1. Introduction

This book is about the lives of three great men from Afghanistan's past. It is also about the stories Afghan people tell one another about the past—stories in which men of quality are tested and, by dint of their single-mindedness, their courage, and their capacity, demonstrate the qualities of person and action by which greatness is achieved. The three men are a tribal khan, a Muslim saint, and a royal prince who became Afghanistan's king. Their stories come from a variety of sources. The khan's tale was recounted to me by his son and involves a feud in which the khan, while still a young boy, was required to avenge his father's murder. The Muslim saint is represented by a series of miracle stories told to me by offspring of his disciples; the stories center on how the saint came to wield spiritual and political authority along the Afghan frontier. The king, in princely fashion, is present through his own words—an autobiographical account of how he came to sit upon the Afghan throne and a proclamation in which he announces to his people the nature of his responsibility as their king and theirs as his subjects.

After surveying and comparing the moral meanings associated with these three lives in the first four chapters, I turn in the last chapter to a specific event: a widespread tribal uprising against the British Raj that broke out in the summer of 1897. This uprising was the severest attack on British colonial rule in India since the so-called Mutiny of 1857, and its principal leader was the Muslim saint whose life is examined in the third chapter. Through an analysis of both colonial and native accounts, I investigate the saint's role in this conflict, his relationship to the tribal groups that followed him, and the larger issue of how Islam traditionally functions as an encompassing framework of political association in frontier society. In addition, I also examine some of the structural reasons for the failure of this uprising, as well as the larger implications of these events for Afghanistan's future.

Throughout the book my concern is with the articulation of moral authority in Afghan society and the contradictions which different moral systems pose to one another and to themselves. The three great men whose lives I consider are icons of resoluteness. Each exemplifies a pure determinacy that stands outside the baser exchanges of average men, a determinacy that beckons even as it casts warnings of the perils that ensnarl those who would follow too closely an ideal. The final chapter on the events of 1897 records some of the dangers that arise when the determinant encounters the contingent and also draws attention to the moral threat posed by colonialism. Using the writings of another would-be hero, Winston Churchill, as a lens, I outline the moral significance attached to Islam by colonial authorities and indicate the larger, moral threat that the West was beginning to pose not only to Islamic religious leaders but also to tribesmen and kings as well.

Because my focus in this book is on the past, it might be said that this is a work of history, but my approach differs from traditional history in being centered on a few texts that are highlighted as cultural artifacts of a particular time and place. The search for logical coherence and chronological continuity in past lives and events is set aside here in favor of a different approach emphasizing the particular cultural coherences that can be found in and through stories. This approach has been pursued by a number of anthropologists interested in history, including Marshall Sahlins, whose rereading of Hawaiian historical texts has had an important influence on this work.^[1]

My concern for the cultural meanings associated with particular texts was also influenced by Hayden White's oft-cited essay, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in which he develops the point that “every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats.”^[2] However, whereas White was interested in his essay in the development of historical consciousness in the West over a broad sweep of time and in the relationship of state authority to changing modes of narrative construction, I focus in this book on a single time and place and the way in which competing forms of moral authority find expression in different kinds of narrative texts.

The ultimate objective of this book is to shed light on the sources of contemporary civil strife in Afghanistan. While I am not the first to address this subject, I believe that most of those who have tried to make sense of the situation so far have been distracted by the action on the ground and have missed what might be called the deep structure of the conflict. One reflection of this problem is the emphasis that different studies have given to the various ideological dimensions of the war. For most of the decade following the Marxist revolution in 1978, analysts assumed that the centerpiece of Afghanistan's troubles was the dispute between Soviet-aligned Marxists and Islamic fundamentalists. But gradually, observers started to consider the role of ethnic and sectarian divisions in the conflict, and then finally, in the past few years, journalists and scholars of various orientations and persuasions began to wonder aloud if, after all, the British hadn't gotten it right in the first place. Afghanistan was once and would remain a singularly wild and anarchic place that could only be managed (if at all) by men of ruthless violence and ambition. So it has seemed to conventional wisdom, and so it is that attention has drifted away from the Afghan morass to other more significant and potentially pacifiable geopolitical hot spots.

All of the factors—Marxism, Islamic fundamentalism, ethnic and sectarian loyalties, and personal ambition—that commentators have marshaled to explain Afghanistan's problems have undoubtedly played a role in the conflict, but something else is at work here as well that has to do less with ideology, identity, and anarchy than with certain deep-seated moral contradictions that press against each other like tectonic plates at geological fault lines below the surface of events. In other words, Afghanistan's troubles derive less from divisions between groups or from the ambitious strivings of particular individuals than they do from the moral incoherence of Afghanistan itself.

This incoherence goes back to the rise of Islam, but it has been greatly exacerbated since the end of the nineteenth century, when the expansion of colonial empires into South and Central Asia led to the fabrication of a nation-state framework on the unstable foundation of Afghan society. The artificiality of the nation-state in this setting and its incommensurability with Afghan social and political realities have deepened inherent contradictions within Afghan culture, contradictions that have increased under the pressure of trying to construct and maintain a framework of unity in defiance of underlying discords. While various social, economic, and political factors have kept the Afghan polity together since its establishment one hundred years ago, the moral fault lines below the Afghan nation-state have not disappeared just because the surface configuration has changed. The underlying situation remains the same, and obscure tectonic shifts of which one is hardly aware are always capable of producing violent surges at unexpected moments.

One reflection of the fundamental artificiality of the Afghan nation-state is the absence of a moral discourse of statehood shared by a majority of its citizens. Afghanistan has great heroes that are recognized by all and a common set of events that are generally glorified (especially the nineteenth-century insurrections against British occupation). Together these heroes and events do constitute what might be called a myth of nationhood, but there is no corresponding myth of the state to go along with it. The result is that although most Afghans hold to some notion of shared identity with one another, that identity is articulated horizontally between individuals, tribes, and regions rather than vertically between the state and its citizens.

Drawing again on White's article on narrativity, I argue that if one of the requirements of state authority is to impose its vision of significance and necessity on events and to infuse this vision with “the odor of the ideal,” then it can be said that one of the failures of the Afghan state and one of the causes of its present inchoate condition has been its own persistent inability to make itself a necessary element of the Afghan moral narrative.^[3] In Afghanistan, other notions of community have persisted on an equal level with that of the state. Similarly, other moral orders have endured despite the development of an increasingly powerful central government, and they have continued to challenge the state in its assertions of legitimacy and its role in plotting the meaning and direction of ongoing events.

Traditionally, these contests of legitimacy have been discussed in terms of tribes and states, with Islamic leaders and institutions sometimes introduced as mediating elements in the relationship. In this study, however, I am less concerned with the social and institutional structure of this relationship than I am with the cultural principles that animated it, specifically, the principles of honor, Islam, and what I will call rule (i.e., state governance). My thesis is that honor, Islam, and rule represent distinct moral orders that are in many respects incompatible with one another. While this incompatibility has been mediated at various times by the delineation of distinct realms of activity within which tribes, states, and religious institutions have exerted their separate authority, the underlying incommensurability of honor, Islam, and rule persisted and became increasingly irreconcilable with the emergence of the nation-state.

In amplifying this thesis, I have located my study in a particular place—the eastern Afghan frontier—and a particular historical era—the late nineteenth century. The frontier is a critically important area because it was there that the pressure of British colonial rule was most dramatically felt and where the contradictions in Afghanistan's political status were most clearly illustrated.^[4] The late nineteenth century was a crucial period in Afghan history for similar reasons. In 1879–80 Kabul was occupied by the British for the second time in forty years. Because of the disastrous nature of the earlier occupation, the British decided on this occasion to get out as fast as they could. To rule in their stead, they chose a young prince, Abdur Rahman, who was relatively unknown to them and who had spent most of his adult life in exile in Russian Central Asia.

