The Ghilzai: a major Pashtun confederation

Name and numbers

The Ghilzai call themselves Ghəljī (غلجي) or Ghəlzay (غلزی), and the name reaches English in many spellings: Ghilzai, Ghilji, Ghalzai, Ghalji, Gilzai. M. Jamil Hanifi, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, argues that Ghalzai is the closest rendering of the Pashto. [1] They are one of the three major Pashtun tribal confederations of Afghanistan. The others are the Durrani (formerly the Abdali) in the west and the Karlanri, who live on both sides of the Afghan–Pakistani border. [1] The first record of the Ghilzai as a distinct people is in early sixteenth-century chronicles, among them the memoirs of Babur. [1]

Writing in 2001, Hanifi estimated that the Ghilzai made up about two-fifths of the roughly eight million Pashtuns in Afghanistan. These are estimates, not census counts. [1]

Ghilzai country

Hanifi places the Ghilzai between the Durand Line on the southeast and a line running from Kandahar through Ghazni to Kabul, and eastwards to Jalalabad. [1] Mountstuart Elphinstone, in his Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815), described their country as a parallelogram about 180 miles long and 85 miles wide, colder everywhere than England in winter and hardly hotter in summer, except in the lower Tarnak valley. [7] A 1911 entry written from British India gives the same range: from Kalat-i-Ghilzai in the south to the Kabul river in the north, and from the Gul Koh range in the west to the Indian border in the east. [5]

Within it the tribes lived very differently. Elphinstone found the western Ghilzai, as far east as the meridian of Ghazni, close to the Durrani in dress and custom. The Hotak and Tokhi "exactly resemble the neighbouring Dooraunees" in everything except government, while the eastern clans differed widely from them. [7]

The story of Bibi Mato

The Pashtun genealogies give the Ghilzai a scandalous birth. Nimatullah's Makhzan-i Afghani, compiled at the Mughal court in the early seventeenth century, says that Shah Husain, a prince of the Shansabani family of Ghor, quarrelled with his father and wandered east to the Takht-i Sulaiman, where Shaikh Bait (Bitan), son of Qais, took him in. Husain fell in love with Bitan's daughter Mato. She became pregnant before any marriage, her mother hurried the wedding through, and the boy was called Ghilzai, "ghil in the Afghan language signifying thief, and zai born a son". Bibi Mato's second son was Ibrahim, who earned the name Lodi; from him come the Lodi and Sur, the Afghan dynasties of Delhi. [4] The Pashto is غل (ghal), thief, and زوی (zoy), son. Hanifi records a second version in which the father is Mokarram Shah, a Pashtun prince of Ghor, and the mother the daughter of a Persian notable; there too the child is born before the marriage. [1]

Olaf Caroe read the tale as a memory. The father is a foreigner and the seducer of an Afghan girl, so early Afghan tradition plainly did not count the Ghilzai as Afghans of the true line. Caroe suggested the story mirrors an old belief that the Ghilzai include a foreign stock which imposed itself on Afghan families and took up their language and customs, a stock that "need not necessarily have been Turkish". He also pointed out that the Delhi genealogists had a motive: they served Lodi and Sur patrons and wanted the Lodis to be of Ghilzai blood but somehow more legitimate than other Ghilzai. Caroe counted the Lohani, Marwat, Niazi and related tribes of Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan as settled Ghilzai, who regard themselves so and speak a Ghilzai dialect. [4] More of the genealogy is in Origins of the Pashtuns.

