2. The Making of Sultan Muhammad Khan

My name is Samiullah. I am known as Safi. My father is Sultan Muhammad Khan from the area of Morchil in Pech Valley of Kunar. My grandfather's name was Talabuddin, but he was famous by the name Akhundzada [son of a religious scholar]. I don't know his background, but this much I do know. My father at that time was about thirteen or fourteen years old. He was the eldest child of my grandfather—my father was. He had two other sons who were small. One of them could eat solids. The other was still nursing. My grandfather had three wives, and these three boys were from each of the mothers—each one separate.

At that time, the government had the regulation that whoever was the elder of the tribe—if he was pious and if he had a reputation among the people (from both the religious and tribal point of view) of being firm—the government would recognize this sort of person and give them the authority over the region. In this way, my grandfather became the administrator [hakim] of the area. His name was Talabuddin Khan but he was known as Akhundzada since his father was also a man of religion. He had studied in a religious school [madrasa], although he didn't do the work of a mulla. But he was an individual who was knowledgeable about religious matters and other things, and for this reason they would refer to him as an akhund [religious scholar].

In addition to this, he was a landowner. The original place of my grandfather was Gul Salak, not Morchil. He had land in Morchil, but at that time this area of Morchil was the border line between the regions of the Nuristanis and Safis. One of our places is named Samtal, which is about twenty minutes by foot from Nuristan. Samtal also belonged to my father. It was originally a Nuristani area, but they had sold it to my grandfather. It happened this way that as long as my grandfather was alive, some of the people who had land there in Morchil sold their land to my grandfather and left. At that time, my grandfather was living in Morchil, which is to say it belonged to us. But the original place of his tribe, the place of the sword, of coming and going, living and dying, among the tribe, that place was called Gul Salak which includes three side valleys, within Pech Valley, which is itself associated with one district administration [‘alaqadari] of Chapa Dara. They also call this valley Mahsud Dara.

There were originally two tribes living in Pech: Nuristanis and Safis. The Nuristanis were, well, Nuristanis, but the Safis are three brothers: one of them is remembered as Mahsud, one by the name of Gurbuz, and the other by the name of Wadir. We are from the line of Mahsud. My tribe is Mahsud, in the line of Safi. This valley is known as Mahsud Dara.

This that I'm telling you, I don't know if it's important, but I think its interesting. However important it might be, it is interesting.

My grandfather—his oldest son became my father—Sultan Muhammad Khan. Some man from that same village of Gul Salak, whose name I have forgotten, said to my grandfather, “I will give my daughter to your son. I will give her to you, you give her to whichever son you want.” He agreed. They were twenty-two people. They were twenty-two malatar—close cousins. This man who gave his daughter to my father (my father at that time was small and didn't have any wife), he had seven young sons. But he didn't have much inherited land. He didn't have land. But my grandfather had the power of the government and the power of the tribe and of the land in his hands.

This plot was arranged between them. The man who wanted to give his daughter to my father and who had talked with my grandfather, he invited my grandfather to his house. I'm not sure if that same girl later married or not; I believe that she didn't get married.

My father, who was small, said to his father, “You yourself have a rifle. You also have servants, and you have soldiers that you are not going to take with you? For security, you should always take your own servants with you with their rifles.” My grandfather said to his son, “Here, I am with people who are of my own tribe. I haven't done any treachery to these people. Why should the government soldiers or my own servants come and go with me?” He would get on his horse and go alone.

Although he was still little, my father didn't accept this reasoning from him. “You must always take an armed person with you when you come and go. You can't say that something bad won't happen, that someone won't attempt to kill you.” But, my grandfather said, “I am an akhundzada, and I have never harmed anyone. Why should I take someone with me?”

He didn't accept my father's advice and went off and came to a bridge which is between Gul Salak and Morchil. [Gul Salak] is about a half-hour away by foot, but my grandfather had fixed the road so you could go by horse. He went back and forth on horseback. He came to the bridge. He was on the bridge, he was crossing over the river. The man who had offered his daughter to my grandfather, he was crouching with his seven sons. They had taken cover. Their rifles were in their hands. He was on his horse and had arrived at the bridge. They shot him, and he fell from his horse.

When my father heard the sound of gunfire, he becomes worried that something had happened. He leaves there, running, and when he arrives, his father is still alive. He had fallen onto the bridge, on the wooden bridge. He places his head on his chest, and his father says to him, “My son, God has given me paradise because I am a pure martyr [shahid]. I have never deprived anyone of their rights, so be careful that you don't ruin the Day of Judgment [akherat] for me.”

Then, my father says to him, “Matters of death are the work of the dead. The dead have no rights over the work of the living. I am alive. If I do not have the force and power in me to take revenge on one person for every bullet that has struck your body, then I would not be your son. Swallow your grief. You should take care of your final moments. You know, and your God knows. I know, and the living know.”

They bring him back and bury him. After that, my father goes to some other place outside of Pech Valley where some friends of my grandfather lived. He went there, and there he immediately begins to learn the study of writing and reading. They call it mursalat [the skills of a scribe]. He learns these. My father would say that, “I learned forty mursalat. Forty mursalat. In the space of two months, I learned forty mursalat.” What these forty mursalat really amounted to were the kind of letters that the scribes of old would write. Petitions and invitations and that sort of thing. Gulistan and Bustan—this kind of book—and religious knowledge.^[1] Of course, at that time, all of these things were quite common. He learned them.

Then my father comes, and the first wife my father takes, through her, God gives him his first son. The name of that first son is Jandad Khan. Last year he died of natural causes in Pech Valley. At the time that his son Jandad Khan is born in his house, my father's mama [mother's brother] goes to see my father.

At the time that his son is born, he isn't there. The reason is that he is afraid. He is afraid because he has two little brothers, one of whom is an infant and the other has just taken his first steps. Except for them, he is alone, and because of this he is afraid that they [his father's enemies] might try to kill him now while he is here. So he would go to the homes of his friends and his father's friends. There he was studying, and then one day he comes to Dir. Dir—the one they call “the Nawab of Dir”—he was there. The Dir Nawab was acquainted and had had a relationship with my grandfather. For example, one would send some people to the other, if something happened and the situation required. They had a friendship. I think that this was during the time of Abdur Rahman Khan [1880 to 1901]. I don't know whether or not the Durand Line had been established yet, but the friendship with my grandfather was from that time.

Anyway, he was studying there when my father's mama comes and says to his nephew, “Let's go to the homeland. God has delivered a child in your home.” He goes there with him and passes some time there with his child. Sometimes he would giggle with my father, and my father would be gentle with him. Then this mama of his sensed the love that was growing between father and child and says to him, “I believe that you have become a cuckold [daus]. You have become a cuckold and a pimp [dala].”

My father doesn't understand what he's saying and says, “Why?”

He replies, “As long as you enjoy this love of your child, you will remain dala.”

Then my father understood what he meant by these words. The meaning of his words was this: “If you are preoccupied with your child and the love of children and family and woman and this sort of thing, with this sort of love, then you will forget about your father. You will forget about the murderers of your father, and after that, maybe you will compromise with them. Maybe you will go on with your life.” His real meaning was this.

After that, my father leaves. He leaves again. I'm not sure if he was in Asmar or where. He was with one of his father's friends since he was a boy and had no friends of his own. All of his friends were the friends of his father's. He studied there.

Then news came to him. Someone informed him that, “Your mother congratulates you that she has gained revenge for your father. She has taken his revenge.”

He comes home, and all of the people, all of his friends and relations think that he must be happy since his mother, with the help of his mama, had killed the murderer of her husband—that is to say, the big man. His seven sons were still alive. The people thought he would be happy, and they congratulate him. But the color had gone from him. He doesn't say a thing, and when he reaches the house, he severely punishes his mother. My father would never talk about it since he understood the rights of a mother from the point of view of Islam. My father never said, “I did this act.” But others say that he sat his mother down some place and put out her eyes. He blinded the eyes of his own mother.

He blinded her because, “You have subjected me to the taunts and ridicule [tana and paighur] of the tribe. [People will say that] `the son of Talabuddin Akhundzada was never born. His wife gained his revenge. His wife took his vengeance. He didn't have a son.' You have ruined my name and reputation in the tribe. When you committed this act, you thought that you were taking revenge for my father or for your husband, but instead you have lost my position in the tribe. You have placed me under the paighur of the people who say that, `Talab Akhundzada died without issue. He is childless. He didn't have a son. He didn't have a man. He didn't have a youth who would take revenge for his own father. His wife took his revenge.”' For this reason it is said he blinded his own mother, but I was never able to question him about this matter because he was a very severe man. And he never said, “I did this thing.”

Whenever he would come, he would only pay his respects to his mother. A man was appointed for her. Until her death, he gave her food. He would put food in her mouth. But he didn't do anything. He wouldn't sit with her to talk or to get her advice on some matters—never. [From that time] my father developed a reaction against women in general that, whatever had to be done, a man had to do it, and he shouldn't take the advice of a woman since the mentality of a woman is of a certain kind. They don't understand.

He had another experience which caused him to have this reaction against women. While he was alive, I often argued with him that this wasn't good. The rights of women and men are the same. They must be equal. But he would reply, “Take good care of your wife and love her. Be kind to her. Don't beat her. Treat her gently. But on important matters a man must never take the advice of a woman, even if she is his mother. Whatever he does, he must not tell her.” This was his attitude.

After that, my father is at home. We had some land some place that shared a boundary with those same men who had killed my grandfather, that is to say, the enemies of my father. They were coming, and they had this plot where they would tell my father, Sultan Muhammad Khan, to come and correctly mark the boundary line of this land. They wanted to take him there. “He is just a boy. If he has a servant or someone else with him, we will kill him too. What do other people care about him? And anyway we are one body, and we are many in number.”

Then they were leaving to come here. But, before this, what does my father do but plant a woman in the house of these enemies of his. He gives her a salary. He gives her clothes—secretly—so that he would be informed of every plan that they might come up with. One day before, she tells my father. At that time, he must have been seventeen or eighteen years old, anyway less than twenty, and maybe only sixteen. She informs him of the decision they had come to, and the decision was such that [their] mother had brought a Qur’an to her seven boys and [said to them], “You should not go. This poor boy. You have killed his father and now you will kill him. This isn't a good thing to do. You have made a marriage bond with him. You gave my daughter to him, and even now this girl is in our house. This is not good. What wrong has he done?”

She beseeches them with the Qur’an, but they don't accept that Qur’an. Well, that woman who was in their house, whoever she was, she comes and tells my father the following: “In the morning they will come. They have this plan to take you some place to divide the land. But you must know.” My father understands.

The seven young men—all wearing the same clothes, all of them [carrying] rifles—they come, and when they reach the fort they call to my father, “Come, let's go!”

My father is inside the house. He wouldn't go outside. He sends a person to tell them, “You should go. However much land you need, and wherever you want to place the boundary—that is up to you. You decide yourselves, and take one or two white beards with you. I am sick. I have some difficulties, but when you come back from there, eat some food with me. Have lunch with me.”