When Abdur Rahman took command, the country he was given to rule was up in arms. Few of his nominal subjects were ready to accede to his authority, and other royal princes were prepared to vie for the favor of tribes and ethnic groups that were themselves eager to assert autonomy from Kabul. Over a period of twenty years, Amir Abdur Rahman succeeded in eliminating his dynastic competition, destroying regional warlords who sought to govern independently of Kabul, and suppressing local revolts. In doing so, he also managed to quiet the threat of outside colonial intervention. So long as he could control his own people and protect against Russian encroachment toward their borders, the British largely abstained from intervening in Afghanistan's internal affairs, although they did continue to exert control over the country's foreign affairs.^[5]

But as the threat of direct colonial domination waned during Abdur Rahman's rule, a more insidious force began to be exerted on Afghan society in the form of the nation-state itself, the framework and mechanisms for which were initiated and implemented during Abdur Rahman's reign. As a number of recent scholars have demonstrated, the nation-state is not the natural and inevitable polity that we sometimes imagine it to be.^[6] Nor is it just an administrative arrangement that can be applied anywhere, anytime, like an architectural blueprint. The nation-state is, rather, the product of particular historical events that occurred in a particular place on the globe. As a consequence of European colonial expansion to other regions of the world, the nation-state was imposed elsewhere, but as recent history has tragically shown, it has remained in many regions an unnatural transplant maintained solely through terror and repression.

In the case of Afghanistan, the imposition of this new framework of political relationship conflicted with the existing arrangement in which kings, seated at various times in Qandahar and Kabul, extended their authority into the precincts of autonomous local principalities and tribes, while the local principalities and tribes did their best to offset (or at least gain advantage from) these extensions of state control through assertions of their own power. The advent of the nation-state presented a new challenge to this arrangement, a challenge that was as much moral as it was practical, and it is the objective of this book to convey a sense both of the underlying principles of honor, Islam, and rule as they traditionally coexisted in Afghan society and of the way in which this coexistence was undermined by the appearance of the nation-state under and after Amir Abdur Rahman.

Beginnings

In 1982, when I arrived in Peshawar to begin research for my Ph. D. dissertation in anthropology, the war in Afghanistan had already been under way for four years. During the next two years (and again for six months in 1986), I had the opportunity to watch its conduct from close at hand. In military terms, the mid-eighties was a period of protracted stalemate in which little was accomplished by either side. In ideological and political terms, however, this period was significant for being the time when what had seemed a fairly straightforward conflict between Marxism and Islam was clearly revealed to be something a great deal more complicated and contradictory. This was the time when the self-interested and parochial character of the Afghan resistance parties became unmistakably apparent, and large numbers of Afghan refugees began to lose their certainty as to war's meaning and value. It was also the period when the Afghan people as a whole began to confront the possibility that the conflict might go on for a very long time, that the millions who had gone into exile might be permanently dispossessed, and that the country they had left might come unglued for good.

The chaos I confronted in Peshawar was all the more remarkable to me because this was not my first trip to the region. Between 1975 and 1977, I had spent almost two years teaching English at a language center in Kabul. The mid-seventies were the golden age of economic development programs in Afghanistan, when teams from a half dozen nations vied with each other to bring the country “into the twentieth century”—or so they and most of the world imagined, for in those days the rightness and logic of development assistance seemed straightforward, and there were few outward signs of the trouble that lay ahead.

The late sixties and early seventies had witnessed a great deal of political turbulence, with violent student demonstrations a frequent occurrence, but the coup d'etat of President Muhammad Daud in July 1973 had brought some of the agitators into the government and pushed the remainder underground. The sole hint of any political unhappiness of which I was aware was a minor uprising that broke out in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul on a holiday weekend during my first summer in Afghanistan. I became aware of this event only because it caused the cancellation of a bus trip that I had planned to the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif. The press made little mention of the problems in Panjshir, and I only discovered much later that there had been attacks that day against government installations throughout the country and that they all had been organized by student leaders of the Muslim Youth Organization (sazman-i jawanan-i musulman).^[7]

When I left Afghanistan to attend graduate school, the idea I had in mind was to live in a mountain village somewhere in the Hindu Kush. The plan I had was a traditional one, long honored in anthropology, but it began to fall apart in the spring of 1978 when I saw headlines announcing the overthrow of President Daud and the establishment of a new revolutionary government in Kabul. Since I was in the early stages of my training, I had plenty of time to reorient the subject of my research plans and grant proposals from villages, kinship, and ritual toward other matters. What I didn't realize, however, was how little the existing anthropological works offered for understanding the kinds of dislocations and disturbances that I was to confront in my fieldwork.

The greatest dissonance I experienced between literature and reality came in my efforts to apply the various studies of tribe-state relations that I had read in graduate school to the actual situation I encountered in Peshawar. The problem was that the majority of these studies viewed tribes and states as discrete sociopolitical formations bound together in long-term dialectical arrangements. Tribes existed on the rural periphery, states were at the urban center, and each served to define the other in their opposition to one another. The classic expression of this opposition came from Morocco, where various scholars had encountered the local distinction between bled l-makhzen and bled s-siba: the land of governance versus the land of dissidence. Accompanying this general spatial opposition, anthropologists had discerned a set of schematic associations: the order of the state was thus opposed by the anarchy of the tribe; the commerce and cosmopolitanism of the city was set off against the barren wastes of the desert and mountain homeland; the artifice of the royal court contrasted with the rough-edged simplicity of the tribal guest house.

While the nature of the relationship between tribes and states has been amplified and refined by later scholars, the basic formula goes back to Ibn Khaldun, the great medieval historian whose analysis of North African dynastic politics established the framework for subsequent anthropological and historical studies of Middle Eastern politics. In Ibn Khaldun's view, tribes and states were linked in an enduring and oft-repeated cycle that begins when a desert tribe, fused by kinship and “group feeling” (‘asabiyah), rises up to overthrow the existing dynasty. As the desert tribe accommodates itself to the decadent life of court and city, it loses the martial qualities and the sense of closeness that had made it powerful in the first place. Over three or four generations, the pace of decline quickens. Kings grow lazy and lose touch with the qualities of greatness that had originally brought their ancestors to the throne. Individuals pursue their own interests at the expense of their kinsmen, while the tribe abandons the group feeling that once made it a formidable fighting force. As the ruling group sinks into decline, other tribes consolidate their strength on the desert fringe and eventually push into the area of government control, doing to the ruling dynasty what its own ancestors had done earlier to their predecessors on the throne.

As I prepared to begin my fieldwork, I naturally assumed that Ibn Khaldun's model would help provide a theoretical understanding to the situation I would confront. After all, in its previous two hundred years, Afghanistan had witnessed a number of great clashes between the central government and various popular coalitions, almost all of which featured some combination of tribal groups from the eastern border area of the country taking up arms to overthrow the government. Sometimes the tribes succeeded, sometimes they did not. Regardless of the outcome, these conflicts did seem to occur at fairly regular intervals, and they appeared to follow what could be construed as a variant of the kind of cyclical pattern that Ibn Khaldun had discerned in the rise and fall of North African dynasties six centuries earlier.^[8]

The most recent instance of this pattern asserting itself is, of course, the popular uprising that began in 1978. As in the past, coalitions of tribes and ethnic groups all over the country rose up to defend themselves against government intrusion in their lives. This time, the government proclaimed a Marxist line, which made it unique in Afghan history, but like other hated regimes before it, this one too allowed itself to serve as the puppet of foreign interests and promoted policies and engaged in practices that were viewed as offensive to popular morality. These characteristics made the Marxist regime seem quite like others that had come before it. Indeed, history appeared to be repeating itself: tribes and states once more were squaring off in one of those periodic clashes by which each side comes to define itself and the other by the difference between them.

