Frontiers of faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan borderland

Abstract

Frontiers of Faith might better be subtitled ‘Islamic politics in the colonial NWFP’ because that is the true focus of the study. Combining an anthropological approach with history (drawn from British government reports, interviews and a surprising number of publications in Pakhto), Haroon describes the critical role played by clerics in local tribal politics, particularly by those who developed networks of followers who transcended tribal boundaries. She argues that (contra Barth’s analysis of Swat) these clerics competed directly with local tribal khans for clients and influence. While her evidence for this is persuasive, more attention might have been paid in the first ethnographic chapter to just how different Swat was politically from the autonomous tribal zone (today’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, FATA). In Swat agricultural surpluses and the ownership of rich irrigated lands underpinned a hierarchical political structure, while the low productivity of subsistence agriculture in FATA made the centralization of power quite difficult. Clerics in FATA found it far easier to exert influence there because the most powerful of them had access to resources far in excess of those available to local khans, except that is when the khans tapped into British colonial patronage. The power of clerics lay in what Haroon labels the pirmuridi lines of authority originally established by sufi leaders (pirs) with their followers (murids). She provides detailed charts that include the primary pirmuridi line descending from Akhund Ghaffur (d. 1878) to the Hadda Mulla Najmudin (d. 1903) to Haji Shahib Turangzai (d. 1938) as well as a host of regional lines of more localized importance. There are two interesting observations in this discussion. The first is that while the line of Pakhtun descent was patrilineal, with sons assuming the roles of their fathers, leadership of the powerful religious lines almost invariably devolved onto the most charismatic follower of the old pir. The pir’s own descendants, while honored, Cont Islam (2009) 3:205–207 DOI 10.1007/s11562-008-0053-z