They replied, “Fine. Not today, tomorrow.” And one of them took some dirt like this in his hand. The dirt was in his hand, and he buried a stick into [the dirt] and struck it like this, flicking it away, and said [to his brothers], “This is little Sultan, you know? We can kill him tomorrow. Today, we'll go and set the boundary ourselves, to our own liking, and come back later.” So when they came back from that place, they would return here, to the house of my father.

[At my father's house] there are some people who are with my father: his servants and in-laws, his mother's kinsmen and others. He says to all of them, “As long as you have been here and lived with me, whether or not we have given you a salary, whether we have given a lot or a little, this life has been in this measure that you have always had our guns on your shoulders. Today, however, I have no need of those of you who work for a wage. I am alone, and my two brothers are small. Those of you who are with me for the sake of my friendship and who are not afraid of losing their heads stay. The rest of you go.”

All of them came to his side and [said], “We don't serve you for the sake of your barley, or because of your crops or for your money. All of us have our own difficulties. We have our own problems—many of them. But, since each of us calls himself a man, we are here, and we have brought our rifles. From long ago, your father has saved us from many sorrows. He has defended our rights. Therefore, if you are to die, we should die first—whatever you order us to do.”

Except for my father, no one has any idea what the plan is. After this, he tells them that this is the situation, that these same ones are coming back and this is the plan we have. He tells them, “We are going to kill them right here. We will kill all of them.”

Then they are there. They have sat down for the meal. Each of the servants chooses one person: “I have this one and I have that one.” Some of them are sitting amongst them. My father's mama is seated with them, and my father is standing, and right then and there they shoot them. They shoot, and one young boy who is the same age as my father escapes. He escapes, wounded, falls by a tree, and grabs the roots of the tree like this. Then my father shoots him with a pistol. He shoots him with the pistol, but then he takes his head in his arms. And my father cries because he had been his friend. He had been his friend and playmate, and for this reason he cries. He cries a lot, so much so that people say he didn't eat any food for a week. He was simply crying, not thinking of anything else except this friend of his. But, since he had become his enemy, he was obliged to kill him.

And then they are on seven bedstands with red mattresses and, in those days, they had a kind of silk shawl. Over each of them they drape a fine silk shawl. And then they send word to their paternal cousins and others to “come and take away your dead.” They come and take them. Then they bury them. Some among those paternal cousins of theirs then begin to get revenge for them, and a feud began. My father—all of them by himself—since his two brothers were small, but he acts in such a way that in total about twenty-two of these enemies are killed. He kills twenty-two of them.

Their women remain. My father says to all of these women, “You are like my own sisters or my own daughters. I will give you to whomever you desire.” Since by the law of inheritance, it was up to my father. No one else had any rights over them. No one was left from their family, other than youngsters. Naturally, some of them had wives, some didn't. Some of them who had wives didn't have young children. With those to whom he gives [women], my father establishes relationships, just as though he had given them his own daughter. It was that sort of relationship.

From then on, whenever my father went out on horseback, he took other men and horses with him. Every time he approached a house where one of these women was living, he would get off his horse one kilometer away and lead it until he was one kilometer past the house. Then he would get back on the horse. He would never ride by. He did this because he did not want to humiliate them by showing haughtiness [kibr] toward them. This is kibr.

“They, what did they want to do? They wanted to kill me; they killed my father, and for this they were killed. The marital tie was also a kind of plot, a conspiracy. They wanted to establish a marital alliance, and then kill my father, and me. I was small. They would have killed me. And then my inheritance, the authority. They would have [taken] it for themselves because there would be no heir. This was their original intention, there was nothing else. Then, what did God do? God did the work that they wanted to do to us—God did this to them. In return, we could not be proud [gharur]. We could not do kibr. [That was] first, and second was this, that since they are namus,^[2] one must show respect to them. Since they are not men—they are namus—and one should not pass by their houses on horseback. These things he didn't do—ever.”

The people saw this. The people saw the kind of thing my father was doing, and at the same time, the people saw what modesty he had with regard to namus and other things that concerned the tribe. The tribe said good things about this. This is how he defends these things.

In this manner, it reached such a point that my older brother, Jandad—one day, my older brother Jandad came upon one of our enemies who was a distant cousin of those others (who had been killed in the feud). Jandad thought to himself, “Ah, they are from that family, from our enemies.” This man's wife was with him, and he said to him, “Drop your rifle!” He put down his rifle, and his rifle was taken away from him.

Since the wife of this enemy was with him and this older brother of mine, Jandad, took away his rifle, this—in afghaniyat [the customs of Afghans], in our tribe, in pakhtunwali [the code of Pakhtuns]—this is a very great dishonor, a very great paighur. That an armed man should put his gun down: a gun is not dropped as long as you are alive, and his wife was also with him.

When this all happened, what did my father do? What did he do about this situation? My father sent for my brother. [ Jandad's] own mother locked him in a room. It was winter, and she put him in this room without any clothes except a pair of shorts. And women brought water. My father was seated in a chair to watch him, a long horse whip in his hand, and he told the mother—the mother of this brother of mine—“Pour water on him.” They poured cold water on him, and my father beat him. The whole tribe heard of this.

He said, “I will kill him in this manner since he has done something very dishonorable [be ghairati]. He was your enemy, and so many of them were killed. He is from that same lineage, and we must show respect for them. He told him to drop his rifle and then took it from him. He did this in front of his wife, and he didn't have this right.” He himself was the husband of a woman. My brother had a wife, and his wife and all the others were standing and watching.

For three days and nights he wasn't given any food, and he was beaten. They gave him just enough food that he wouldn't die of starvation and a little bit of water, and then they beat him.

Finally, my father's brothers, especially that brother of his who lives in Samtal, he came to see him. His name was Abdul Qudus Khan. Abdul Qudus Khan had two wives. He comes to his brother—my father—and says, “If you kill this boy, I will divorce these two wives of mine. Then you marry them, or anyone else can marry them, and I will go, in whatever direction I end up going.”

My father is afraid that if he releases his wives and divorces them that it will be very bad, one more disgrace. He wouldn't have cared if Abdul Qudus had died or killed himself, but if he had divorced his wives, that would have been something else. And Abdul Qudus had said, “If you kill him, I will divorce these two wives of mine, and when they are divorced I will go away.” So he was obliged to release him, but he gathered the whole tribe together, and he disowned his own son. This disowning continued until 1346 or 47 [1967 or 68]. My father was in his final moments. He was dying, and the whole tribe came together and said to him, “Forgive your son whom you have disowned.”

He replied, “If I forgive him, may God not forgive me.” This is the kind of single-mindedness and determination he had. You see? Later, he was about to die. There was hardly anyone around. I was also away in the army, and one of my brothers named Shah Khusrau said to him, “Father, pray for us.”

My father accepted his request but said, “I disown Torab and you should not speak with him.” He also disowned him, this other son, Torab, who is older and is now in our homeland [because] he was with his brother, Jandad. These two fingers, he cut off like that, and forgave all of his children but these two sons. All of the men and women of our family were there and saw that even in his last moments his resolve had not left him. They thought that even if we ask him to forgive everyone, these two others will not be included. He cut off these two fingers and except for them forgave everyone else.

Myth and History

The story you have just read is the first story that Samiullah Safi told me. It is the story he chose to begin with, the story he felt compelled to tell first of all. Hours of stories followed this one, some having to do with his father, most with himself and the various stages that his life had passed through including a childhood spent in exile in distant parts of the country, student days at Kabul University during the era of protests and demonstrations in the mid-1960s, his tenure as a parliamentary deputy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his career as a leader of the anti-government resistance in the Pech Valley after the Marxist Revolution in 1978, and finally his exile to Peshawar following the takeover of the resistance by Islamic parties after the Soviet invasion in 1979. All told, Safi talked for more than twelve hours, and the transcripts of the many stories he told me go on for several hundred pages of single-spaced text. Of all the stories, however, this first one, the one of Sultan Muhammad's revenge, is the one I have always come back to, the one that, to my mind at least, reveals more about the irreducible values of tribal culture than any other story that Safi ever told me or that I have encountered elsewhere.

Before Safi and I began our interviews, I told him that I wanted to find out about tribes and honor in Pakhtun society. I don't remember exactly how I expressed my interests, but given that Safi was one of the first people I interviewed during my two years in Peshawar, I'm quite sure that the questions I had for him were basic ones of the “What is honor and what does it mean to you?” variety. As it turned out, it didn't really matter what I asked him. He had his own agenda, and during our time together I asked him very few questions. Every morning for a period of several weeks, we would meet at my home in Peshawar over a pot of black tea, a pack of cigarettes, and a Sony tape recorder. Sometimes other Afghan friends would sit in, but usually it was just Safi and me: Safi doing most of the talking and I almost all of the listening, trying to keep up with the rapid flow of the Dari Persian that Safi had learned fluently during his years in exile away from Pech Valley.

However I might have framed my questions about tribal honor, Safi complied in a way that made sense to him, even if it was not immediately evident to me what he was up to or how I might make use of what he had given me. His manner of responding to my crude questions was not with analysis, but rather with a story, a story that he prefaced by saying, “This that I'm telling you—I don't know if it's important, but I think it's interesting [delchasp]. However important it might be, it is interesting.” That's not an especially grandiose claim. It is, in fact, a lot less grand a claim than some of those that I make for the story myself. But as straightforward as Safi's description of the story appears to be, I find it revealing because it indicates that the narrator realized this story would seem notable to me in some way. It also suggests that, perhaps more than most people, Safi was able to objectify his family lore and to see it as illustrative of some larger process or pattern of social life extending beyond itself. Perhaps this is because Safi himself was educated and had worked as a writer and editor in Kabul. Perhaps it is because he spent much of his life among strangers. Whatever the reason, in seeing the story as potentially useful to me, Safi also seems to have been signaling his own estrangement from it. At the very least, he demonstrated that he was sufficiently outside the orbit of his own society and sufficiently aware of the orbit that I was operating in to have a fairly clear idea of the difference that lay between us. Be that as it may, the question that must be of concern at present is how to analyze a narrative like this one. I have been mulling this story over for a long time, but I have never been able to completely convince myself that I understand it or that I know what depths to sound. One reason for this uncertainty is that the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge seems so radically to blur the traditional boundary between myth and history.

Distinctions between myth and history are artificial, of course, but they still have a hold over us. They still must be negotiated, and in terms of such negotiation this story is strangely anomalous, in part because it seems too close in time for the kind of story it purports to be. Many of the characters in Safi's tale are only recently deceased, and the events themselves occurred within—or just over the horizon—of living memory. If there is no one around who specifically remembers all of these events, there are those who remember some of them; and those from whom Safi heard the story are in all probability those who also witnessed it and perhaps even joined with his father in the climactic slaughter in the guest house. For these reasons, the story has a grain and texture that we usually associate with history, with chronicle, with the narrative recounting of events as people actually remember them in that near temporal space in which specific accounts can still be checked against personal memory.