Nevertheless, one of the first revelations I had on arriving in Peshawar was that it was extremely difficult to discern who the tribes were in this scenario. Peshawar was overrun with Afghan refugees in 1982, and although many of them identified themselves as members of particular tribes, those tribes had little if any concrete, corporate existence. Small, patrilineally related kin groups often lived together in the refugee camps I surveyed, but these groups seldom consisted of more than twenty or thirty families and only rarely had any connection to larger tribal structures. More important than tribal identity in the choice of residence was the time of arrival and the availability of sites on which to set up a tent. Likewise, it was as common to meet people who had chosen to live near in-laws, business partners, or former neighbors as it was to meet kinsmen living together.^[9]

As difficult as it was to discern discrete tribes, it was equally hard to detect a government. This was Pakistan, after all, and although the Pakistani government was very much in evidence, the Afghan resistance movement with which I was concerned had spawned not a government but a shifting assortment of interest groups that passed themselves off as political parties. Shortly after the Soviet invasion, a Pakistani scholar counted over a hundred separate Afghan refugee political parties in Peshawar, each with its own office, manifesto, and, if it was lucky, letterhead.^[10] The Pakistan government had forced all but ten of those parties to disband by the time I arrived in 1982; but while now better funded, the leadership and composition of the ten surviving parties remained unstable and subject to continual rearrangement.

There was another government, of course, in Kabul, but my position disallowed me from seeing it up close. Even if I had been able to observe the situation on the other side, I don't think I would have found it very different. All through the 1980s, the same sort of ethnic and personal factionalism that I observed in Peshawar was eating away at the Kabul regime as well, so that nowhere was one likely to find anything resembling the kind of developed, sophisticated court culture and government administration that one reads about in the traditional literature on Middle Eastern tribes and states.

Another problem with applying the classic tribe-state model to the Afghan situation was the overwhelming significance of Islam. In most studies of tribe-state relations that I had encountered as a graduate student, Islam was of secondary importance and tended to enter the political equation solely as an interstitial force: a politician wearing the guise of preacher, hereditary saint, or charismatic mystic arrives on the scene at a time of crisis and interposes himself between tribe and state as a mediator, power broker, or rabble-rouser. As usually described, the Islamic figure's turn on the stage is brief and his significance transitory. In almost all cases, he is viewed with suspicion—as an opportunist who dons a disguise to mislead the people and stir up trouble.

This depiction of Islam's role in political affairs makes some sense perhaps at certain points in Afghan and frontier history, but the persistent tendency to interpret the role of religious leaders in cynical terms struck me as biased, while the more general tendency to see their importance as medial and temporary also seemed inappropriate, particularly in the context I was witnessing. The war in Afghanistan had already been going on for four years when I began my research and is in its eighteenth year as I complete this book. Clearly, the notion of Islam as politically short-lived and interstitial was not working as it was supposed to, even if one assumed that this was simply a very long intermission between acts in the national drama. An even greater problem with seeing Islam simply as an intermediary force is that it fails to account for the moral and political authority wielded by Islamic leaders, an authority that, in my experience, was not reducible to their presumed position in the interstices of tribes and states.

While I was engaged in research, these incongruities led me to the conclusion that Ibn Khaldun's model had little to offer. Over time, however, I have come to change my mind and to see the problem as lying more in the direction in which Ibn Khaldun's successors have gone than in his original formulation itself. Specifically, I believe that modern scholars have tended to focus on (and in the process overreify) tribes and states as concrete social formations while underrepresenting the emphasis that Ibn Khaldun himself gave to the moral dimension of political relations. As concerned as he was with tribes, states, and Islam, Ibn Khaldun paid at least as much attention to the moral sentiments that made each of them unique: the “group feeling” that existed among tribesmen, the “royal authority” upon which kingship was based, and the “prophetic law” that sanctioned the pronouncements of Muslim divines.^[11]

For me, perceiving the significance of the moral bases of political authority came not through any great, solitary insight, but as a result of the particular exigencies of my fieldwork situation. Historians working with archival sources tend to absorb the assumptions, rationales, and expectations of the state employees whose documents they are reading. Similarly, anthropologists who have lived and worked for a long time with a particular tribe tend to adopt that tribe's perspective and to see the world from its vantage. My situation, however, was different because it had no natural center of social gravity.

Peshawar was a chaotic and somewhat estranging place in which to conduct fieldwork. People were far from their homes, their native kin groups were generally scattered, and the formal political groupings that claimed to represent them attracted only transient respect and rarely generated much sense of shared identity. The only common cement was Islam, but there was a pervasive feeling of disillusionment here as well—not with Islam itself, but with the self-interested promotions that various leaders undertook in the name of Islam. Practically every day I would hear stories of minor corruption on the part of religious leaders alongside reports of street abductions and summary executions. And when leaders were not filling their pockets or spreading terror, they were making themselves objects of derision, as when a party leader in his sixties married a teenage girl.

The absence of stability was disorienting to me at first. Most anthropological accounts at that time tended to emphasize the endurance of the social order, not its destruction. In Peshawar, however, I could see or infer very little in the way of stability and therefore had to accustom myself to believe my own eyes, to locate my study in the reality around me, and finally to come to terms with what it means for a society to collapse upon itself. Although it seems a rather straightforward matter now, it was not a simple conclusion at the time. Repeatedly, I tried to write about things of which I had no direct experience, for instance, the social organization of tribes or the economic situation in Afghanistan prior to the war.

The reason I did so was simply the force of tradition. The models I had in my head for doing anthropology centered on the material, economic, and ritual substructures of everyday life around which villages and nomadic camping groups arranged themselves over time. Peshawar disallowed this sort of approach. Refugees also had to meet basic subsistence needs, of course, and many of the rituals of everyday life, from Friday prayers to female seclusion, were being maintained in Peshawar, just as they had been in Afghanistan. Yet, while the persistence of certain key cultural traits was an interesting subject in itself, it also seemed to mask an underlying process of dissolution that needed to be understood on its own terms.^[12]

Although I didn't completely recognize it at the time, the turning point for my research came one day about a month after I had arrived in Peshawar. I was still staying at a hotel at the time and had gotten to know a fellow transient, an American from Los Angeles, who was in Peshawar to record sounds (background noises, music, local color) that might be used for a proposed docudrama on the war in Afghanistan. (The plot, as I recall, had to do with American mountaineers who set out to climb one of the peaks close to the Afghan-Pakistan border and get lost in a snowstorm, only to find themselves in an Afghan village in the middle of the war.) We became friendly, and when he proposed that I accompany him one day to record some Afghan musicians, I readily agreed.

Our destination was a small room above a cloth shop in the part of old Peshawar known as Qissa Khani: the Street of the Storytellers. As picturesque as the name sounds, I had always found it incongruous because one was more likely to hear the drone of a motor rickshaw or the pounding of a tinsmith there than the tale of a bard. On this occasion, however, the name proved appropriate, for in the bare room upstairs we found three musicians and a singer who proceeded to sing song after song of the war over the mountains. Some of the songs were exhortations to the tribes to rally against the infidels in Kabul; others were tragic laments for fallen martyrs. The author of most of the songs was a man named Rafiq Jan, whom I was not to meet until several years later; his songs, however, were to become important to me not only for their content and the connection they provided to the ethos of the war but also for the way they made me reconsider the direction of my own research.^[13]

That afternoon in Qissa Khani began to reorient my attention from larger, more abstract matters, like “tribes” and “states,” toward the opportunities that were immediately available and what the people right around me were actually doing, which, of course, was mostly getting by—preserving and supplementing their ration allotments, establishing and keeping up contacts with the various refugee political organizations, and obtaining various forms of assistance and sinecure from them. These activities could consume considerable amounts of time, but they still left a large part of the day free for the other principal occupation of refugees—talking and telling stories.

While I was ill-disposed to take this sort of activity very seriously at first, I eventually came to see it as the centerpiece of my ethnographic research. My initial reluctance to pay much attention to this activity stemmed from the fact that most of what I was hearing was a litany of gripes and complaints—all very predictable and pathetic for being so. Gradually, however, it dawned on me that this was actually a more serious and revealing discourse than I had imagined. Much of the conversation did consist of laments about inadequate ration allotments and reproachful comments regarding this or that party or leader, but I could also make out other persistent elements in the talk, the most notable of which was nostalgia for the past and for what might have been.

