The English spelling of Arabic, Persian, Pashtu and Hindustani names and words is always problematic, not least because the Victorians transliterated these words very differently from modern usage. For example, the Arabic word for a descendant of the Prophet is usually set down in English as ‘Saiyyed’ but is also written ‘Sayyed’, ‘Sayyid’, ‘Syed’, ‘Syad’ or ‘Said’. Here, to help delineate different individuals and groups of people, ‘Saiyyed’ is used for the central meaning; ‘Sayyed’ to describe the two clans occupying the Khagan valley in northern Hazara and Sittana in the Indus Valley; ‘Sayyid’ in relation to Sayyid Nazir Husain Muhaddith of Delhi, suspected leader of the Delhi Wahhabis in 1857 and after; ‘Syad’ for the moderniser Sir Syad Ahmad Khan of Alighar; and ‘Syed’ for the Indian revivalist-cum-revolutionary Syed Ahmad. In much the same way, ‘Shah’ denotes kingship but is also an honorific title granted to Saiyyeds; here it is used chiefly to identify Shah Waliullah, founder of the Madrassah-i-Rahimiya school in Delhi, his son Shah Abdul Aziz and grandson Shah Muhammad Ishaq.
With many sources still closed to me, this history can best be described as a work in progress. Corrections and further information on this subject are invited and can be posted on my website at www.godsterrorists.co.uk.
Acknowledgements
Some informants have asked not to be named. My particular thanks to them and also to Bashir Ahmad Khan, Omar Khan Afridi, Major Tariq Mahmood, Rahimulla Yusufzai, Gulzar Khan, Hugh Leach, Ron Rosner, Sue Farrington, Theon and Rosemary Wilkinson; Norman Cameron, Secretary of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs; Dr Peter Boyden, Assistant Director, and staff of the National Army Museum; Nicholas Barnard, Curator of the South Asian Department, and Tim Stanley, Asian Department, at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Alison Ohta, Curator, and Kathy Lazenbatt, Assistant Librarian, at the Royal Asiatic Society; Muhammad Isa Waley, Curator of Persian and Turkish Collections at the British Library; Matthew Buck at the Royal Artillery Museum; Helen George, Prints and Drawings, and the Director and staff of the Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library; the Director and staff at the University of Cambridge Library; the Director and staff at the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies. I am particularly grateful to David Loyn for reading my manuscript and correcting a number of factual errors. While I have sought advice and listened, I should make it clear that the reading which follows is my own. Some passages have previously appeared in World Policy Journal, Volume XXII, Number 2 (Summer 2005) and are republished here by kind permission of Karl Miller, Editor, World Policy Journal.
A special shukria, also, to the many kind persons who have helped to make my visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan memorable for the best of reasons. Their Pakistan and their Afghanistan are not well represented in this book, but it is they and others like them who embody the virtues of Islam.
Lastly, my continuing thanks to that inner band without whom no author can hope to get by: my editor Liz Robinson, for her unsparing determination to keep me on the path of literacy; at Time Warner, my commissioning editor Tim Whiting, for having faith in me, and also Linda Silverman and Iain Hunt; my agent at Sheil Land, Vivien Green, for continuing moral support; and my life partner, Liz, for always being there. Bismallah.
MAP
Introduction: ‘Am I not a Pakhtun?’
When the Pathan is a child his mother tells him, ‘The coward dies but his shrieks live long after,’ and so he learns not to shriek. He is shown dozens of things dearer than life so that he will not mind either dying or killing. He is forbidden colourful clothes or exotic music, for they weaken the arm and soften the eye. He is taught to look at the hawk and forget the nightingale. He is asked to kill his beloved to save the soul of her children. It is a perpetual surrender – an eternal giving up of man to man and to their wise follies.
A few years ago, while researching an episode of British imperial history, I made a brief journey to Kabul by way of the Khyber Pass, that notorious defile which opens on to the plains of India. Ever since men first learned to march under one banner this fatal chink in the mountain ranges guarding the Indian sub-continent’s north-western approaches has been a zone of conflict. Down through this rocky pass wave after wave of invaders have picked their way, intent on securing for themselves the three traditional prizes of the plunderer: zan, zar, zamin – women, gold and land. Among those invaders are the present incumbents of Afghanistan’s eastern and Pakistan’s western borders, a group of some two dozen tribes, large and small. While each clings fiercely to its own territory and tribal identity, they refer to themselves collectively as the Pakhtuna or Pashtuna, better known to the West as the Pathans. All claim descent from one or other of the three sons of their putative ancestor, Qais bin Rashid, who went from Gor in Afghanistan to Arabia and was there converted to Islam by the Prophet Muhammad himself. Although Sunni Muslims, they follow their own code of ethics, known as Pakhtunwali, which by tradition takes precedence even over the Islamic code of law known as sharia. There is a common Pathan proverb which states, ‘Obey the mullah’s teachings but do not go by what he does.’
Almost everyone I met on this journey was a Pathan, as was my guide and mentor Rahimullah Yusufzai, a gentle, scholarly journalist based in Peshawar, the ancient frontier town which an early British administrator long ago termed the ‘Piccadilly of Central Asia’. When I came knocking on his door Rahimullah was already well known among journalists and foreign correspondents – and is even better known today. Because he broadcast for the BBC World Service in Pashtu, the Pathan language, his voice was familiar on both sides of the border – so much so that the mere sound of it was enough to bring a group of panicky guards to their senses after they had begun poking Kalashnikovs through our car windows at a check-post: ‘Ah, Rahimullah Yusufzai,’ they cried, shouldering their weapons and beaming at us. ‘Come inside and have a cup of tea!’
Rahimullah Yusufzai had been covering the fighting in Afghanistan since before the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 and the civil war that raged thereafter as the mujahedeen (‘those who engage in struggle for the Faith’, but most often interpreted as ‘holy warriors’) who had liberated their country from the infidel Russians turned on each other and transformed an already wartorn region into Mad Max country, where warlord fought warlord and both terrorised the civil population.