Despite the historical proximity of the recounted events, however, the story also has a mythic quality to it—like the Oresteia or a medieval fairy tale that seems, at once, too hideous in its excesses and too elegant in its symmetries to be of real lives and actual happenings. The reader almost senses that he or she is a spectator at an ancient drama—the sort in which a mother's appearance in the first act foreshadows another in the last, vengeance always redresses deceit, and dramatic oaths of honor are intoned at climactic junctures and in a voice loud enough that even those in the back rows might hear them. There are also moments in this story that seem too perfect to be believed as real-life experience, such as the scene in which Talabuddin tells his son not to “ruin his Paradise” while lying prostrate on a bridge, not unlike the bridge called sirat that all Muslims must cross to enter the gates of Heaven.

And there is the sheer economy of the story, with every moment carefully plotted, every extraneous event removed (including the narratively anticlimactic deaths of twenty-two of the enemy), every detail somehow contributing to the coherence of the whole. Let one example suffice— the moment early on when Safi introduces the antagonist of the story: “A man from Gul Salak—I have forgotten his name—said to my grandfather…” Here we are embarking on a story about how one man overcomes tremendous obstacles to gain his identity, and the first person we encounter is a man who has lost his name. A lapse on the part of the narrator perhaps, but we are shortly to discover that such lapses have tremendous resonance in a culture where one's name is literally worth dying, or killing, for. However, there is an irony in this lapse, as well, that again blurs the distinction between myth and history, for no matter how much Safi might wish that the enemy's name be forgotten, the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge is sufficiently within the range of remembering that some details, including this one, can be checked out. The edited portions of the narrative—the parts that were dissonant in tone or out of keeping with the moral tenor of the whole—remain accessible. They have not yet been swept away with the decomposition of memory, and consequently we can still ascertain that the name of Sultan Muhammad's enemy has not been forgotten, even if—in a culturally more meaningful sense—it has been lost because the dead man has no heirs, no one to claim him as his father, his grandfather, his ancestor.

In the process of my research, I have been able to discover other pertinent facts that likewise confound the mythic consolidation of the tale. The most important of these concerns the background of the story: how it all began. The beginning is clear-cut in Safi's rendition. A man from a neighboring village—a man who had many adult children but little land—offered his daughter in marriage to one of Talabuddin's sons. Talabuddin, who had a lot of land but only three small sons, went to fetch the girl but was ambushed and killed on his way. Safi's description of events makes it quite clear why the killing occurred and leaves little room for alternative interpretations.

However, another informant from the area has offered additional information that complicates the meaning of the story by making it less certain when and why the feud between the two families first got under way. According to this alternate version, Talabuddin's murder was not the opening scene in this drama. Rather, it was one of a series of acts in a long-standing enmity that involved many other people not mentioned in Safi's narrative. The man with seven sons whom Safi does not name was known as Paindo, and he was a tarbur, or close paternal cousin, of Talabuddin's. Paternal cousins are natural rivals in Pakhtun society. The term tarbur, in fact, connotes “ emy,” which Pakhtuns themselves explain by referring to the common interest that cousins have in the inheritable lands of their paternal grandfather and to the tendency of cousins to vie with one another for primacy and prestige within the family.

That these two tarburs—Talabuddin and Paindo—should be at odds with one another was very much according to form, but it is still uncertain whether or not they were engaged in enmity with one another prior to the events recounted in Safi's story. The other informant was unclear on this. What was more certain in his mind was that Paindo was feuding with another family closely allied with Talabuddin's brother, ‘Ali Dost. One day, ‘Ali Dost, who is not mentioned at all in Safi's story, was accompanying his allies to Gul Salak when Paindo and his sons ambushed them along the path. During the attack, ‘Ali Dost killed Paindo's brother, Faizullah, and thereby initiated (or extended) the feud that would later lead to Talabuddin's death.

According to my other Safi informant, tribal elders from the area convened an assembly (jirga) to resolve the dispute and came to the decision that Paindo should give a daughter to the family of Talabuddin. The reasoning behind this decision was apparently that ‘Ali Dost's honor had been injured when Paindo's side attacked his guests. (As will be discussed further on, the obligation of a host to his guest is fundamental in Pakhtun culture.) ‘Ali Dost was consequently duty-bound to protect his guests and could not be held personally liable for the death of Paindo's brother because ‘Ali Dost was only doing what honor required. At the same time, the jirga recognized that it was in everyone's interest for violence between the families to cease, and the chances of reconciliation were much greater if the two families were joined by marriage. To bring about this end, the jirga decreed that Paindo should give his daughter to one of Talabuddin's sons, and it was for this purpose that Talabuddin set off from his village on the day of his death.

This additional information complicates the story but does not fundamentally contradict it. Instead of recounting a complex and morally ambiguous history, Safi has simplified events, reducing them to their bare narrative essentials and introducing a more straightforward plot and a clearer sense of a beginning and end (which reality had refused to provide). Safi's version also imparts a clear sense of moral responsibility, at least as regards the relations between the two families: Talabuddin innocently, if naively, set off to get a bride for his son and was treacherously murdered for reasons of greed. Blame here can be readily affixed, which helps to explain, if not entirely excuse, the excesses that Sultan Muhammad later commits in pursuit of his revenge.

The new information confounds the simple moral equation by introducing at least the possibility that events were more ethically ambiguous than Safi made them out to be, particularly if the tribal assembly reached the decision reported to me. According to other Pakhtuns I have talked to (including some experienced tribal negotiators), most jirgas dealing with conflicts such as this one would require that the family of the murderer give a woman to the family of the victim, regardless of which side was ultimately liable for the violence. If Paindo had been judged accountable for the ambush of ‘Ali Dost's allies, he or one of his sons might have been exiled from the community, his house might have been burnt, or the family might have been forced to pay a hefty compensation. But because his family had suffered a death, it would have been unusual for the jirga to compound their loss—and humiliation—by making them give up a daughter to their enemies in addition to the brother they had already lost.

Why would the jirga have decided that Talabuddin should receive the woman? Was it because this incident was preceded by others in which Paindo's family was held accountable? Was it because the honor of Talabuddin's family had been mortally impugned by the attack on their guests? Or was it because Talabuddin, as the governor of the area, had sufficient power to turn the results to his own favor, thereby contravening the sanctity of the jirga as the arbiter of honor in tribal life? If one of the former possibilities is correct, then the basic moral equation Safi set up still holds, but if the latter possibility is closer to the truth, then perhaps Talabuddin's killers had a more compelling motive than mere greed. Perhaps because of his position as a powerful landowner and government official, Talabuddin felt he could gain an advantage over his cousin. Perhaps he felt invulnerable in his own home territory, and it was arrogance (kibr) rather than piety that made him leave home without a bodyguard. Perhaps, as well, Paindo's attack on Talabuddin was not launched by greed but as an honorable defiance to a rival cousin who was unbalancing the rough equality of tribal cousins and fast turning himself into an overlord.

These speculations rest on uncertain ground, of course, but the fact that they can be entertained at all reminds us that we can never know for sure how historically accurate Safi's tale really is. It also indicates that we should set aside any aspirations we might harbor for discovering the “plain facts” of history. We are in a world of stories, and the absolutes we encounter here are made-up ones while the rendition of history meets other requirements than mere truth. The ultimately uncertain truth value of the story does not lessen its interest, however. In some ways, it makes it more interesting, for we can see in the interstices between myth and history the shaping influence of the moral imagination as it has passed over this particular outcropping of events in the course of myriad retellings.

In the tale of Sultan Muhammad's revenge, we confront a rendering of a historical event that is the product not of Safi alone or of any other single author but of many. We know this to be the case because no single voice could possibly have known all the parts of the story and because its main protagonist was himself silent on critical matters that only he could have known about but that have nevertheless found expression within the narrative frame. This being the case, we can see in this account not merely the working of one man's imagination but the operation of a cultural logic fashioning meaning from experience and fixing value to memory.

At the same time, while it is clear that the account has a strong moral dimension, it is also equally the case that aspects of the story do not readily lend themselves to what might be called common-sense interpretation, even when those doing the common-sense interpreting are other Afghans. Although most of the actions recounted in the narrative are perfectly comprehensible to a native audience, there are some that blur cultural distinctions between right and wrong and violate one set of customary expectations in the process of fulfilling another. Three scenes in particular stand out as extreme, even to Afghans brought up on stories of feud and retribution. They are Sultan Muhammad's denial of his father's dying request, the blinding of his mother, and the slaughter of the seven sons in the guest house.

The actions recounted in these scenes touch raw nerves and occasion awkward silences when recounted in company, and I have found that Afghans to whom I have told the story find these parts as troubling as I do, despite their bringing different cultural resources to the story. This being the case, I had to confront the fact that a straightforward exegesis (along the lines of “he does this because in Afghan culture they believe that…”) was insufficient to the contradictions embodied in the story and that it was necessary to search out deeper meanings than those immediately evident even to Afghan listeners. The idea of stretching my analysis beyond the boundaries of the native point of view bothered me at first: if this story was strange and distasteful to Afghans, what use could I make of it in my exposition on the moral logic of honor? And besides, what right did I have to impose an interpretation on their stories that went beyond what Afghans themselves would recognize as legitimate and apparent?

Increasingly, however, I have come to accept the necessity of this sort of interpretation and to feel that the only stories worth writing about, in one's own or another culture, are the troubling ones that are full of contradictions and that defy easy exegesis. This point became especially clear to me when I started reading bedtime books to my son. Like most children, he has an insatiable appetite for stories and often wants to hear the same ones over and over. Like most adults, I enjoy reading aloud but found the experience of repeating the same story night after night to be trying at first. Gradually, however, I have gotten used to repetition and in the process have gained a much clearer sense of what makes a story affecting than I ever got from reading books one time through to the end.

The sum of my experience is this: simplistic stories devoid of morally ambiguous characters and narrative complexity quickly wear thin, both for the child and the parent. The worst of all stories are those that seek to be charming, but a close second are those stories that rework classic fairy tales, gutting them of their contradictions, their violence, their perverse strangeness. Such reworkings are usually undertaken to make the classic tales less offensive to modern ears, but they achieve this objective at the expense of the stories' integrity and leave little behind that might catch (or fester) in the imagination of a child or an adult.

Applying this experience to my reading of Safi's tale, I have been emboldened to think that what matters most in this story are precisely its moments of excess and transgression, for it is in these moments that we come to see the story's horrible fascination and glimpse the troubling contradictions that rest at the core of Sultan Muhammad's world and that Pakhtuns themselves are aware of, at least subliminally. The strategy for the remainder of this chapter, then, will be to focus on what I have marked off as the three pivotal transgressions in the story, both as a way of illuminating the meaning of the story as a whole and as a means of comprehending the cultural logic of honor.

Fathers and Sons

One of the underpinnings of the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge is the principle of patrilineal descent and the relationship between fathers and sons. Like people in other parts of the Middle East, Pakhtuns accord special significance to kinship through the paternal line, and many, if not most, refer to themselves as members of a larger grouping (qaum) that includes all those who claim descent from a common patrilineal ancestor. Thus, for example, members of the royal family that ruled Afghanistan prior to the 1978 revolution belonged to the “Muhammadzai” lineage: those who claim to be “sons of” (zai) an earlier Muhammad, though not the Prophet Muhammad.