One focus of this nostalgia was the early part of the popular rebellion, which was seen as a time when people acted out of moral principle unsullied by self-interest. A second focus, at least among some of the refugees, was the absent king, Zahir Shah, who had been deposed in 1973 and was therefore relatively uncorrupted by more recent political events that had tarnished other leaders. Viewed in hindsight, Zahir Shah's reign (1933–73) seemed to many to be a long springtime of peace and gentility, and it was the unrealistic sense that such a time could come again that fueled the cult of his return.

Because Zahir Shah was still alive, many refugees pictured him as a “man on horseback” who might reappear to lead the nation to peace and reconciliation. The ex-king was not the only person put forward as the national savior, but in my experience he was the most commonly proposed candidate, probably because he was the best known and his reputation the least damaged. Many also romanticized the idea of kingship itself, which, for all its faults, had the virtue of fixing authority (and dynastic dissension) within a single family. Another name that was frequently mentioned was that of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of Panjshir Valley (whose attack on President Daud's government in 1975 had disturbed my holiday bus trip). Massoud's reputation has since declined owing to his involvement in the long and destructive siege of Kabul that began in 1993, but in the mid-1980s many who would later denounce and belittle him entertained the notion that he might potentially rescue Afghanistan from the abyss.^[14]

Regardless of their specific content, such discussions made clear to me that many Afghans felt a need to express their disillusionment by focusing on times and leaders other than those they currently faced. Zahir Shah, because of his association with a favorably remembered past, and Massoud, because of his dissociation from the immediate and despised situation in Peshawar, were both cast as potential champions—men who could, as champions have always done, destroy evil and reestablish order. No heroes emerged, of course, but the recurrent longing for the appearance of a champion encouraged me to begin to think about heroes, what they mean, and how they help to encode cultural and moral truths that are at the center of what is and is not present in Afghanistan today.

Recollecting the Past

I should mention before proceeding further that I had originally received permission from the Pakistani government to conduct an ethnographic study of a refugee camp. My topic was to show how Afghans preserved their cultural identity in the camp context. Eventually, I was allowed four months to investigate this subject, but shortly after my arrival in the capital, Islamabad, I was told that the one research permit I had already received from the Ministry of Education was inadequate and I would need a second one from the Ministry of States and Frontier Regions. That would take months, I was warned (in fact, the permit wasn't issued until more than a year later), but in the meantime I could move to Peshawar, cash my fellowship checks, and make myself at home.

Like the Afghans I had come to study, I had plenty of time on my hands during this year of waiting, and I wasn't at all sure what to do with it. In their initial trepidation and uncertainty, anthropologists newly arrived in a village have long relied on a variety of mundane tasks to get them over the hurdle of the first few months. These tasks, which typically include such activities as measuring rice paddies and conducting household censuses, do not usually figure in the final ethnography (at least not these days), but they do serve to cushion the ethnographer from the more difficult enterprise of actually relating to people and making sense of what they are saying and doing. It was partially out of a similar desire to cushion myself from the strangeness of my surroundings that I turned to history and stories.

Although I was first encouraged in this direction by my experience listening to the musicians sing songs of war, one of the things that most appealed to me about the afternoon I spent in that room overlooking the Street of the Storytellers was that I could turn on my tape recorder, lie back, and let those on the other end of the microphone do the work. The tape recorder was a buffer that diffused interaction while also allowing me the comfort of knowing that I was collecting information that might somehow, someday prove useful. Eventually, as my language skills improved, I started taking a more aggressive role in my interviews; however, initially I took as my role not that of the investigative interviewer but that of the chronicler, and my rationale for doing so was that Peshawar was chock full of people whose life histories constituted a significant portion of Afghanistan's recent national history.

One of the ironies of the situation I encountered was that in displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their native villages, the war had laid bare a treasure trove of oral history. In the past, no one could ever have tapped more than a small part of this resource if only because the people one might have wanted to interview were too widely dispersed and often lived in remote villages that were difficult to reach. If a researcher could even discover the names of appropriate people to interview on a particular subject, he or she would then have had to find out where they lived and try to make arrangements to travel there. With luck, the potential interviewee would be home and willing to talk. If not, too bad.^[15] The war significantly altered this situation, for one of the unintended consequences of the Marxist government's efforts to suppress the traditional rural elites was that many of those who had played a prominent role in earlier events (along with the sons and grandsons of those who had been important in earlier eras) were among the first to flee the country. Many of these elite families crossed the border into Pakistan, and a large percentage of them ended up in Peshawar.^[16]

Not surprisingly, the greatest number of refugees came from the eastern provinces of Afghanistan, a fact that disposed me to focus on this region even though I would have preferred to concentrate on a Persian-speaking area. I had begun studying the Afghan dialect of Persian during my stay in Kabul in the mid-seventies, had continued it in graduate school, and by the time I arrived in Peshawar, was reasonably fluent. But the overwhelming preponderance of Pakhtu-speaking refugees from the east and the relative paucity of native Persian speakers obliged me to fix my attention on the eastern areas and start learning a second language. Fortunately, because I was interested in people who had been significant political actors or who were the offspring of such people, I found that I could usually conduct my interviews in Persian since this had been the principal language of commerce and the state and almost all of my subjects had sufficient mastery of the language to converse easily. This being the case (and given the fact that I never knew when the Pakistani government might take notice of my anomalous presence and decide to expel me as a security risk), my decision was the expedient one of falling back on Persian whenever possible, even if it meant that I was communicating with many informants in their second language.

Since I had not anticipated the possibility of conducting an oral-history project, the research plan I adopted during my first year in Peshawar was vaguely defined at best. There were people who had stories to tell. I was determined to capture these stories on tape, and later I would figure out what to do with them. All told, I conducted more than one hundred formal interviews with a wide variety of people. These included five of the seven principal party leaders, scores of mid-level officials, tribal elders from most of the major tribes in the border area, well-known and obscure Sufi religious leaders, ordinary Sufi disciples, former directors of the departments of tribal affairs and religious endowments, one former Justice Minister, a close confidant of King Zahir Shah, primary school teachers and university professors, poets, various nomads-cum-refugees (including both the camel-herding and truck-driving varieties), drug smugglers, former army officers, present jihad commanders, ex-communists, judges, religious teachers, mullas, Turkmen carpet dealers, an old Uzbek chief who'd fled from Central Asia as a young boy when the Bolsheviks took over, a variety of businessmen, newspaper editors, pamphleteers, and the grandson of the bandit Ajab Khan Afridi, who had gained renown in the 1920s for kidnapping the British girl Molly Ellis.

The list goes on, continuing in the same eclectic fashion. The only real criterion I imposed in deciding whom to interview was my sense of who had an interesting story to tell. Since I didn't have a clear idea of how I might finally focus the project, I also intentionally sought breadth, on the assumption that it was better to have too much than too little.^[17] On one level, this mix of interview topics was exhilarating, but it was also disorienting. Despite my change of direction toward oral history, I still had some notion of following anthropological tradition and focusing on a single tribe or even some quarter of the city.

I abandoned this inclination only gradually and, in the meantime, felt quite perplexed by the indefiniteness of the interviews and the absence of any clear organizing principle that might help me decide what to do with all of the material I was collecting. Presaging the fate of the Hubble satellite with its flawed telescope lens, I found myself a long way from home trying to focus on a lot of distant objects that remained blurry no matter how I adjusted my instruments. Unlike the Hubble satellite, however, I did not ultimately need a rescue crew from home to salvage my mission (although my wife's arrival six months into my fieldwork certainly helped). Rather, I had simply to remind myself to attend to the opportunities that my research situation presented and not try to impose my preconceived ideas onto the material.

As I began to realize the value of responding to (as opposed to forcing myself upon) the situation, it became clear that Peshawar offered a scope that most anthropologists living within the precincts of a single group are not afforded. The disadvantage I suffered under, given my interest in what was going on across the border, was that I was not immersed in the social milieu of the people about whom I wanted to write, and consequently I could not produce the sort of traditional ethnographic study of a particular place at a particular time that has long been the stock-in-trade of anthropologists. At the same time, however, because of the number, diversity, and uniqueness of the informants upon whom I could draw, I had a wider field available to me than most anthropologists have. With the disparate ethnographic and historical sources at my disposal, I could hold within my lens a wider than usual terrain that still possessed considerable detail—something midway between the highly nuanced but closely cropped portraits generally produced by ethnographers and the long-range but fuzzy panoramas that historians usually provide from their documentary sources.

