles Lindholm's work with the Yusufzai there among the main ethnographic studies of the region. [4]

The war with Akbar, 1586

The Mughal emperor Akbar saw the Yusufzai as the backbone of tribal resistance on the north-west frontier, and, in Caroe's account, sent his general Zain Khan against the Yusufzai and Mandanr in Swat and Bajaur. Reinforcements under Akbar's favourite, the courtier and poet Raja Birbal, and the physician Hakim Abul Fateh, joined him, though neither had commanded an army before. [1]

Caroe's account is the fullest. The army crossed into Swat and then, over Zain Khan's objections, turned towards the Karakar pass into Buner, the shortest way home to Attock. In the passes the Yusufzai lined the crests and poured down arrows and stones on a column that had lost its order, and in the confusion Birbal and about 8,000 men of Akbar's army were killed. Zain Khan reached Attock with what remained. [1] Caroe calls it the last serious effort to subdue the northern hills before 1895. Afterwards the Mughals limited themselves to raids and to a string of small forts in what is now Mardan. [1]

Sikhs, British and Swat

Barth notes that the Yusufzai dominated Peshawar and the surrounding plain until the Sikh conquest of 1818–34. [2] Daniel Balland observes that in 1800 the Durrani, who supported Mahmud against his half-brother Zaman Shah, held Zaman's Yusufzai relations through his mother against him. [5]

Barth writes that the Akhund of Swat, a holy man who died in 1877, took part in a holy war once, in the Ambela (Umbeyla) campaign of 1863, and for the rest of his career acted as an adviser to his followers, among them almost all the successful political leaders of his generation. [2] His tomb at Saidu Sharif in Swat is among the major shrines of the region. [2] When Barth worked there, Swat was a state with a Ruler, recognised by the Indian government in 1926, whose capital was Saidu Sharif. [2]

Reading the evidence

Most of what is known about the early history of the Yusufzai comes from their own chronicles, written after the events they describe, and from Caroe's retelling, which dates from 1958 and reflects a British official's views. The traditional genealogies and the tribe's land system are best treated as tradition, with Barth's fieldwork as the closest thing to independent observation. [1] [2]