In the course of my investigations, I have frequently encountered individuals who, when asked to substantiate their claim to being “from the so-and-so-zai tribe,” can provide from memory a genealogy that is ten or eleven generations deep and more or less inclusive of all parallel lines that have branched off from their own within the last four or five generations. This depth of genealogical knowledge is far from general (many Pakhtuns can tell you their grandfather's name and little else), and the practical implications of claiming common patrilineal descent varies widely. But it is doubtless the case that patrilineal descent is of tremendous moral import even for those without extensive patrilineal connections.

One expression of this significance is the respect paid to paternal ancestors who are accorded unquestioned respect by the very fact of their being in the category of nikagan, or “grandfathers.” Being a grandfather (singular, nika) means first of all that a man lived long enough and productively enough to propagate the line. This in turn implies that the ancestor's name, at least for a time, will be preserved in genealogies and will be remembered by those who come after him and who owe him their respect by the mere fact that he made them possible. In a profound way, attacks against one's ancestor(s) are defamations of oneself, while conversely the honor (nang) of an ancestor is honor reflected through oneself. The logic of this can be seen in the following statement of Shahmund, a venerable elder of the Isakhel branch of the Mohmand tribe. The Isakhel are among the branches of the tribe known as sarhad (frontier) Mohmands because their territory straddles the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Other Pakhtuns generally acknowledge the sarhad Mohmands as exemplars of Pakhtun culture in its uncorrupted state, and Shahmund demonstrates the merit of this assessment by the manner in which he describes a man who had recently been selected to a position of power within the tribe:

I'm sure that this family will not be destroyed by the will of God because if there is goodness among them God will not destroy them. If someone is a gambler or a vagabond, God will destroy his family.…What finally happens is God's doing. They are better than other people. “The sword of real iron cuts” [tura pa asil ghutsa kawi]. For example, Faiz Gul is the brother of Haji Reza Khan. Since Faiz Gul is a good-for-nothing, his son is just like him. His grandson is also nothing. Since Haji Reza Khan is a good man, his sons are also like him. His grandsons are also like him, and maybe his grandsons' sons will be even better than him.

In the world view of the speaker (as of Sultan Muhammad), a man carries the honor of his father as his primary legacy, and, before he has done anything in the world, he will be judged by the actions of his forebears. A man of good stock—like the clean-cutting sword—is said to be asil: pure, uncorrupted, authentic. This quality can be diluted in a number of ways—for example, by having a mother who is from another tribe or, worse yet, another ethnic group—but so long as a man is known to have a Pakhtun father and paternal grandfathers, then it is understood that he is at least capable of honor.^[3]

In both the action inscribed in the narrative (as well as in the act of narration itself), the relation of father and son provides the central axis of Sultan Muhammad's story, but the first instance in which the father-son relationship presents itself as a relevant factor is not in fact within the story itself. Rather, it is embedded in Talabuddin's honorific surname, Akhundzada (son of an akhund). While not developed explicitly by the narrator, the fact that Talabuddin was known by this name is important, for it tells us a great deal about who he was and how he came to hold the position of power that he did.

In Kunar Province, there are four renowned families known by the name Akhundzada. Three of these families are located in villages along the main branch of the Kunar River (in Kus Kunar, Khas Kunar, and Narang), and the fourth is Safi's family in Gul Salak of Pech Valley. While the exact histories of these families is unclear, it is known that the apical ancestor of each of these families was a religious figure and that all four of these ancestors lived within the last hundred years. In two cases (the families in Kus Kunar and Khas Kunar), it appears that the paterfamilias was an outsider brought to the village to serve as prayer leader and religious teacher, whereas the families of the other two akhunds were both indigenous to the villages in which they lived. Regardless of their original situations, the sons of all four of these pious fathers succeeded in parlaying the initial spiritual influence of their forebears into political power in their areas.

The specifics of how this came about are obscure, but it appears that the principal factor in all four cases was the role that the succeeding generation played as mediators with the central government, probably during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Amir Abdur Rahman (1880–1901) and his son Amir Habibullah (1901–1919) were consolidating power in the Kunar Valley.^[4] Religious families could play this role effectively for a variety of reasons. In relation to the needs of the government, religious families tended to be literate and more conversant in the ethos and practical requirements of government service than the average person brought up in the tribe. This was especially true of families that had been brought into the tribe from elsewhere and therefore had kinship ties and other connections that most native tribesmen lacked. In addition, religious families enjoyed the privilege of being simultaneously inside and outside the tribes with which they lived. This status meant that while they were knowledgeable of tribal ways and tended to be trusted because of their local residence in tribal areas, they also could withdraw themselves from tribal feuds without loss of prestige to themselves.

Since religious figures were frequently placed in inter- and intra-tribal mediatory roles during times of conflict or dispute, it was not difficult for them to take the further step of mediating between tribe and government. In taking on this role, religious figures also had certain perquisites that they could draw upon to advance their position. The most important of these was authority over the Holy Book itself, which tribesmen revered but which most were unable to read. Because of the sacred but generally inaccessible status of the Qur’an, those who could quote from its pages had a tremendous advantage that could be used, for example, to excoriate those who exhibited inadequate religiosity in their everyday lives or who participated in unsanctioned political activities. This kind of tactic did not always work, of course, and tribesmen no less than peasant farmers and city dwellers were ready to condemn those who used Islam for personal advantage. However, under certain circumstances, such as those that existed in Kunar in the early part of the century, religious status could be used to advantage, and for the four akhundzada families of Kunar, the combination of religious prestige, a tribal base, and government backing proved decisive in acquiring power, land, and privilege.

From the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge, we also know that religious status, particularly when combined with “the power of the government and the power of the tribe and of land” could also prove troublesome and contradictory. In fact, we must conclude that it is precisely this unwholesome combination of personal statuses that brought about the first confrontation in the story: that between Talabuddin Akhundzada and his son, Sultan Muhammad, when the latter decided to travel unescorted outside of his village. This is a strange and barely credible scene. After all, Sultan Muhammad is said to be only a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy at the time, and it is hard to imagine a child of this age lecturing his father in so open and worldly a manner, particularly in a social context that values paternal authority as highly as this one. It is also, of course, difficult to imagine that the father would be so naive as to travel alone in the area given the position he occupied and the existence of ongoing rivalries.

What then motivates the father? From what the story tells us, we are meant to believe that the father acts out of trust. He has faith in his fellow men. Because he has acted fairly with others in his community, he trusts that they will act fairly with him. His logic is simple. It is the logic of a man of religion, a pious Muslim. Perhaps like many old men in Pakhtun society, he wants to retreat from life, to finally immerse himself in religion and piety before death arrives to close the book of his deeds. This is a legitimate sort of progression in the life of any man, but Talabuddin is not any man: he is hakim, he is a landowner, he is a man who lived life fully enough to acquire the rivals and enemies that are the sign of one's status and worth in this world.

Talabuddin, in other words, is still too fully invested in the world to legitimately seek divestment. As such, his action can only be judged as intentionally self-destructive and morally indefensible since his destruction in all likelihood will also mean the destruction of his family. In the moral universe of the tribe, the father's incaution must be viewed as profoundly criminal, for by refusing to acknowledge the reality of violence, Talabuddin visits upon his son the curse of that violence. In contradiction to the statement of principle attributed to Talabuddin in his dying moments, the most basic fact of life in the tribal universe is that all men are not “brothers,” at least not in any simplistic sense. They are, rather, “tarburs” and, one must also assume, enemies, now or in the future.^[5]

Talabuddin, of course, knows the continual threat which exists even (or especially) from one's own kinsmen, and his failure to acknowledge it occasions his death and the transgression of his son's disobedience to his dying request. Thus, while it would appear on one level that it is the treachery of the enemy that sets the action of the story into motion, on another level, it is Talabuddin's recklessness that matters more. This incaution is, in a certain sense, the original sin of the story, and its import is signaled by the incongruity in the opening scene of the son giving advice and thereby reversing roles with his father.

Similarly, when Sultan Muhammad reaches his dying father, he gives the boy an order which he cannot obey and which is based on a moral presupposition that does not apply in this world. The order may not seem remarkable to us, but it is in fact a mark of supreme arrogance: the arrogance of a man who, in his concern for his own status, ignores the social community that is the legitimate arbiter of status; the arrogance of one who worries more about his own situation than that of his dependents; the arrogance of a believer who abrogates to himself what is rightfully God's alone, namely the determination of who is and is not “a pure martyr.” Preternaturally wise in the ways of the world, Sultan Muhammad refuses his father's command and in doing so breaches one code of tribal life (obedience to one's father) in order to satisfy another (the necessity of taking revenge for an act of violence committed against a close kinsman).

The binding nature of Sultan Muhammad's obligation to avenge his father's death is spelled out in dramatic fashion when he says to his father, “I am alive. If I do not have the force and power in me to take revenge on one person for every bullet that has struck your body, then I would not be your son.” This statement makes clear that Sultan Muhammad's status as his father's son has been placed in jeopardy. In Pakhtun culture, the symbolic status of being a son is the fundamental precondition of male identity. Detachment from one's father means that one is alienated from the honor which the father represents and from the community of individuals bound by their shared concern for honor. Thus, in a very real sense, a man without a father is a man without identity; but at the same time, having a father, we come to understand, is not presupposed by being alive. A man may, in the course of events, lose his father (or his claim to identity through the father) and be forced to prove that he is in fact the son of a man. Such is the case with Sultan Muhammad, but the tragic irony here is that regaining the identity of being his father's son requires Sultan Muhammad to refuse his father's dying command. The son's disobedience condemns the father to damnation (in the religious terms invoked by the father), just as the father's allowing himself to be killed has condemned the son to a sort of living damnation (in society's terms): the damnation of being exiled from one's group and of losing the most basic claim to identity, the claim of having a father.

A final issue must concern us before moving on to the second transgression in this story. That issue concerns the significance of Sultan Muhammad's disobedience outside the confines of the story itself. In addressing this matter, we must first recall that the action inscribed in this story is not real, even if it may be true. We don't know what motivated the father to do what he did, and we must suspect even the basic “facts” of the story, especially those facts that would tell us what transpired between father and son at the father's death. Whose words are these that Safi recounts and who preserved them for posterity? Only Sultan Muhammad was there after all. Is this dialogue based on his own testimony (a somewhat unlikely possibility given his general reticence to discuss his own life), or do these words rather represent what might have or should have been said?

Are they, in other words, a response developed later by untold other voices to explain and resolve both Sultan Muhammad's relation to his particular father and—more generally—the ambiguous ties that join all fathers and sons in Pakhtun culture? There being no other eyewitnesses to provide even the barest Rashomon-like balance to the available narrative, we will never know what portion of this story corresponds to real events and what portion is made-up. However, on the assumption that all historical narratives reflect to some degree a sense of what ought to have happened rather than what did, my tendency in this case is to believe that here, too, what should have been said came over time to be what was said, and it did so in a fashion that corresponded with the ambivalent feelings men generally have about their fathers.