Samiullah Safi and Sultan Muhammad Khan

If my experience in Qissa Khani began to awaken me to what was going on around me, my encounter with Samiullah Safi, the narrator of the story of Sultan Muhammad Khan that will be told in chapter 2, opened me up to the historical possibilities of the moment. I met Safi (as he is called) at the office of the Afghan Information Center, a now defunct organization whose principal task at that time was to provide assistance for foreign journalists who wanted to report on the war inside Afghanistan. When I first arrived in Peshawar, I used to go over to the Afghan Information Center several times a week to chat with whoever happened to be there. Because the center catered to reporters from abroad, I fit in and was always made to feel welcome, something I especially appreciated during the first few months of my stay in Peshawar.

As I spent more time at the center, it quickly became clear that despite its nominal status as a cooperative, most of its work was performed by one man—Sayyid Bahauddin Majrooh, a former professor and dean at Kabul University, who long ago, in another life really, had attended university in France and written his Ph. D. dissertation on Hegel. Majrooh spoke French and English fluently, along with many other languages, and was possessed of rare intelligence and energy. Because the center generated a limited amount of day-to-day work, it had become a one-man operation—Majrooh being that man—and the other members usually spent their time sitting around a table in the living room gossiping with one another. That suited most just fine, but others were unhappy in their inactivity—among them Safi.

During the first few months, Safi was almost always at the information center. Sometimes there would be three or four others with him, sometimes eight or ten. Usually Majrooh would be sitting at a table in the next room, punching keys on his typewriter or talking in one of his various languages to some foreigner newly arrived and eager to head over the border. Most of the members of the center could speak at least a smattering of English, and the one job that many of them did do was to accompany and translate for this or that foreigner as they conducted their business in Peshawar. The only one who did not perform this job was Safi, and the reason seemed to me both his pride and the fact that, alone among the center members, he could speak none of the European languages that the visiting journalists knew. I don't remember exactly how I got to know Safi, but it probably had something to do with my being one of the few foreigners who could speak with him and appreciate his story and situation.

When Safi was a boy of five or six, his family had been exiled from Pech Valley because of his father's involvement in the jang-i safi, the War of the Safis. The Safis had long been one of the most dissident tribes in the country, and the jang-i safi, which broke out in the late 1940s and lasted for more than a year, had severely tested the authority of the Afghan government. Prior to the present civil war, this conflict was generally recognized as the last great tribal rebellion in Afghanistan—the final act in the ancient drama of tribe-state conflict in this traditionally anarchic region. Safi's father had been a leader of that failed uprising and suffered nearly two decades of imprisonment and exile as the price of his leadership.

His family had also paid the price, being transported across the country and forced to live, first, in the western city of Herat and, later, in several isolated cities in the far north. Eventually, in the mid-1960s, the government allowed the family to move to Kabul, where Safi attended the university. This was during the so-called Democratic Era, when independent newspapers and political parties were permitted to operate openly for the first time. Safi's family benefited from the climate of liberalization as well, being given the opportunity to return to their native Pech Valley for the first time since the uprising twenty years earlier.

Shortly after their return, Safi announced his own decision to run in the parliamentary election as the deputy from Pech. Despite his having been away for most of his life, Safi won that election, a testament to the deep and abiding respect that the people of Pech had for his father. Safi stayed in the parliament until it was disbanded by Muhammad Daud following his bloodless coup d'etat of July 1973. Thereafter, Safi held various government jobs, including the editorship of a folklore journal. When the Marxist Khalqi party took power in April 1978, Safi began making preparations to return to Pech, which was among the first regions to experience anti-government agitation following the coup. Safi managed to leave Kabul with his family in December, and on his arrival in Pech, he immediately assumed a leadership role in the burgeoning rebellion against the Marxist regime.

Safi stayed in Pech for more than a year, planning strategy and rallying support for the rebels from neighboring tribes. Late in 1980, however, ten months after the Soviet invasion, Safi had been forced to leave Pech for Pakistan and had not returned. The initial impetus for his departure was a major Soviet operation targeted on Pech, but the reason he had not gone back was his ongoing dispute with local mullas. Independent tribal leaders like himself had come under pressure from religious leaders aligned with the Peshawar parties. Gradually, after much bickering and maneuvering on both sides, the mullas had won out, and the only tribal leaders who could maintain their position were those who accepted the mullas' terms and their ultimate control of the military situation and the society.

My encounter with Safi came about a year after his departure from Pech. I knew nothing of this history before the interview, and it is my recollection that the reason I suggested an interview in the first place had as much to do with his availability as with any perception on my part that his story might be a particularly significant one. I don't recall exactly how I phrased it, but (in keeping with my graduate school lessons) I let him know that I wanted to find out about “tribes and honor and Islam.” Whatever I said, it was enough to get him to tell me his story and the story of his family, particularly that of his father, Sultan Muhammad Khan.

To this day I don't really know why Safi talked with me, but over a period of several weeks we spent nearly fifteen hours together taping an extensive inventory of stories about his father's life and his own. During these tapings, Safi was very much in charge. I would occasionally ask a question, but the basic agenda was his, as he told me (and the tape recorder) what he thought I (and it) should know. After we had finished, however, Safi said nothing more about the interview and never asked me what I was going to do with all the material we had recorded. He did tell me that I was free to use it any way I saw fit, but he never inquired as to what way that might be. Then, a few months after we finished the interviews, he drifted away from the information center, and I stopped seeing him with any frequency. Occasionally I would run into him on the street or at someone's house, but we pretty much forgot about each other.

Despite losing track of Safi, I grew increasingly fascinated by the stories he had given me as I listened to them again and again during the process of translating and transcribing the tapes. In attending to Safi's stories, I decided that somehow I would keep these artifacts in the final text that I produced. Stories were important in and of themselves, I concluded, and I did not want simply to extract from them some pulpy mash of facts that could be reconstituted within my own narrative history. My interaction with Safi also led me to abandon the traditional questions I had brought with me from graduate school and focus instead on the particular lives that were being revealed to me in my various interviews.^[18]

Although I had not anticipated this emphasis when I set out to do my research, it was not altogether surprising that I should move in this direction, for the book that had first made me consider going into anthropology had been Clifford Geertz's Islam Observed. In this work Geertz contrasted Islamic cultural styles in Morocco and Java, and he did so by considering the very different personae of legendary saints: a rough-and-ready firebrand from the tribal hinterland of Morocco and a quietist yogi-like divine from the peasant heartland of Java. Geertz's portrayal of these two saints as “axial figures,” each of whom exemplified a particular cultural “style,” undoubtedly influenced my decision to view Safi's father as an axial figure—not of Afghan Islam but of Afghan honor. Sultan Muhammad Khan's fame in the tribal areas was well attested, and he was repeatedly mentioned by others from the frontier region as a man of great deeds who defended his personal and family honor with notorious zeal. This reputation and the wonderfully evocative quality of the stories themselves encouraged me to portray Sultan Muhammad in a way comparable to Geertz's handling of the Moroccan (Sidi Lahsen Lyusi) and the Javanese (Sunan Kalidjaga).

As I was beginning to see Safi's father as exemplary, however, the stories I was hearing also encouraged me to question the very notion of the axial figure, because many of the narratives seemed too extreme to be in any sense representative of a lifestyle or normative of the way honor should be followed. As often as Sultan Muhammad appears to exemplify the tenets of honor, he also appears to breach them, and the violence inherent in his stories also made me wonder about the viability of society itself when such passions were loosed. But for all the confusion they engendered in me, the stories still existed, and the detail and conviction with which they were told convinced me that they were grounded in empirical reality, just as the testimony of others besides Safi convinced me of the heroic stature of the man.

