Yusufzai

In the Makhzan-i Afghani Yusuf is one of four sons of Sheikha (Khakhay), with Tarkalani, Geghiani and Omar, and his sons are Elias, Akko, Muhli and Isa. Omar's son Mandar married Yusuf's daughter, "in consequence of which they call him also Yusufzye". The Khulasat al-Ansab puts Mandar a generation higher, as the father of both Omar and Yusuf. Elphinstone, Bellew and Ibbetson use the name for both lines, the Yusufzai proper and the Mandanr, while the Imperial Gazetteer (1908) says the Pathans themselves keep it for Dir, Swat and Buner. In their own speech the name is Isapzai or Esapzai, as one of the Khans of Hoti told Caroe.

Ibbetson divides the Yusufzai proper into the Badi Khel, by then extinct, and the Isazai, Iliaszai, Malizai and Akozai; the Akozai are split again into the Ranizai, Khwajazai and Baizai. Bellew gives a different list of five clans (Isa, Musa, Bai, Aka and Urya).^{1,2,3,4,6,7,5}

Elphinstone, working from Afghan histories, places the tribe's early seats at Garra and Nushki on the edge of the Baluch desert. Driven out around 1300, they settled near Kabul and helped Ulugh Beg of the house of Timur to the throne. He later turned on them, killed their chiefs at a feast and expelled them. Caroe dates this massacre to about 1485 and names the leading malik killed as Sulaiman. The Dilazak, who then held the Peshawar valley, gave the refugees the Doaba; as more arrived, the Yusufzai took the Dilazak lands north of the Kabul river and drove Sultan Uwais of Swat into the Kafir hills.

On Caroe's chronology the Yusufzai and their allies occupied Swat about 1515, and about 1530 Shaikh Mali surveyed the conquered country and shared it out among the clans. His settlement, with its periodic redistribution of holdings (wesh), remained the basis of land tenure north of the Kabul river into the twentieth century. The Imperial Gazetteer says that by the sixteenth century the Yusufzai held Buner, Lower Swat and the Panjkora valley, and in Humayun's reign they advanced up Swat as far as Ain.^3,7,6

Babur punished the Yusufzai clans north of Peshawar in 1519 and in the same year married Bibi Mubarika, daughter of Malik Shah Mansur; Babur wrote that he asked for her to conciliate the tribe. Akbar obtained only a nominal submission in 1584. The tribes were then divided by the teaching of Bayazid, the Pir Roshan, whose chief opponent was Akhund Darweza, the historian of the Yusufzai. About 1587 Akbar's general Zain Khan Kokaltash was sent into Swat and Bajaur; the Mughal army was routed and Birbal, Akbar's favourite, was killed. Zain Khan came back and in 1595, after five years of fighting and fort-building, completed a conquest of the country.

Under Aurangzeb the tribes again refused revenue, and in 1667 the Yusufzai and Mandanr crossed the Indus before they were defeated near Attock. Ibbetson dates to the early seventeenth century the split in which the Yusufzai proper drove the Mandanr out of Swat and Buner while the Mandanr took most of the plain.^6,7,5

Nadir Shah and the Durrani kings Ahmad Shah and Timur Shah held the country, and Timur's son Shah Shuja, whose mother was a Yusufzai, was long remembered among the tribe. Elphinstone (1815) counted at least thirty small independent communities. The strongest chief was Kasim Khan of Dir, head of the Malizai, who had ended feuds in his clan and could imprison and execute. In 1823 the Yusufzai sent a large contingent with Azim Khan against the Sikhs and were defeated, after which Ranjit Singh entered Peshawar.

The British, who annexed the Peshawar valley in 1849, at first stayed out of the hills. In 1863 a column sent through the Ambela pass against the Hindustani colony at Sitana and Malka met a rising of the Buner and Swat tribes; the expedition lost 20 officers and 219 men killed and 670 wounded before the Bunerwals destroyed Malka themselves.^6,7,3

Caroe calls Dir the one Pathan state where the tribes accepted one of themselves as hereditary ruler. Its Khans belong to the Painda Khel section of the Malizai and count nine generations from Ismail Khan, a younger contemporary of Khushal Khan Khattak. In Swat the Akhund's grandson, the Miangul Gulshahzada, brought the Yusufzai clans into one state, ruled it for some thirty years, abolished wesh and built schools and hospitals.

The Imperial Gazetteer (1908) put the Akozai Yusufzai of Swat proper at about 150,000 and called the Yusufzai dialect the classical form of Pashto, the speech of the earliest Pashto books. Ibbetson notes that the Yusufzai were also the most widely spread Pathans in Hindustan, where 1,200 of them came with Babur on his last invasion and settled.^7,6,5