In Pakhtun society, so long as the father is alive, the son will always be subordinate. He will always be forced to serve his father and will be, to one degree or another, a dependent in terms of his material stake in the world and the voice that he is able to exert in familial and societal affairs.^[6] The first symbolic severing of this dependence comes with the boy's marriage and, even more important, the birth of his first male child. At this moment, the boy truly joins the tribe, both in the literal sense that his name will be included as a significant link in the chain of genealogical memory that constitutes the tribe and in the more personal and emotionally charged sense that he now stands as an independent actor who radiates his own honor as well as the reflected glory of his antecedent fathers. The birth of a son is thus integral to the construction of a man's identity, but this construction is based on the perpetuation of the same kind of psychic subjection of the son's identity to that of his father that the father himself experienced in his early life. For his son, as for himself, this subjection will continue at full strength until the birth of his own male offspring and will only cease altogether when his father departs the world.

Given the centrality of the father-son relationship within Pakhtun society (and the status of the father as the one who makes the son what he is while also denying him the chance to become what he wants to be), it is clear that the account of Sultan Muhammad's disobedience to his father's last command taps into a powerful current, a current that has a strong resonance with Pakhtun men who know all too well the contrary pulls of paternal obedience and personal affirmation. In a way that is eerily reminiscent of other myths (including the psychoanalytic ur-tale contained in Totem and Taboo), the story can be seen as a kind of patricide by which obedience to paternal authority is violently rejected. This act of resistance is only a story, of course, but it nevertheless reflects the psychic turbulence which patriarchal authority creates in a society that measures the merits of men both by the status of their paternal ancestors and the degree of independence they manage to muster in worldly affairs. The story of Sultan Muhammad's denial of his father's command gives dramatic form to this ambivalence, and does so in a way that allows the son to affirm both his paternity (what his father stands for as opposed to who he actually is) and at least the potentiality of his selfhood in the face of the father's willful suppression.

Men and Women

After Talabuddin's death and burial, the second part of Sultan Muhammad's story begins. So long as his father's murder remains unavenged, the boy will remain in an existential limbo, a fact dramatically demonstrated by his leaving the insular world of his tribe and taking up residence with allies of his father's. The narrator does not know exactly when all of these events took place, but his surmise that it was “during the time of Abdur Rahman Khan” provides one of our few hints as to what was going on in the larger world outside Pech Valley. This was before the establishment of national borders, when local potentates like the Nawab of Dir wielded nearly as much influence in the area as the government in Kabul itself, and Sultan Muhammad avails himself of the Nawab's offer of asylum to provide for his needs and protect himself from the further violence of his enemies.

Sultan Muhammad settles into the life of the Nawab of Dir's court, learning to read and write (one assumes he did not acquire these skills in Pech) and eventually mastering the calligraphic and rhetorical techniques associated with the scribal class. These were accomplishments in which Sultan Muhammad clearly took pride, but even as he marveled in his mastering of the forty “mursalat” of the scribe, he also must have felt the sting of his diminished status as an employee of a man who had once been his father's friend. The reprieve offered by the Nawab is a costly one for Sultan Muhammad that requires his physical and moral estrangement from his native land. Exile, he must come to realize, will end only when he rejects his dependence on others and takes the necessary steps to avenge the murder of his father. Before fully absorbing this lesson, however, Sultan Muhammad must endure humiliations that elucidate (for him and for the story's listeners) the full extent of his alienation and liminality.

The first humiliation arises from the birth of his son during his absence from Pech. We don't know exactly when this event takes place; Sultan Muhammad's age is omitted, as is the identity of his wife and when they got married. In my later research, however, I did manage to discover that this wife was Sultan Muhammad's stepsister: the daughter of Talabuddin's third wife by an earlier, deceased husband (himself a cousin of Talabuddin).^[7] Since this information is not relevant to the narrative, Samiullah has not included it; but what he has provided—and what is underscored in the story—is the contradiction to Sultan Muhammad's own status that the birth of a son brings into being.

In Pakhtun society, the birth of a son is normally the occasion for general celebration and personal recognition for the father. This is one of the highlights of any man's life—a moment for ceremonially firing rifles into the sky and feasting family and friends. However, in this instance, the news that a son has been born is delivered in a somber, almost funereal manner: “Let us go to the homeland. God has delivered a child in your home.” As the scene develops, it becomes clear that the brusque tone of the original message was not accidental, and we see that the maternal uncle (mama) does not intend to let happiness be a part of his nephew's response to his good fortune. So long as his debt to his father remains unpaid, Sultan Muhammad will not be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his newly gained status in society.

The nature of this debt is made clear to Sultan Muhammad by his mama, who forces the young man to recognize the shame and incongruity of lavishing affection on his infant son while his own relationship with his father remains unresolved. The uncle's message is that if Sultan Muhammad is to return to Pech and live a normal life with normal affections, he must do so on the tribe's terms. It is worth noting here that the mama has a special place in Pakhtun culture. He is one of the few senior males with whom a boy can talk and enjoy an informal and uninhibited relationship, and this closeness helps to offset the formality that usually characterizes the relationship between a boy and his senior agnatic relatives, especially his father and his paternal uncles.

In this instance, the mama uses his trusting relationship with his nephew to say directly to his face what others would say behind his back. The terms that the mama throws at Sultan Muhammad—daus and dala—don't translate well into contemporary English with its impoverished vocabulary of honor, but they are especially offensive and insulting to Pakhtun ears. To call a man “daus” is to accuse him of being unable to preserve the sexual honor of his wife, even potentially of offering his wife to other men. It is to say that the normally sacrosanct domestic quarter of his home is violable and that he himself has not the power to defend his home, his lands, or his women (wives, mother, sisters, daughters)—all of which, individually and collectively, constitute a man's namus.

It could be said that a man's namus are all those things he has that other men might desire and whose inviolability to those desires constitutes the primary criterion of his worth in the tribe.^[8] A man who is incapable of defending his namus is referred to as daus. “Cuckold” is probably the closest approximation to the word and captures some aspects of it, but it completely loses the affective power of the word daus, along with its many possible applications—for example, to men who spend all of their time in the company of women, who are continually nagged and scolded by their wives, or who choose to live with their fathers-in-law.

Dala is frequently used as a synonym for daus but also carries the meaning of someone who is weightless and without substance—a man who, out of ignorance or moral perversity, debases honor by inaction or by action undertaken solely for personal advantage. Like daus,dala is a term that is invoked rarely and then only with due caution. If the mama did not enjoy a trusting relationship with his nephew, his use of these words would be understood as the kind of mortal insult that could only be redressed by deadly violence. Because they are uttered by the mama, however, the words stand as a warning of the fate that befalls a man who is unmindful of the implications of his actions.

If his mama's words are a warning of the ridicule that will follow if he does not achieve vengeance for his father, the actions of his mother are the realization of this possibility. The responsibility for taking revenge should fall to the wife of a slain man only if there is no male heir to take up the challenge. The precipitous action of Sultan Muhammad's mother denies the son the opportunity to fulfill his obligation and obtain social recognition as the son who has avenged his father. In a fundamental way, the mother has condemned the son not so much to disgrace as to a perpetual state of liminality. As the uncle has warned, Sultan Muhammad cannot reside within the tribe as a full equal of other men so long as he has not avenged his father's death. Once the mother has taken matters into her own hands, the opportunity no longer exists for Sultan Muhammad to effect his own revenge. From the tribe's point of view, a life has been squared with a life. The debt (por) is paid, and if further violence were to be initiated, the perpetrator would himself come to be thought of as the responsible party. Sultan Muhammad presumably knows this and knows as well that his opportunity for redemption has slipped beyond his reach.^[9]

Sultan Muhammad's response involves two actions: first, the blinding of his mother and, second, the elaboration and execution of his own plan to bring about vengeance for his father's murder without bringing down upon his head the indignation of the tribe. The first of these two acts is the more difficult to comprehend and brings to mind what would seem to be a discrepancy between how the mother and the majority of others have interpreted her actions and how Sultan Muhammad himself has conceived of them. Thus, the narrator tells us that “all of the people, all of his friends and relations think that he must be happy” with the news that revenge has been achieved and the debt of honor erased. I have also asked other Pakhtuns what their reaction would be, and while they understand logically the reasons for Sultan Muhammad's displeasure, they also express surprise and outright abhorrence at the brutality of his actions.

Such responses make one wonder just what is going on, and so too does the fact that Safi interjects his own explanation into the narrative, an explanation that is couched in the direct speech of the father, even though he also states that the father never talked about the incident. Safi's interpretation is, in fact, a tangle of made-up quotes belonging not only to his father but also to “the tribe”: “You have subjected me to the tana and paighur of the tribe: `The son of Talabuddin Akhundzada was never born. His wife gained his revenge. His wife took his vengeance. He didn't have a son.' You have ruined my name and reputation in the tribe.” What Safi's explanation seems to indicate, first of all, is his own understanding of the problematic, and perhaps transgressive, nature of his father's action and, second, his attempt to make sense of that action in a language that will make sense to me, an outsider, and that will also accurately reflect the cultural realities.

Despite the confusing syntax of Safi's explanation, it accomplishes both purposes in an admirably succinct manner, for he shows how his father has internalized and amplified the external judgments of the people as the basis of his own self-judgment. The anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers has noted that “Honour is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride.”^[10] In the case of Sultan Muhammad, we see this relationship played out to its logical conclusion, a conclusion that results in a man renouncing all other claims on his person but that of honor. For Sultan Muhammad, honor is not to be gauged in any componental sense by what he does (e.g., by feeding guests, by carrying a gun, or even by gaining revenge). It is rather to be gauged by who he is. In this sense, Sultan Muhammad is attuned to the inexorable logic of honor to a degree that others, who are bound and determined by other sorts of loyalties and affections, are not. Hearing this tale unfold, the listener understands that while Sultan Muhammad may be a man obsessed, he is also a man who knows more fully than other men what honor means.

Perhaps the listener also understands that honor unmediated by countervailing attachments is finally corrosive of social life—perhaps, but perhaps not. At any rate, we must conclude that when Sultan Muhammad punishes his mother, it is not in a fit of rage or pique. To the contrary, it is, like all of his actions, a “rational” and coherent response to a situation that threatens not only his own existence but the ethical presuppositions of honor that underpin the society. The response is certainly heartless, but those who expect something less extreme do so out of concern for something other than honor.

Even if we grant the rationality of punishment given Sultan Muhammad's ethic of honor, we are still left to wonder why the punishment chosen was blinding. In considering this question, it is helpful to know something about the circumstances under which the mother carried out the revenge for her husband's murder. The story itself does not provide this information, but additional research has helped fill this gap. One important piece of information that has been retrieved is that after Talabuddin's death, it was arranged for his widow, Sultan Muhammad's mother, to marry Paindo. This may seem an odd choice, but it makes sense if several factors are taken into consideration. The first of these is that in Pakhtun society widows are almost always remarried to a close agnatic relative of the husband. Talabuddin's brother, ‘Ali Dost, would normally have been the logical choice for her to remarry, but for reasons that remain obscure it was decided that she would marry Talabuddin's more distant cousin, Paindo, instead.^[11]

A second relevant factor in the decision was that Paindo's responsibility for the murder had not been proven. Since Talabuddin was alone at the time of this murder and the murderers themselves had acted covertly, no one knew for certain who was guilty of the crime. Consequently, while most people assumed that Paindo and his sons were guilty of the deed, responsibility could be denied by Paindo himself, even as he stepped forward to marry the dead man's widow and, presumably, seize hold of at least part of his estate. According to tribal informants, this plot was foiled when Sultan Muhammad's mother and her brother—the same mama who retrieved Sultan Muhammad from Dir—murdered Paindo when he appeared to claim his bride.