My sense of uncertainty as to how to interpret Safi's stories of his father's life began to develop while I was still in Peshawar, but the feeling didn't solidify until much later, when I was writing this book and casting about for a title. I had stewed over this issue for a long time, assuming that there must be something wrong with a book that couldn't find a title for itself. Finally, a Persian phrase came to my mind, a phrase I had heard many times in relation to great men of the past: qahraman-i zaman, hero of the age. The term was normally reserved for mythic figures from the distant past such as the warrior-poet Khushhal Khan Khattak or the great champion Rustam, from Firdausi's Shahnama. The phrase was rarely applied to a living person and never, in my hearing, to a Muslim saint. Still, it had a nice ring and might even convey a hint of irony, given the morass in which Afghan politics and political leaders were currently trapped. More importantly, it was appropriate to the subject of the great lives that define particular times, which is what the book was going to be about. What I didn't recognize right away was the aptness of the title in relation to the equivocal legacy of heroes. The word qahraman derives from the Arabic root qahr, meaning to subdue or gain mastery over something or someone. As it is used in the two relevant languages to this study—Persian and Pakhtu—other meanings have also accrued to the root form: rage, fury, wrath, calamity—all of which convey a sense of violence and disequilibrium.

What this etymology signifies to me is something that scholars of Greek myths have long realized: as praiseworthy as heroes might be, they are also dangerous. Noble and memorable, indeed, they also stand outside the normal orbit of human interaction and are never entirely fit for ordinary society.^[19] In Afghanistan, no less than in other cultures at other times, heroes are an ambivalent blessing. On the one hand, they embody through their deeds the axiomatic truths by which societies define themselves. On the other, they strain the limits of what societies can tolerate if they are to survive. The hero rarely knows his place; he creates his own space at the expense of others and in doing so almost invariably transgresses the limits and agreements around which the normal commerce of daily life takes shape.

Shahmahmood and the Mulla of Hadda

Although Safi's stories were to occupy a considerable portion of my thoughts over the next few years, the interviews themselves were over quickly, and Safi was soon gone as well. The next part of my research would not go so easily, for it involved untangling the complex histories of the Islamic parties that then dominated the refugee political scene.

When I arrived in Peshawar in 1982, there were ten recognized resistance parties aligned in two coalitions: the Seven Party Unity (ettehad-i haft gana) and the Three Party Unity (ettehad-i se guna). The Seven Party Unity was the more radical and included among its members the Islamic Party (hizb-i islami), headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the Islamic Society (jam‘iyyat-i islami),directed by Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. The Three Party Unity, the more traditional alliance, counted among its members a party directed by an old-style religious scholar—the Movement for Islamic Revolution (harakat-i inqilab-i islami) of Maulavi Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi—and two parties affiliated with the heads of prominent spiritual families: the National Liberation Front (jabha-yi nejat-i milli), run by Hazrat Sibghatullah Mujadidi, and the National Islamic Front (mahaz-i milli islami), whose leader was Sayyid Ahmad Gailani.

Although I had been keeping abreast of events before my arrival in Peshawar and was aware of the ascendance of these parties, the reality of the world that they had created was something I was not prepared for, even after two years in Kabul. If anything, my time there was to blame for my confusion because the situation in Peshawar was so radically different from what I had known in Kabul. Where once I had seen bureaucrats in karakul hats and Western suits whizzing past in their chauffeur-driven Volga sedans, I now found myself staring at turban-draped mullas squeezed between kalashnikov-toting bodyguards in bright, new Toyota Land Cruisers. Where before there had been the one smirking photograph of President Daud surveying every tea shop and staring down from every eminence, Peshawar claimed a hive of would-be Dauds, all buzzing madly about but none managing to dominate the rest.

As an anthropologist with spare time, I immediately wanted to investigate how this situation had come to be but also knew from my reading of the literature on Afghanistan that very little had been written on Afghan Islam—a subject that had appeared just a few years earlier to have only an antiquarian significance in the modern world.^[20] The world that the refugees created in Peshawar was a world full-blown, a world that seemed to have sprung up as if by some mysterious process of spontaneous generation. This could not be the case, of course, but I also recognized that it would require a considerable amount of digging to discover where these multiple Islams had come from and how they had claimed center stage.

Addressing this issue required that I start to unravel the web of personalities, parties, and alliances that was all around me. In turn, doing so required that I spend a large percentage of my time at the various party headquarters, interviewing officials high and low and gradually constructing from their testimony a chronological history and an ideological map that would help me first keep the different factions straight in my mind and then explain where they had come from and what they represented for the future. While I was occupied fixing the coordinates of the present confusion, I was also interested in uncovering some sense of the moral force of Islam—the ideational center around which these party satellites were spinning in their various irregular orbits. The creation of new parties was not all there was to Islam; fragmentation and discord might be what one saw on the surface, but there had to be something else going on as well—some profound pull that kept Islam at the center of people's thoughts and affections despite the abuses to which it was subjected by the parties.

Perhaps because I had already “found” Sultan Muhammad Khan, I began to focus my efforts on discovering some comparable figure who could exemplify and encapsulate the moral imperatives of Islam as Sultan Muhammad Khan seemed to exemplify and encapsulate those of honor. Ironically, the soundman from Los Angeles who had led me to the poems of Rafiq Jan also had an indirect hand in my finding the exemplary figure I was seeking, for he introduced me to a young Afghan named Shahmahmood Miakhel, who would lead me in turn to a historic figure as representative of Afghanistan's Islamic past as Sultan Muhammad Khan was of the traditional culture of tribal honor.

When I met him, Shahmahmood was working as the soundman's paid assistant. He was, in fact, my acquaintance's contact with the musicians on Qissa Khani. After the soundman returned to the United States, I saw Shahmahmood from time to time, but not that often because in the early months of my stay I was still hoping to work with Persian-speaking refugees from the north rather than with Pakhtu-speakers from the frontier, where Shahmahmood's home was. We stayed in touch, however, and eventually started working together, at first occasionally, and later daily. By the time I left Peshawar, we were together most of the time, and even now, more than a decade later, we remain close friends and sometime collaborators.

Shahmahmood's family was not exceedingly wealthy but was prominent in its area because its members were recognized as sayyids, or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. The family also traced descent from an important saint—Mia ‘Ali Sahib—whose shrine outside of Jalalabad was one of the best known and most frequented in eastern Afghanistan. Mia ‘Ali Sahib had lived many centuries before, but Shahmahmood's grandfather had gained his own small following as a Sufi pir,or master, in the area of Kunar Province where he settled his family. The grandfather had been a government official but abandoned his career to devote himself full-time to religion as a disciple of his own Sufi master, Serkano Mia Sahib. Serkano Mia Sahib was also from Kunar, and he was one of the principal deputies of an even more famous master, the Mulla of Hadda.

As my interest in matters of religion became more apparent, Shahmahmood started talking more and more about this Mulla of Hadda, and he mentioned that there were a number of families then living in Peshawar who had a connection to the Mulla. As I contacted members of these families and interviewed them, I began to realize that the Mulla might provide a useful focus for my research into the role of Islam in tribal society. He had operated along the frontier in the later part of the nineteenth century, and it was clear from the way people spoke of him that his life held a special resonance for them. His Islam was the real Islam, many would tell me. The way he did things was the right way.

In a strange way that I only gradually appreciated, the Mulla seemed somewhat like Samiullah Safi's father. Both men were larger-than-life figures, and both were associated with a period in the past that was only dimly recollected but was nevertheless thought of as purer than the present. The era of men like Sultan Muhammad and the Mulla of Hadda was a mythic one, when people acted not for themselves but for higher principles. In the minds of many Afghans, men nowadays are corrupt and let all sorts of mitigating factors intrude upon their response to events. But the Mulla of Hadda and Sultan Muhammad Khan were different. They did not vacillate and collude as men do today. They were exemplars who adhered to a moral code to the end.