Turks, Khalaj or Pashtuns

A long-running theory makes the Ghilzai Turks. The 1911 Britannica repeated the popular view that they descend from the Kilji, a Turkish tribe brought into Afghanistan by Sabuktagin in the tenth century. [5] Others link them to the Turkic-speaking Khalaj, whom tenth-century chronicles place near Kandahar and Ghazni, or to the Hephthalites; Hanifi names Caroe among those who saw a Hephthalite connection. [1] [4] Some writers also claimed the Khalji (1290–1320) and Lodi (1451–1526) sultans of Delhi as Ghilzai. [1]

Hanifi rejects all of these links. The Ghilzai speak Pashto, an Iranian language, and show cultural and linguistic features unlike those of the Khalaj or other Turkic groups, and he finds no systematic, conclusive evidence tying them to the Hephthalites, the Khalaj or the Khalji and Lodi dynasties. The modern place called Khalaj, a Pashto-speaking market town near Lashkargah, is not Ghilzai at all. [1]

Turan and Burhan

Most genealogies make Ghalzoy the father of two sons, Turan and Burhan (also called Ibrahim). Turan's descendants are the Western Ghilzai, whose main tribes are the Hotak, Tokhi and Kharoti. Burhan is the ancestor of the Eastern Ghilzai, among them the Sulaiman Khel, Ali Khel and Taraki. The Ahmadzai and Jabar Khel are sections of the Sulaiman Khel. [1]

Elphinstone gave figures for the clans, counted in families, as he received them ("are reckoned", "are said to be"), and he doubted some of them. [7]

• Sulaiman Khel: 30,000 to 35,000 families, by far the largest clan, divided into four uluses. The northern Ahmadzai were pastoral, living east of Logar and driving their flocks as far as the hills above Jalalabad.

• Tokhi: 12,000 families, with Kalat-i-Ghilzai as their main place and the Tarnak valley to themselves.

• Taraki: 12,000 families around Mukur, many of them pastoral, some wintering as far away as the Daman.

• Andar: 12,000 families, farming the rich district of Shilgar.

• Ali Khel: 8,000 families, a figure Elphinstone thought too high, since they held little but the plain of Zurmat.

• Kharoti: about 6,000 families, in the hills between the Gomal and the Sulaiman range. Elphinstone noted that the Ghilzai themselves were unsure which branch the Kharoti belonged to.

• Hotak: reduced to five or six thousand families.

Kings and viziers

In Elphinstone's account the Turan branch held the honours: the kings of the Ghilzai dynasty came from the Hotak and its viziers from the Tokhi. [7] In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Safavids and Mughals fought over Kandahar. The Abdali backed the Safavids and the Ghilzai led the opposition, and when Shah Abbas I moved the Abdali from Kandahar to Herat, the Hotak became the dominant tribe in the city. [1] Early in the eighteenth century Ghilzai pressure drove the Abdali, or part of them, into the mountains near Herat. [2]

The Hotak chief Mir Wais overthrew Safavid rule at Kandahar in 1709; his son Mahmud took Isfahan in 1722; Mahmud's cousin Ashraf was recognised by the Ottomans as king of Persia, until Nader Shah drove him out in 1729. In 1738 Nader, helped by the Abdali, took Kandahar from the last Hotak ruler, Shah Husayn, and deported him and many Ghilzai to Mazandaran. [1] Nader returned to the Abdali the lands they had lost to the Ghilzai. [2] The full story is in the Hotak dynasty.

Some Ghilzai stayed in Persia. Elphinstone tells of Azad Khan, a Sulaiman Khel, who set himself up as king of Persia and was the most dangerous rival of Karim Khan Zand. [7] At home, he wrote, the Ghilzai "still fondly recal the ancient grandeur of their tribe", and the royalty of the Shah Alam Khel and the hereditary standing of their khans were still acknowledged by all of them. [7]

Powindas on the Gomal

Many Eastern Ghilzai were pastoral nomads, moving between the central highlands of Afghanistan in summer and the Indus plains beyond the border in winter. [1] The nomad traders who came down through the Gomal and Bolan passes were known in British India as powindahs, and farther north, through Kohat and the Khyber, as kuchi. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi's Iranica entry on the Gomal says that in the nineteenth century most of the tent-dwelling powindahs were eastern Ghilzai, above all the Sulaiman Khel, Kharoti and Nasir, who grazed their animals in autumn and winter around Tank, Kulachi and Daraband. From autumn to spring many of the men left their families in the Daman and Derajat and went on to the markets of the Punjab, north India and Bengal to trade and work. [8] The 1911 Britannica also names the Sulaiman Khel, Nasir Khel and Kharoti as the clans that supplied most of the powindah merchants. [5] Until the border closures of the 1940s, the settled people of the Gomal country also lived by the banking, trade and transport that went with this traffic. [8]