In acting as she did, the mother may have balanced a debt of honor according to an objective calculus, but from Sultan Muhammad's personal vantage, she did so in a way that compromised the integrity of his namus (by allowing Paindo even to think that he could claim Sultan Muhammad's home as his own) and that abrogated a right and duty (that of revenge) that was primarily his to uphold. While the mother's actions achieved the desired end, the means by which this end was brought about were potentially open to public censure and, of greater importance ultimately, they entailed the usurpation of a role properly belonging to him. That the arrogation of Sultan Muhammad's rightful role is the ultimate meaning of this scene is indicated by the nature of the punishment that Sultan Muhammad inflicts, for in blinding his mother, he engages in a form of punishment that appears to be uncommon in the tribal world but is more familiar in the context of the state. While I have never come across any reports of blinding as a punishment in tribal society, I have encountered accounts of blinding as a punishment for crimes of state, the most important being the usurpation of royal power by a functionary of the court. One example is a famous case from the early nineteenth century involving the chief minister to the royal court, Wazir Fateh Shah, who had his eyes torn out by the dissolute ruler, Shah Mahmud. The purported reason was that Shah Mahmud, briefly emerging from his perpetual stupor, was upset when he realized how much power and influence his minister had come to wield in his court. A second example is more recent and comes from the late nineteenth century during the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman, who is also the subject of the next chapter. According to Frank Martin, a British engineer who worked in the Amir's court, blinding was a punishment sometimes inflicted on prisoners “who try to escape from prison or from the country—synonymous terms almost.”^[12] An additional purpose underlying blinding in this instance is that the punishment makes the criminal dependent, whereas before he had acted in a manner that was excessively independent and evasive of royal authority.

The congruent logic of the punishment in this historical instance and in Sultan Muhammad's story is apparent. A minister (wazir) is not the equal of kings. He is properly a functionary, dependent upon the patronage of the king. Nevertheless, wazirs could gain considerable power in their management of the court and its affairs. When this power spilled out from the interior of the court to the exterior realm of politics, then the wazir was seen as overstepping his role. In a similar fashion, Pakhtun women can also exercise considerable power in the internal administration of their families. They often manage finances and ensure the proper feeding of guests, and they also quite frequently consult with their husbands (or nag them if necessary) in matters of familial concern. However, women, like wazirs, have a dependent status and are rarely expected to act independently in the political realm. In the case of Sultan Muhammad's mother, the nature of her “crime” was precisely that of acting beyond the limits of her culturally prescribed role. If she had committed adultery, then the penalty of death (for her and her partner) would have been expected, but her mistake was that of overreaching her authority as a mother, a wife, and a woman. Blinding was a coherent response in this circumstance because it made the wrongdoer passive and dependent where before she had been excessively active and independent.

Beyond this culturally grounded interpretation of blinding, Sultan Muhammad's act has an additional value within the confines of the story. Because of women's ability to move in and out of interior spaces that are restricted to men, they see more than men do. Although veiled from the sight of others as they move about in the public realm, women's own sight is unhampered, and they can observe the actions of men there just as they can also pass into their own world and see what is going on behind closed doors. The freedom to look into the inner worlds that men seal off from other men and to let others know what they see gives women considerable power over men. In this light, the act of blinding can be thought of as a practical, although inevitably futile, response to limit the power of surveillance with which women are culturally endowed.

After blinding his mother, Sultan Muhammad did not ignore her needs. A man was assigned to care for her, and Sultan Muhammad continued to pay her nominal respect, which was her due. Thereafter, however, he never indulged in the normal intimacies that are expected between mothers and sons, and—the narrator emphasizes—he never asked advice of his mother again and later warned his son of the dangers of female involvement in male affairs. Love is fine in its place, we are to conclude, and brutality toward women is to be censured, but the man of honor must be cautious that his judgment is not clouded by their advice. To allow this to happen is to make oneself vulnerable to the dangers which women embody: the danger of becoming the object of public ridicule, the danger of having extraneous considerations interjected in the course of pursuing honorable objectives, and the danger of having events slip out of one's control.

Friends and Enemies

There is much more that could be said about the role of women in this story, as well as about male-female relations in Pakhtun society generally, but I want to turn now to the third of the story's transgressions: the slaughter of the seven brothers in Sultan Muhammad's guest house. In order to make sense of this knot in the narrative, it is first necessary to consider the cultural logic and social structure of revenge in Pakhtun society.

Among Pakhtuns, all men of common descent are viewed as sials of one another. The term sial has the explicit meaning of “equal,” but it also has the more commonly understood connotation of “rival.” In theory, all members of a tribe are equal (and rival) to one another, and the killing of a poor tribesman in a feud is viewed as nominally equivalent to that of a wealthy man in tribal legal precedents. The only male residents in the tribal community who are not considered equal to other men are servants (nokaran), tenant farmers (dehqan), and client groups such as barbers and blacksmiths, collectively referred to as hamsaya (“same shade,” i.e., those living in the shade of a patron or of the tribe), who do not possess their own honor but rather share in the reflected honor of those under whose protection they live.

Rivalries in Pakhtun society generally coalesce along lines of age, wealth, and kinship relation—which delineation means that men of the same generation are more likely to become rivals than are men of different generations. Similarly, men of traditionally influential households will also tend to view each other (and be viewed by their fellows) as competitors for status and prestige if not also for land and women. Beyond such situational rivalries, every man also has a natural rival in his patrilateral first cousin, the aforementioned tarbur. When the word tarbur is joined with the suffix wali, it connotes something along the lines of “cousin competition” and is used to describe the endemic gamesmanship, rivalry, and sometimes open hostility that is thought to exist inevitably between the sons of brothers.

Most situations in which tarburwali comes into play are of an innocent sort. First cousins, for example, are expected to try to show each other up whether the opportunity arises in a sporting competition or in battle with some other group. The reward for proving oneself the better of one's cousin is the intangible advantage of being referred to as a “good youth” (kha tzwan). Whereas the term tarburwali is most often used in reference to first cousin rivalry, that all males in a tribe are categorically referred to as tarburs of one another means that the competition known as tarburwali can and frequently does extend beyond the range of first cousins to include all males of the same generation belonging to a tribe or tribal lineage. When good-natured rivalry escalates to deadly violence, the dynamic of reciprocal exchange that governs that violence is known as badal.

In its most general sense, badal signifies simply “exchange” and thus can be used to describe such phenomena as linked marriages in which two men marry each others' sisters. But badal is most commonly used to refer to exchanges of violence, most importantly, revenge killings, which, like marriage, are structured and regulated by custom. Revenge killings represent an extreme situation, but the very possibility of their occurrence sets the terms by which relationships in Pakhtun society are conceived, and they engender the common understanding that all alliances are necessarily formed because of the present existence or future likelihood of violent feud: which is to say, the existence of opposition creates the need for community. This conceptual complementarity is transformed into a practical unity of those allies who defend one another (malatar: those who bind their waists together) over and against the group of enemies (dushmanan) who, in different contexts, can be composed of one's cousins, a collateral tribal lineage, another tribe, or a temporary alliance of various kinsmen and allies not strictly related by ties of patrilineal descent.^[13]

A basic comprehension of the logic and structure of badal is a necessary prelude to uncovering the meaning of the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge, for in certain respects this whole tale can be read as an extended meditation on the fragile nature of social community in the tribal world. Any act of friendship (dosti) can quickly turn into an act of enmity (dushmani). Every alliance can become a feud, and all that prevents this from happening is the individual's vigilant concern for defending his honor, which, in the final analysis, is all that he has. The narrative progression of Sultan Muhammad's story clearly reflects the structural logic of badal—from the initial act of violence by the enemy to the final destruction of the twenty-two members of the opposing faction. Like other feud stories that one hears in Afghanistan (and the Middle East in general), this story replays a number of familiar refrains: for example, the tendency to attribute base intentions, treacherous practices, and breaches of taboo to your enemy; and the tendency for violence to escalate with every stage in the progression of the feud.

Despite these common threads, Sultan Muhammad's story stands out as different from most other feud stories in several respects. First, few feud stories end in the total annihilation of one's enemies. As Emrys Peters and other anthropologists have noted, feuds tend to have no set beginning, just as they have no determinate end. In many cases, the origins of a feud are lost in a mythic past, and even as the tenor of a feud will change—occasionally rising to snarling ferocity in response to a killing or other offense, more often keeping to a low growl of mutual intimidation—it is generally presumed that a feud will have no resolution, if only because no outcome could ever be equally satisfactory to both sides and, in a more general sense, the feud is too important for it to be allowed to end.^[14]

Without an ongoing arena of competition, young men have no avenue by which to prove their mettle. Feuds provide this arena, and even when older men want to see a feud resolved, young men usually want to see it prolonged.^[15] Likewise, for the group as a whole, feuds provide individuals with their most vivid stirrings of identity and the principal context within which they can feel themselves to be part of a unified community. The feud story in this narrative therefore stands apart because it does have both a beginning and an end, the beginning being possible to inscribe as a beginning because the ending has happened, which is to say, it is because the enemy is annihilated that Safi can begin the narrative part of his tale with the declaration “Some man from Gul Salak, whose name I have forgotten, said to my grandfather.…”

The second feature of this story that sets it apart from other feud stories is the constructed character of Sultan Muhammad's “vengeance group.” Feuds almost always develop between related branches of a single tribe and are more often than not the product of cousin rivalries. As has been noted, the only rivalry worth pursuing is with an equal: to become entangled with someone who is not one's equal raises that individual in the eyes of others and lowers oneself. In this case, however, Sultan Muhammad allies himself with an assortment of relatives (mostly affinal and maternal) and lower-caste tenant farmers (most of whom we assume either do not belong to the Safi tribe or are Safis who have had to accept the demeaning status of working for others).^[16] Although the members of Sultan Muhammad's vengeance group are not agnatically related and many appear to be his servants and tenant farmers, the request that he makes of them and their ceremonial response to it explicitly erase the contradiction of their alliance with the principle that patrilineal descent should be the basis of partnership in defense of honor. The ethical significance of this exchange of oaths is initially signaled by its being presented in dialogue rather than simply being reported by the narrator. Quoting this exchange allows the narrator to show the ethical status of the pact and the voluntary compliance of those who are party to it.^[17]

In his address, Sultan Muhammad indicates that the cement binding him to all those who would choose to join with him is their common readiness to die for the sake of higher ideals. Sultan Muhammad does allude rather conspicuously to the fact that he is the salary-giver and provider of arms for the group, but he then denies the importance of these factors in comparison to the friendship and mutual regard that bring them together. The implicit message here is that while Sultan Muhammad may be their superior they will show themselves to be his equal in honor by their willingness to sacrifice their heads in the cause of honor. In their response, Sultan Muhammad's allies likewise hint at the economic nature of their relationship, but they then set this matter aside as an irrelevant consideration. Instead, they praise the murdered father for his loyalty in the past and commit themselves to Sultan Muhammad's cause, not because of anything he has done, but because he is his father's son and therefore worthy of respect. The mutual obliviousness to the exact nature of the undertaking and to the risks it entails demonstrates the disinterestedness of the parties to this negotiation and the moral righteousness of their bond (a righteousness that offsets and obscures the variegated nature of their social structural ties).^[18]

The third and final way in which this story is different from most feud stories is in its apparent attribution of treachery to family members. Feud stories are often full of incidents in which people are killed while praying or guns are fired in a saintly shrine or a mosque, but these actions are always carried out by enemies, not by allies. Here, however, we are confronted with what is a clear transgression of cultural norms when Sultan Muhammad lures his enemies into the sacred precincts of his guest house (hujra) in order to murder them. Just as there are examples of political blindings in Afghan history, so there are examples of kings laying out lavish banquets for their guests and then slaughtering them. However, I am unfamiliar with any instances—other than this one—of a tribal host violating the sanctity of his hujra in this way.