As the history of the Mulla of Hadda became clearer to me, I began to consider using the story of his life as a counterpoint to that of Sultan Muhammad Khan; however, several problems arose that made the two life histories incommensurable. First, whereas Sultan Muhammad's story had come from one source, his son, I was hearing the Mulla's story from a dozen different people, all of whom revealed significant pieces of the puzzle. Second, the various stories I was hearing did not arrange themselves into a coherent life history as Safi's stories did. To the contrary, the layering of story upon story by different informants seemed to deepen the mystery of the life I was investigating rather than to clarify it, and the main reason for this increasing obscurity was that almost all of the stories I collected were centered on miracles that the Mulla of Hadda had performed.

The question I had to answer was how I could fabricate a life history out of a series of disconnected stories, all of which focused on some action that, the rational part of my brain told me, had never happened in the first place. It appeared to me that the answer was embodied in the basic assumption that was coming to guide the study—namely, that all stories moralize the history with which they are concerned. The notion of moralizing history implied a process of perception and interpretation by which meaning was attached to events.^[21] This was essentially a cultural process, and its result would necessarily vary depending on the background of those who would mold (largely unconsciously, but never nonculturally) the raw data of events according to the metaphysical principles and narrative conventions that were available to them.

Someone who imagines history as the sum of great and ignominious deeds performed by the ancestors of the living will tell one kind of story; someone who envisions the events of the world as unfolding according to a divine plan will tell another. The task for an anthropologist delving into the realm of the historian was less to assemble the “facts” of a particular historical situation than to preserve the texture of the original stories in which historical facts were embedded and to use those stories to illuminate the cultural imagination of those who took part in the events that those stories recalled. What mattered then was not merely that the life history of an Islamic saint and a tribal khan be told, but that the narrative genres themselves within which their stories were encoded be highlighted and treated as centrally important evidence in the search for historical meaning.^[22]

I increasingly understood that the story as a story was itself a mirror for viewing society, and it was therefore critical that the integrity of different narrative genres be respected and understood in and of themselves. This was especially true with regard to the stories that were told of the Mulla of Hadda. The fact that the majority of these stories recounted miraculous transformations and voyages undertaken by the Mulla had to be recognized as significant in itself and not treated as a cultural idiosyncrasy to be overcome and seen through. His was the life of a saint—a man endowed with supernatural powers beyond the ken of ordinary men—and the analytical challenge in making sense of that life was how to respect the integrity of miracles in the cultural construction of his narrative identity.

The Missing Life

Having decided to focus on the lives of a tribal khan and a Muslim saint as a means of gaining access to the moral bases of honor and Islam, I began to realize the need for a life history of an individual from the same historical period that could illuminate the moral order represented by the state. On what basis did Afghan rulers command allegiance, and how did they legitimate their authority? In trying to answer these questions, I quickly confronted a fundamental problem: there was no one to ask—no one with a narrative connection to the royal family comparable to Safi's with Sultan Muhammad Khan or to the descendants of the Mulla of Hadda's disciples' with the great saint. The strangeness of this fact should not be overlooked. Members of the Durrani tribe that had ruled Afghanistan almost uninterruptedly from 1747 to 1978 simply were not in evidence in this, the capital of the resistance movement that was trying to unseat those who had swept the Durranis from power.

As unexpected as the hegemony of Islamic political parties seemed to me on my arrival, this absence of Durranis was odder still, for when I had lived in Kabul in the 1970s, members of the ruling Muhammadzai lineage of the Durrani tribe were everywhere to be seen and very much the first among the Kabul elite. In many of the most important offices, in the largest homes, in the fashionable restaurants and discotheques then sprouting up in Kabul, they were ones you saw, and theirs were the names you most often heard. Now they were gone—the former kings and kingpins of Afghan society—all dead or vanished to one or another Western capital where many of them had long-standing connections and probably bank accounts as well. In their absence, I had to find another informant, equal to those I had already discovered, who could provide access to the ethos of rulership in Afghan culture.

Because I had chosen to focus on the Mulla of Hadda, I was particularly eager to establish some link to the king of his day: Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. In almost every account I heard of the Mulla's life, Abdur Rahman's name also came up, and the references were usually negative because the Amir had tried to capture the Mulla on several occasions and had actually imprisoned several of his disciples, including the grandfathers of two of my informants. Nevertheless, I did not get a uniformly disapproving sense of the Amir from the stories in which he figured, and rarely did I hear outright condemnations of his actions. I sensed instead, even from these informants, that kings operated according to a different morality and a different set of cultural expectations. Abdur Rahman may have been cruel to his subjects. He may have been inadequately respectful of the saints and scholars of his realm, and he probably earned the divine retribution that was his in the end. But then again, he was the king. His lot was not the same as other men's, and it was understood that he would adhere to norms other than their own. Ultimately, everyone seemed to admit, a king had to be judged on a different scale. If many believed that Abdur Rahman exceeded what a king should do, then they also acknowledged their own inadequacy to evaluate his excesses with any certainty.

As I began to recognize the distinctiveness of Abdur Rahman's moral station, I also became aware of the way in which his reign appeared to function as something of a divide in people's minds, and one of the main reasons for this appears to have been his association with the founding of the nation-state. I don't recall anyone making this connection between the Amir and the nation-state explicitly, for the nation-state as a concept was not something that most people talked about. Instead, what was fixed on were those concrete manifestations of the nation-state's appearance for which Abdur Rahman was largely responsible and in relationship to which many of my informants made their judgments of him.

The most prominent of these manifestations was the Durand Line, which was established in 1893 at British insistence and delineated the frontier between the areas of British and Afghan control. While no British subject was ever allowed to enter tribal territory to survey the actual line and no cairns were ever set in place to show where Afghan sovereignty ended and British sovereignty began, the Durand Line nevertheless became, in different ways for different constituencies, an important symbol both of British domination in the area and of the changing role and character of the Afghan state. For tribal informants, the Durand Line had the particular significance of differentiating and dividing what previously had been singular and whole. The land of the tribes was free territory unencumbered by government control. Yaghistan, it was sometimes called—the land of the yaghi, the rebel, the unruly, the one who obeyed his own law. The tribes fought among themselves. They nursed bitter enmities and rarely, if ever, made common cause. But this they could agree upon: in comparison to the fragmented, hierarchical, and regulated world of the state (hukumat), theirs was an undivided world, a world of sure ethical standards and fierce loyalties.^[23] And this too they knew: the recognition and universal acceptance of this social and political order began to fall apart when the Durand Line intruded and forced upon them a different sort of moral order than the one they knew and understood.

From a Muslim point of view, the Durand Line was equally problematic, not only because it reflected the growing control of an infidel regime, but also because it divided the land in terms alien to their own. Great Britain, India, Afghanistan—these were categories that confounded the fundamental division of the world between the dar al-islam, the land of Islam, and the dar al-harb, the land of war. The dar al-Islam is the territory of those who have submitted to God's dominion. The dar al-harb is land controlled by non-Muslims, and it is subject to contestation because those who live there have not yet accepted God's dominion. Muslims also accept as legitimate the existence of separate polities within the dar al-Islam because God has decreed that individual tribes and races must come together in communities and obey kings drawn from among themselves. But there is no precedent in Islam for the nation-state, and as we shall see, one focus of particular antipathy was the creation of the Durand Line, which many Muslims viewed as an act of capitulation to an infidel power for which Abdur Rahman bore most of the responsibility.