Risings against the Durrani

From Nader Shah's death in 1747 until 1978, central power in Afghanistan was held by Persianised Durrani figures, and the Ghilzai were the regular source of opposition to it. [1] Hanifi lists large armed risings in 1801, 1803, 1839–42 and 1886. [1]

Elphinstone gives the fullest account of the first. The rising against Shah Mahmud was planned at Kabul, where many Ghilzai chiefs happened to be. They offered the crown to Abdurrahim, "the representative of their royal family", who had been living on a pension from Shah Zaman and accepted with great reluctance. A Ghilzai army of at least 20,000, almost all on foot, badly armed and some with nothing but clubs, met the Durrani at Sejawand in Logar. It broke one Durrani division, but the rest wheeled onto its flanks. The next day the Ghilzai plundered the villages near Kabul against Abdurrahim's orders, attacked without orders, and were routed; about 3,000 were said to have been killed, and the Durrani raised a pyramid of their heads at Kabul. In the spring of 1802 almost all the Ghilzai clans rose again, said to number 50,000, and lost three battles, all reported to have been fought on the same day in March 1802. [7] Elphinstone's Ahmadzai, obedient to the king, did not join. [7]

During the First Anglo-Afghan War the Jabar Khel inflicted the heaviest casualties on the retreating British army between Kabul and Jalalabad in the winter of 1842, and the Western Ghilzai opposed the British occupation in both wars. In the second, Ahmadzai chiefs were prominent in British operations in the southeast. [1] See the Anglo-Afghan wars.

Under Abdur Rahman Khan the Ghilzai rising was the longest of the many revolts against him, lasting until 1887. [3] It ended in mass deportations: large numbers of Ghilzai were forced to settle in northern Afghanistan by the Durrani government. [1] In April 1929 a Ghilzai attack at Ghazni turned back Amanullah, who had abdicated and fled to Kandahar, from his attempt to retake Kabul. [3]

The twentieth century

The Ahmadzai supported Mohammad Nader when he took Kabul in 1929 and declared himself king. [1] The Khalq coup of 1978 ended Durrani rule and put Nur Mohammad Taraki, whom Daniel Balland describes as a Ghilzai of rural and provincial background, at the head of the new government. [3] [1] Three of the four presidents after 1978 were Ghilzai: Taraki (Taraki tribe), Hafizullah Amin (Kharoti) and Najibullah (Ahmadzai). Hanifi, writing in 2001, also noted that Ghilzai were prominent in the leadership of the Taliban, who had controlled much of Afghanistan since 1996. [1]

Speaking and doing Pashto

The Ghilzai are known in Afghanistan for strict adherence to Pashtunwali. Hanifi gives the three duties as Paxtū larel, having Pashto; Paxtū kawel, doing Pashto; and Paxtū wayel, speaking Pashto: holding the values, acting on them and speaking the language well. [1] Georg Morgenstierne noted that the word Pashto itself also means the Pashtun code of honour. [9]

Their speech sits between Pashto's two main groups. Caroe observed that most Ghilzai speak the soft dialect, with only a few near Jalalabad using the hard one. [4] Morgenstierne found the transitional forms of the language mainly in Ghilzai Pashto. His example is the word for "woman", whose first sound in Ghilzai speech wavers between the soft Kandahari and the hard Peshawari pronunciation. [9] See Pashto dialects.

Tribe or confederation

Scholars disagree on which groups should be called tribes and which confederations. Richard Tapper notes that the many local terms make the definitions harder, and that some very large groups, such as the roughly two million Durrani Pashtuns, have been called tribes because they share an ideology of common descent. [6] The Ghilzai, like the Durrani, are called a confederation here because that is how the Encyclopaedia Iranica and most of the literature describe them. [1] [6] Dates follow the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and in some accounts they differ by a year: Hanifi dates the second rising to 1803, while Elphinstone puts it in the spring of 1802. [1] [7]