In Pakhtun culture, hospitality (melmastia) is a central principle and a core feature of identity. All Pakhtuns, rich and poor alike, pride themselves on their readiness to feed and care for their guests, even if it means denying themselves and their families. For the khan in particular, feeding many guests is one of the primary ways to convert wealth into power and respect, not simply because it ties people to him in a dependent relationship, but also because it allows the khan to demonstrate his personal humility and his corresponding commitment to the ideals of his culture. This attitude is demonstrated in a myriad of ways seen daily in Pakhtun communities, for example, when a host personally presents each of his guests with a pitcher of water and bowl to wash their hands before a meal is served or when a host carries in the platter of food for his guests and then sits off to the side until they have finished their meal. As the primary site where the rituals of hospitality are played out, the hujra takes on a special significance as the symbol of the khan's identity and the way in which he wants to be viewed by his fellow tribesmen.

Like hospitality, offering shelter and protection to all who request it is another sacred value of Pakhtun culture. Known as nanawatai, this principle requires that an individual safeguards those who place themselves under his control, even it means sacrificing his own life to do it.^[19] A common narrative motif in Pakhtun culture is thus of the tribesman fleeing from one set of enemies who is forced to seek refuge from a third party with whom he has also been feuding. The person from whom refuge is sought invariably accepts the request, refusing to surrender the enemy now under his protection, even if it means having to fight the enemies of his sworn enemy. Nanawatai is a principle that Pakhtuns not only talk about but also put into practice and that they invoke in discussing the virtues and merits of individuals. A man cannot expect to be accorded respect if he refuses to shelter those who (to use the Pakhtun phrase) “seize his skirt” (laman niwul) any more than he can if he is stingy with his resources or lax in monitoring the behavior of female family members. In the story of Sultan Muhammad, however, we see both the principles of protection and hospitality violated. What are we to make of this? Is it not the case then that in gaining his revenge Sultan Muhammad has sacrificed any claim he might have had to the honorable regard and respect of others?

The contradiction is not an easy one to resolve, but there are several steps that might be taken to help explain this part of the story. The first is to relate Sultan Muhammad's actions to those of his enemy and thereby evaluate the degree to which the prior offenses of the enemy made Sultan Muhammad's response qualitatively reciprocal and therefore justified. One incident from the story that is relevant here is the denial by the seven sons of their mother's plea that they desist from their plan of violence against Sultan Muhammad. The description of the mother, Qur’an in hand, begging her sons to spare Sultan Muhammad's life presents a profound and disturbing image to Pakhtuns, for it is recognized that the violation of such a sacred request is likely to bring ill tidings to those responsible.

In a more general sense as well, the sons' refusal to heed their mother's appeal can be seen as qualitatively similar to a violation of the principle of nanawatai. When one side to a conflict wishes to sue for peace, they will frequently signal their intention by sending a delegation of women carrying Qur’ans and accompanied by one or more mullas to the compound of their enemy. The women will go into the domestic quarters and lower their shawls so that their hair and faces are revealed. This gesture, which replicates what women normally do when visiting relatives, signals the readiness of the women's male kinsmen to negotiate and enter into friendly relations with their enemies. Likewise, when someone has accidentally injured or killed another person, the family of the responsible party will signal its responsibility and desire for peace by sending women with Qur’ans to the victim's home. When women have crossed the lines of conflict in this way, all fighting must cease, and those who refuse to acquiesce are recognized to have violated the law of nanawatai. The action of the sons is not precisely the same, but it is similar. In both situations, the relevant fact is that women holding holy Qur’ans have placed themselves in harm's way in order to secure a truce. Those who are implicated by this act are obliged to comply, at least temporarily, and the failure of the seven sons to honor their obligation places them in a position of moral culpability for what follows.

A similar logic can be applied to the scene in which the seven sons first confront Sultan Muhammad and ask him to accompany them to mark the boundary between their properties. Sultan Muhammad refuses, feigning illness, but sends a messenger to tell them to take “however much land you need, and wherever you want to place the boundary—that is up to you. You decide yourself, and take two white beards with you.” On one level, Sultan Muhammad's words can be interpreted as an elaborate deception: pretending to be sick, he makes his enemies think he is afraid and furthers this impression by sending them a message that seems to indicate his abject willingness to capitulate to their demands. That this act is part of a plan to trap his enemies demonstrates Sultan Muhammad's cunning and perhaps helps to justify his violation of the norms of hospitality. Cleverness, particularly when placed in the service of honor, is a laudable virtue in Pakhtun society, and to some extent at least, the end (reclaiming honor) can be said to legitimate the means (violation of the rule of hospitality).^[20]

This much is going on, I think, but there is an additional message embedded in Sultan Muhammad's words as well—a message that the seven sons rashly overlook in their rush to seize their rival's land and destroy his name. As all Pakhtuns know, someone who willingly relinquishes his ancestral land is the most ignoble of creatures, for he has not only sacrificed his claim to social identity and membership in councils of the tribe, he has also “sold the bones of his fathers.” A man without land may be pitied for his poverty, but if he is otherwise brave and steadfast he will still have the respect of those around him. A man who sells his land or who abandons it to his enemies is in another category, however. Such a man is seen as cowardly (be ghairati) and unworthy of the respect of others in his society. Attacks against land are attacks against honor, and they cannot go unrequited if the victim of the attack has any intention of retaining his name and place in society.^[21]

Given the symbolic significance of defending one's land, it can be argued that when Sultan Muhammad expressed his willingness to have Paindo's sons move his boundary markers, he was actually up to something more complicated and devious than it appeared on the surface. Feigning timid concurrence to his enemies' demands, Sultan Muhammad succeeded in duping Paindo's sons into believing that he was not man enough to defend his land. This was the impression that his message conveyed, and it was under its spell that they set off to disenfranchise Sultan Muhammad of his inherited estate. At his suggestion, they also presumably brought along a number of old “white beards” to witness the act, but what they seem not to have recognized is that these same old men could also serve Sultan Muhammad's interests. Specifically, they could act as witnesses to an act of unlawful and immoral trespass egregiously perpetrated in broad daylight for all to see.

In this sense, it can be argued that Sultan Muhammad's appearance of acquiescence was actually intended to provide a pretext for attacking his enemies, a pretext that he hitherto lacked. From the tribe's point of view, Paindo's murder would have wiped the slate clean between the two families. Each side had lost a man of comparable rank, and no one had any right to pursue the feud any farther. However, once Paindo's seven sons violated “the bones of Sultan Muhammad's father,” he had all the pretext he needed to escalate the feud to the next level. The sons, of course, didn't recognize this possibility, but in the context of the story that ignorance is a mark of their greed and stupidity, just as it is also a sign of Sultan Muhammad's singular cleverness.

The endpoint of the present argument is that the seven sons of Paindo have sealed their own fate. By ignoring their mother's plea for mercy and ignobly stealing Sultan Muhammad's land, they have given Sultan Muhammad adequate cause for seeking their deaths. From a cultural and a narrative point of view, there seems to be considerable justification for viewing the logic of the slaughter in this way. However, I am not ultimately convinced by this argument. In the final analysis, I cannot fully believe that these rationales are sufficient to solve the problem that this scene raises in regard to understanding Sultan Muhammad's position in Pakhtun society or honor as a cultural system and moral logic. In a sense, the variables that I have provided are rationalizations, present in the text no doubt, but still inadequate to explain, much less erase, the transgressive quality of Sultan Muhammad's actions.

This being the case, I would take the analysis of the story one step further by admitting the morally contradictory features of the tale while also trying to place them in a more inclusive, less strictly componential framework. In my view, the story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge is about all I have claimed it to be, but it is also finally about something else as well—the impossibility of honor unmitigated by other principles as a basis of social action. In following Sultan Muhammad's actions and the events that he brings about, the listener (reader) cannot help but notice the cost to the individual and to the society of an unswerving adherence to honor. No man, we are led to understand, could possibly care more for honor than Sultan Muhammad, and no man understands its terrible logic better than he or realizes it more completely in his life. At the same time, no man pays a greater price, and the price he pays is one to which society at large must also contribute. The first installment on that price comes when Sultan Muhammad must disobey his dying father. The second and third are met when Sultan Muhammad is compelled to withhold his love from his infant son and then when he blinds his mother, thereby forever estranging her from himself. After this, Sultan Muhammad's path leads to two final sacrifices, one of which, ironically, is the sacrifice of his own status as a host, a man who offers hospitality and protection, a man of honor. This dimension of Sultan Muhammad's sacrifice derives from the perception, logically arrived at given the presuppositions of honor, that it is only when he has gained his own revenge that it can be said of him that he even exists (that when his father died he left behind a child who could become a man of honor).

In this sense, to kill his enemies in the guest house can be understood as an act of renunciation by which Sultan Muhammad signals his willingness to give up what he values most—his own status—so that he can exist at all within the threshold of honor. The existence he seeks is of necessity a cursed state of incompleteness: a state in which antagonism is the existential condition for one's identity as an individual and as a member of a group; a state in which an individual is forever in the thrall of those whom he respects and those whom he despises; a state in which the man of power and authority is finally as dependent on others as the man of basest means and aspirations.

The last and in some ways most poignant of all the sacrifices that Sultan Muhammad must make in regaining his claim to honor is the killing of his friend, which appears in the story as the denouement of the climactic slaughter in the guest house. Interestingly, this is the only one of Sultan Muhammad's actions that elicits an emotional response, and it is an effusive one at that: “And my father cries because he had been his friend. He had been his friend and playmate, and for this reason he cries. He cries a lot, so much so that people say he didn't eat food for a week. He was simply crying, not thinking of anything else except this friend of his. But, since he had become his enemy, he was obliged to kill him.”

