Safi

In the Makhzan-i Afghani Sabi is one of the eighteen sons of Panni, in the Ghurghusht line; Dorn, the translator, took "Sabi" to be a copyist's slip for Safi. The Khulasat al-Ansab says the Safi and the Gadun both descend from Panni, and Caroe's Table IV follows it.

Other writers doubt the Afghan descent. Rose calls the Safi "a tribe of doubtful Pathan origin" and cites Merk, who thought them almost certainly converts from among the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, because of their position on the edge of Kafiristan and the separate language spoken in Kashmung. Bellew says they speak a dialect of their own and are usually reckoned a branch of the Pashai. The Imperial Gazetteer (1908) calls them "probably Kafirs converted to Islam, of whom little is known", and Caroe thinks they were probably the last of the Afghan tribes to accept Islam. Rose adds that the Nadirnama's account of a numerous Safi tribe near Kabul in 1738 tells against a purely Kafir origin.^1,2,3,4,5,7

Rose lists four clans: the Kandahari (with the Sipah, Kamal Khel, Mirza Khel and Amrohi sections), the Gurbaz, the Wadir and the Masaud. Raverty, as Rose quotes him, knew only the last three and counted nearly 20,000 families. A few lived in the Saur Kamar hills and paid tithe to the chief of Bajaur; most held the valleys of Laghman, Pech, Kunar and Kaman and paid no tribute, and the three clans shared each village and its lands. In the tradition Raverty gives, a Safi who had quarrelled with the ruler of Bajaur settled at Badel, the first village the Safi took from the Tor Kafirs, and from there they drove the Tor Kafirs out of the Pech valley.

Bellew placed the tribe in Laghman and the lower valleys under the Kafiristan hills from the Alishang to the Kunar, and counted the Gandhari clan of Nawagai at about 3,000 families. Elphinstone (1815) found Safi in the lower Tagab valley north of Kabul, and Rose says they had settled in Panjshir by Akbar's time. In Bajaur, Caroe places them in the recesses of the dales between the hill Mohmand and the Tarkalani, and the Imperial Gazetteer lists them among the peoples of the Rud valley. The Kandahari sections in the Mohmand hills held their land by sufferance of the Mohmand and paid tribute to the Khan of Lalpura; the 1910 Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes calls them a vassal clan of the Mohmand.^{4,5,10,3,7,11}

The Ain-i Akbari expected the Safi to furnish 85,000 men to the imperial militia, a figure Raverty thought should read 300 horse and 5,000 foot. In 1672 soldiers of Husain Beg, the Mughal commandant in Kunar, insulted a Safi woman who had come to their post to trade. Safi men killed the soldiers and the Safi chiefs refused to give them up. Husain Beg ordered the neighbouring tribes to burn the Safi villages; they came, as their service required, but warned the Safi and would not fight them. Anger spread from Kunar to Tirah, and the Safi joined the Mohmand, Afridi and Shinwari who destroyed the governor Muhammad Amin Khan's army in the Khyber that year.

Rose, drawing on the Nadirnama, records that in 1738 Nadir Shah punished the Safi of Shah Makh, Chariakar and other parts of Kabul province for their attacks on him during his siege of Kandahar and his march to Kabul, and that many who submitted were blinded.^4,6,8

The best-known man of Safi descent is Abdul Ghafur, the Akhund of Swat. Caroe says he was born about 1784 at Jabrai in Upper Swat, the son of a shepherd of the Qandhari section who had left the tribe to live among the Yusufzai; Bellew calls him a Gandharai. The Akhund settled at Saidu in 1835 and was the most powerful man in Swat until his death in 1877, and his grandson, the Miangul, later made Swat a state. Caroe links the Qandhari name with ancient Gandhara and with the Safi's own memory of a late conversion.

On the evidence of these writers the Safi live on both sides of the Durand Line, in Kunar and Laghman in Afghanistan and in Bajaur and the Mohmand hills in Pakistan. In the 1970s, Caroe's 1983 epilogue notes, a road from Yusaf Khel to Nawagai was built through the Safi area of Bajaur.^8,5,7,9,4