As my fieldwork came to a close, the evidence I was accumulating pointed ever more insistently to the importance of Abdur Rahman for my study, but I was getting no closer to finding the informant or informants who could provide the kinds of personal stories I needed to complete my study. No one had the kind of personal stories I needed. No one produced testimony comparable to what I had been given by Samiullah Safi and the descendants of the Mulla of Hadda's disciples. I left Peshawar loaded down with tapes and transcripts but missing one critical piece of the puzzle that I had determined to solve. I didn't realize it until much later, but the informant I needed had been available to me all along. That informant was Abdur Rahman, who made himself accessible to inspection through several invaluable documents: an autobiographical account depicting the trials and adventures of his early years and a royal proclamation enunciating the Amir's understanding of the moral ties of kingly authority.^[24]

Contested Domains

In the last chapter of this book, I will keep the focus on narrative that holds sway elsewhere, but I will shift attention from persons to events: specifically, a conflict (referred to by the British as an “uprising” and by the people of the frontier as a “jihad”) that broke out in the summer of 1897 along the border between British India and Afghanistan. This uprising/jihad was led by religious leaders, the most important of whom was the Mulla of Hadda, and most of its participants were Pakhtun tribesmen from eastern Afghanistan and the autonomous districts of the frontier. Standing on the sidelines—perhaps complicit in the attack, perhaps not—was the Afghan amir, Abdur Rahman Khan.

The initial reason for my focusing on the frontier war of 1897 as the subject for the last chapter was the serendipity of discovering accounts of those events from three distinctly different points of view. The first of these accounts came via several descendants of the Mulla's disciples. The story that they told involved the Mulla's miraculous escape from imminent capture by British troops near the village of Jarobi, high in the mountains of the Mohmand territory. Initially I didn't know what to do with this story because it had no dates attached to it, and it was unclear what battle was being discussed. But the story possessed a singular dramatic quality, and it was still very much in my mind when I later read accounts of the events of 1897 written by the British war correspondent H. Woosnam Mills, who accompanied the expeditionary force that was sent into Mohmand territory to punish the tribe for its participation in the attacks.

One of the stated goals of the expeditionary force was to capture the Mulla of Hadda, and Mills spun a vivid tale of the British troops braving enemy fire and a thunderous monsoon storm as they entered Jarobi in pursuit of the elusive Mulla. As I read the account, I noticed that a number of elements in Mills's story corresponded with elements in the miracle story I had heard in Peshawar, and it became clear to me that the two stories concerned the same set of events. What was less clear was how to reconcile the two accounts—how to make them speak to one another. The two stories reflected such different notions of agency, of meaning, and of reality itself that a simple, straightforward account of “what happened” seemed not only impossible but also somewhat beside the point.

The problem got even more complex in 1986 when I went back to Peshawar for six months of additional fieldwork. During that trip I met and interviewed Shahmund, a man about seventy years old who was an elder of the Mohmand tribe. His branch of the tribe was the one that the Mulla of Hadda had lived with when he was with the Mohmands, and according to Shahmund's version of history, it was his own grandfather who carried the Mulla away from the field of battle and saved him from capture. Shahmund's story was short and didn't provide many details from the battle, but it did suggest that there was a third way to view events, a way that reflected a tribal understanding of the world that was distinctly different from the understandings which informed the other two accounts.

The congruent but contradictory stories of the Mulla's escape from Jarobi is what first drew my attention to the uprising of 1897, but the more I investigated these events and thought about them, the more I realized that their significance transcended the events themselves and the issues of narrative representation that their historical recounting raised. Viewed against the backdrop of the anti-Soviet resistance that was raging when I first heard and read these accounts, the earlier conflict could be seen as connected in some way to the later, if only because both were led by Islamic leaders and viewed as Islamic holy wars against foreign, infidel invasions.

However, the differences between the two were at least as striking as the similarities. Gone, for the most part, from the recent conflict were miracles and the fantastic claims of divine complicity in the outcome of events. Gone too was the overwhelming sense of conviction and certainty that, all accounts agree, the people of the frontier felt when the rising first began. In the place of miracles and emotions, what one saw were political parties and more or less shrewd politicians spouting ideological formulas and cadging money and arms from foreign governments. Examples of heartfelt Islamic devotion were much in evidence—from the innumerable daily sacrifices and deprivations that refugees and civilians uncomplainingly accepted for the greater good of the struggle to the corporal immolation of tens of thousands of mujahidin martyrs—but so too was the sense of abiding suspicion conveyed in so many ways by so many Afghans: suspicion that ambitious leaders were systematically corrupting the faith, that the Islam they represented was not the Islam the people as a whole believed in and practiced, that the struggles of the present were more about baser matters and concerns than the idealized struggles of the past.

The forms of Islamic ideology and political practice that one observed in the 1980s had many points in common with those one heard and read about from the turn of the century, but there seemed to be as many differences, and it became clear to me that to understand the present I had first to understand the past and the transformations that had been wrought between past and present. Beyond this, however, it also began to become apparent that the uprising/jihad of 1897 could serve not simply as a baseline for measuring change: its significance was not just as an illustration of traditional Islam that could be erected and set next to the contemporary variant. Rather, it seemed that past and present were intertwined and that one could make out in the events of that distant summer not just arrayed armies of men but also opposed moral visions that, combined and reconfigured, would transform the political landscape of Afghan society.

The role of the Durand Line as symbol and substance of changing political relations has already been alluded to, but what I began to see more directly as I considered the long-forgotten colonial conflict was the deeper, cultural threat that the colonial vision of progress and civilization represented to the Mulla and the Islam he embodied. At the time of the uprising/jihad of 1897, this threat was still a distant one that had not yet been articulated in a language or form that made it directly accessible to the tribal people of the frontier; however, one could also see the challenge that the colonial vision posed, particularly if one paid attention to the contrary ways in which the colonial conflict was portrayed and meaning assigned by different sides.

Of special significance in this regard is the interpretation of the “irrational” features of the uprising: an erratic holy man promising miracles and the end of British rule in India, farmers abandoning their fields and flocks in the middle of the growing season, otherwise normal villagers assaulting fortified forts with little more than pitchforks in their hands. Various political and economic factors could be marshaled as contributory to the climate of discontent; but, as the following statement suggests, British authorities and commentators of the time recognized that the ultimate cause was not something accessible to rational analysis: “after having studied the attitude of the tribes from the first burst of their energy through the varied phases of their resistance, and the final collapse of the majority of sections, one is inclined to sum the causes of the outbreak up under three heads: the first of which is fanaticism; the second, fanaticism; and the third, fanaticism.”^[25]

Fanaticism (along with related terms like barbarism and mad mullahs) constitutes a key trope in British accounts of native unruliness, and one which is as significant for understanding the moral threat presented by British imperialism as the Durand Line is for understanding the practical political and economic challenge of colonial authority. Thus, if the Durand Line can be said to represent the spatial imposition of an exogenous order over an existing social organization, the terminology of fanaticism represented a similar sort of superimposition of an all-encompassing binary conceptual grid on the existing cultural topology.

To uncover the structural implications of this conjunction, I begin chapter 5 by focusing on the writings of a different sort of hero: young Winston Churchill, who, in his first foray into the political arena, was an eyewitness to the frontier war and its aftermath. Because of his involvement in the conflict, his passionate commitment to imperial rule, and his expressive power as a writer, Churchill makes an appropriate and articulate spokesman for the British point of view on the tribal rising. Churchill's dispatches and correspondence from the frontier provide both a dramatic chronicle of the events themselves and a passionate polemic on the significance of the conflict for British interests and ideals.

At the same time, Churchill also supplied us with another document that, I will argue, effectively negates—or at least relativizes—the terms of moral absolutism that infuse his dispatches. This document, an unpublished treatise on political oratory that Churchill happened to be working on during the same summer of 1897, discusses the requirements and techniques that enable a political speaker to win an audience to his side. In providing us these insights into the practical nature of political authority, Churchill also, quite unintentionally, provided a ground for dissolving the rational grid that dictated the interpretation of the combined tribal/Islamic assault on colonial control.

Using Churchill's treatise as a starting point, I continue on to a consideration of the cultural and organizational bases of the uprising and then conclude with a comparison of the three stories of the Mulla of Hadda's escape from Jarobi glen. Throughout the several stages of this analysis, my aim is to try to reconstitute the cultural logic of the “fanaticism” that inspired the frontier people to mount a movement of resistance against British power. At the same time, I also try to lay the groundwork for considering the manner in which the rationalist paradigm introduced to the region by the British would later integrate itself within the hitherto self-contained moral matrix of Afghan politics: the matrix of honor, Islam, and rule to which I will now turn.

Notes