Given its placement in the story and the emphasis that it is given, one is led to see this murder of the friend as especially significant, and this view is strengthened when one takes into consideration the value that Pakhtuns attach to friendship as an ideal. The most common word that Pakhtuns use for friend is andiwal. The prefix of this word, andi, literally means the bundle that makes up half the load carried on the back of a camel, horse, or other pack animal. Combined with the suffix wal, the word refers to the second bundle carried on the other side of the animal's back to balance the load. The sense of the term is thus that friends are comparable to a pair of fully loaded saddlebags that balance and support one another on the journey of life. When one has a friend with whom to share life's burdens, the journey proceeds smoothly; but for those who do not, the journey is likely to be torturous and slow.

That this linguistic metaphor of friendship correlates with Pakhtun cultural realities is substantiated by research that Charles Lindholm has conducted among Pakhtuns in the Swat valley of Pakistan. As Lindholm has noted (and my own experience confirms), the Pakhtun ideal of friendship is much more intense than the casual concept of friendship that generally prevails in the West:

[Pakhtun] Friends should be together constantly; they should completely trust one another and reveal all their secrets to one another. … The friend should be willing to sacrifice himself in total devotion to the will of the other. His affection must be spontaneous, without reservation, and all-consuming. The true friend is called `naked chest' because the hearts of both parties are bared to one another, thus sweeping away the pervasive secrecy and mistrust of…society.^[22]

The extent of Sultan Muhammad's emotional response to the death of his friend indicates the applicability of Lindholm's assertion to the Afghan context, just as Lindholm's analysis helps us to realize the toll which obedience to honor has exacted on Sultan Muhammad's soul. For Pakhtuns, the friend represents the possibility of an uncomplicated, unmediated relationship contracted outside the bounds of kinship and honor. The friend is a refuge from the distrust and suspicion that are ubiquitous everywhere else in tribal society.^[23] In destroying this refuge of trust then, Sultan Muhammad has destroyed the last part of his self that is responsive to something other than honor. All other attachments have gone before. At each stage of the story, Sultan Muhammad has been forced to renounce some part of his identity, some affection that contradicts the inexorable demands of honor, and the last and perhaps greatest of these sacrifices is that of his childhood friend whose life is dearer than his own.

The triumph of honor is thus complete: parental love, the bond between men and women, social respect as a host and protector of other men, and finally friendship—all have been sacrificed on the altar of honor. And if we still question the genesis of Sultan Muhammad's actions, the narrative provides some further suggestions in the care that he subsequently takes to uphold the sanctity of honor: care, for example, in attending to the bodies of his enemies and, later, care in demonstrating the proper respect to the wives of his fallen victims. To show disrespect for one's enemies would be to show disrespect for honor itself and would throw into doubt the very foundation upon which this act of extreme vengeance has been undertaken. Sultan Muhammad, we are to suppose, has not acted for himself or for his own advancement. Rather, he has been motivated solely by his absolute and unwavering concern for honor. That alone could justify the magnitude of his revenge, and that alone, we are asked to believe, is what Sultan Muhammad strove to uphold.

Coda: Jandad's Punishment

The story of Sultan Muhammad's revenge has introduced us to a man who fully understands the logic of honor and carries that logic to its ultimate conclusion. But what are we finally to conclude from his story? If, as Hayden White has argued, “narrativity…is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality,” what is the ultimate moral message of this tale of vengeance and resolve?^[24] One answer perhaps is provided by Safi when he declares (again speaking his father's lines) his father's rationale for treating the female kin of his enemies with circumspection and respect: “we could not be proud [gharur]. We could not do kibr. [That was] first, and second was this, that since they are namus, one must show respect to this namus.”

Act, in other words, not in pursuit of self-interest but for honor. So long as one's motivations are pure, one can be assured that God's sanction and society's approval will follow. And indeed, this was the case, as “God did the work that they wanted to do to us” while “the people saw the kind of thing my father was doing, and at the same time the people saw what modesty he had with regard to namus and other things that concerned the tribe. The tribe said good things about this. This is how he defends these things.”

Thus, the tale would appear to conclude logically. This, in fact, is its natural terminus, but when Safi recounted the story of his father's revenge he did not stop here. Instead, he glided past the conclusion of the first story of his father's revenge to tell of another incident many years later that involved his eldest brother, Jandad. Jandad, it will be recalled, was introduced in the story as the infant whose affections Sultan Muhammad denied. Here, we see him as a young man seeking to demonstrate, as all young men should do, his courage and prowess. However, in disarming this rival, Jandad also shows a heedlessness to the dictates of honor, a heedlessness that his father has good reason to fear and condemn. In the Pakhtun world, the rifle is the symbolic marker of a man's identity as a man. To take away someone's rifle is therefore extremely provocative; to do so in front of his wife is far worse, virtually a form of sexual assault which conveys the message that the wife is the assailant's to possess. Whatever Jandad may have had in mind when he took his rival's weapon, his action represented a serious breach of Pakhtun norms; and given the care with which Sultan Muhammad has treated his enemies and the female relatives of his fallen foe, it can also be said that Jandad's impulsiveness has threatened his father's efforts to live a life utterly ruled by honor's dictates.

While one can understand the logic of Sultan Muhammad's response, one is still left gaping at its severity and also wonders at the narrator's motivation in appending this additional episode to the earlier story. What could have motivated Safi to continue on past the natural ending of the first story to tell the second? Both episodes involve relations with Paindo's family and are linked in that way. Both also involve the concept of namus, but the placement of the two episodes back-to-back does not have the effect of clarifying the meaning of namus or of explicating the meaning of the story more generally. Rather, its central effect is to place in doubt, if not actually undermine, the sense of the narrative and with it, the ethical foundations of Sultan Muhammad's actions. More specifically, Safi's inclusion of this story of Jandad's punishment raises some basic questions that might otherwise have remained unasked: When does the pursuit of personal honor go beyond the bounds of what is just and commendable? At what point does the kha tzwan—the good youth—become the badmash—the reprobate or outlaw? The answer Safi explicitly provides is that it happens when an individual acts in an arrogant fashion to advance himself and his own interests to the detriment of society's norms and expectations. At critical junctures, however, Safi's father has contravened this principle by disregarding the views of the community, for example, when he blinds his mother or, in this case, when he punishes and disowns Jandad. Reading these episodes, one must wonder whether an individual is, in fact, acting in an honorable manner if he insists on upholding a standard of morality that exceeds that of his neighbors. Is not such a man guilty of the sin of arrogance, or kibr, that the story so vehemently decries?

Safi does not tell us his opinion on this question, but his inclusion of these alternative endings has forced us to confront it directly. If we are to make sense of the story, we must make sense of these contradictory closings, for they highlight the ultimate ambiguity of Sultan Muhammad's actions and the ambivalent nature of honor itself. Let me then conclude this examination of honor as a moral system by considering in somewhat greater depth the significance of Jandad's actions and Sultan Muhammad's response to them.

From Sultan Muhammad's perspective, Jandad's sin is to violate another man's namus, a term that comprises all those things with which a Pakhtun man surrounds himself—rifles, land, women—and that collectively constitute his claim to honor. Without women in his home, without land to his name, without a rifle to shoulder, a man is weightless and naked (luchak). But, namus can also be defined as all those things—rifles, land, women—that are inherently desirable, that other men will in the normal course of events seek to possess, and that must at all costs be defended. Those things that give substance to a man's claim to honor thus also make him vulnerable. The more namus, the greater the honor that accrues, but along with this greater honor comes greater susceptibility to assault. In this way, the attainment of honor—that most cherished of possessions—requires exposure to dishonor. The individual who would be respected must make himself vulnerable: the more so the better. In this system, there is no stopping point, no resting place, only greater risks, as long as a man lives or chooses to play the game.^[25]

That Sultan Muhammad took a total of nine wives indicates the extent to which he understood this logic. The ability to secure more wives demonstrated his power and his prowess, but at a considerable cost. For in taking these wives, Sultan Muhammad increased his vulnerability both to other men in his society and to the women themselves since women gain power in and to the degree that men require them in order to become and remain competitive in the arena of honor. Here then is one of the central dilemmas of honor as a cultural system. The ultimate objective of the man of honor is to exhibit independence in his actions and to sustain the appearance that he is not dependent upon or determined by any other individual. In seeking that independence of action, however, the man of honor must become dependent on women who, although categorically inferior to him, are yet capable of denying him the social respect that is his most cherished desire.

The most poignant manifestation of this predicament is found in the pervasive fear of paighur, or public ridicule. It will be recalled that the motivation Safi cites as the reason Sultan Muhammad blinded his mother was that she had brought ridicule upon him. Such reasoning is not at all unusual, nor is the association of paighur with women. Thus, while insults can emanate from any quarter, the worst are those voiced by women, for they can be neither rejoined nor rebutted. The ability women have to comment on their husband's sexual prowess, to observe the private behavior of their male in-laws, and to move as visitors between households puts them in the privileged position of witnessing and potentially reporting on all aspects of male activity.^[26] And because men are always under the gaze of women and because women are capable of shaming men through their verbal and physical indiscretions, male power, which seeks to be absolute, is finite at its core.

These indications of female power lend to Sultan Muhammad's tale, and to all like it, a curious sense of pathos. The man of honor, we see, is no übermensch living by his own dictates and in satisfaction of his own desires. He is rather a desperate sort of fixer, fearless in his way no doubt, but destined to engage in the futile activity of making solid and whole what is by its nature hollow and incomplete. No matter how great the individual, there is no escape from this trap, for as Alasdair MacInytre has noted about such cultures, the hero lacks “the capacity to detach [him]self from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of view from outside. In heroic society there is no `outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear.”^[27]

No “heroic” society, including this one, is oblivious to the existence of other moral codes. No society lacks an outside to the degree that MacIntyre claims, but the point is still an important one. In Sultan Muhammad's case, several alternative moralities were available for the choosing. His grandfather, after all, was an akhund (a man of religion), the father had become a hakim (a man of the government), and the boy himself had the option of following either of these paths if he had so desired, particularly after he was forced into exile from his home community. However, once Sultan Muhammad decided to return to Pech, all of his options disappeared. From this point on, there was, as MacIntyre states, no “outside” from which to ponder his situation, no half-measure or negotiated settlement that would allow him to fully reclaim and keep his former status.

Sultan Muhammad certainly knew all of this. He understood that his father's status and position made his own challenge greater. His father, after all, had been a man of renown before his turn to religion, and the son, once he chose to meet the challenge, would necessarily attract rivals and enmities of his own. Since his father was now dead and the family had proven vulnerable to assault from its enemies, the certainty of further attacks had increased, even after his mother succeeded in avenging his father's killing. If he was to be known as the son of a Pakhtun father and stand on the same footing as his father, he would have to gain his own vengeance.

And once vengeance was achieved, vigilance could not end. The commitment had to be lifelong, first, because anything less would cast suspicion upon his original motives in killing Paindo's sons and, second, because he, better than anyone else, knew the misfortune that could befall one who wavers. He, better than anyone, understood the suffering that comes to the family of a man who deludes himself into believing that he could suddenly change loyalties and become someone different than the man he was known to be. Other moralities and devotions will intrude from time to time to challenge the primacy of honor in the tribal homeland, but for the man who enters honor's realm, there is no way to avoid its dictates or its contradictions. Sultan Muhammad knew this better than most men, and his story is an enduring testament to the price and peril such knowledge entails.

Notes