Pashtun homelands in an Indo-Afghan hagiographical collection

Abstract

The article explores the ethnocultural aspects and ideological implications of a hagiographical collection from the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī (1613), a book on the general history of the Pashtuns compiled in the Indo-Afghan diaspora. This article primarily focuses on the stories that either presumably originate from or directly relate in content to Pashtun tribal areas to the west of the Indus. Being foremost a supplement to the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s genealogical section, the hagiographical anthology was included in this book to highlight and illustrate the idea of the Pashtuns’ continuous adherence to Islam throughout many centuries. However, its narratives suggest that Islamic traditions in the Pashtuns’ collective memory can be traced back as far as the turn of the thirteenth century. While the genealogies maintained the principle of patrilineal descent as the basic attribute of Pashtun identity, the hagiographies affirmed the profession of Islamic faith as another integral component of this identity and also brought to light its linguistic criterion. One of the article’s sections offers a survey of the cases where the Pashto language as well as Pashto lexemes and phrases are mentioned in the Persian text of the hagiographies. The article also attempts to locate the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s hagiographical collection among similar works in Indo-Persian literature; it also considers such still-understudied issues as the emergence of spiritual lineages in Pashtun tribes and the entwining of folklore and conventional Islamic elements in the stories about Pashtun religious leaders.

Introduction

The first and very consequential work that made an essential contribution to the institutionalization of Pashtun identity in the early modern period—the Indo-Afghan historiographical compilation Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī—still needs a closer reading and more accurate interpretation to clarify which particular criteria of this identity it intended to promote and how its varied and multilayered content as well as ideology related to Pashtun tribal areas proper.¹ This article examines the hagiographical material included in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī with the aim of providing concrete textual evidence of the then-ongoing process of constructing the confessional component of Pashtun identity in its interconnection with genealogical and linguistic criteria.² With a particular focus on the stories originating from or thematically pertaining to Pashtun homelands in the southeast Hindu Kush, the article attempts, on the one hand, to demonstrate how the contrived concept of Pashtuns’ early conversion to Islam was sustained and popularized over several centuries through a mixture of folktales, hagiographical narratives, and historical facts. On the other, it offers a discussion of a number of specific issues addressed in the heterogeneous stories of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s hagiographical anthology that are important for further enquiry into the understudied history of the Islamization of Pashtuns.

The article begins with a consideration of the place and functional role of the hagiographical collection within the large corpus of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī. The second section contains an analysis of its position among the works of a similar genre in contemporaneous Indo-Persian literature, bringing out some parallels and emphasizing its specificity as a specimen of ethnically oriented storytelling. In the other four parts of the article, the texts of selected stories are scrutinized to bring out how and for what purposes the image and socio-cultural traditions of Pashtun homelands, perceived in a broader sense than a mere territory, were treated in the hagiographical narratives created in Indo-Afghan milieus. These parts deal with such topics as the incorporation of genealogical legends into hagiographical stories implicitly buttressing the political ideology of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī (in the third section), the formation of spiritual lineages in Pashtun tribes (in the fourth section), and the entwining of folktales and popular Islamic beliefs in the stories which are set in the tribal areas (in the fifth section). The last section traces sporadic mentions of the Pashto language in the hagiographies, thus touching upon the rarely discussed issue of the use of Pashto within the Indo-Afghan diaspora before the rise of Pashto written poetry in Mughal India in the mid-seventeenth century.

A hagiographical section in Niʿmatallāh Harawī’s book on the history of the Pashtuns

In early 1613 (10.12.1021 ah), in the Indian town of Burhānpūr, a modest Mughal court secretary Niʿmatallāh Harawī (d. after 1615) finished working on an ambitious book on the general history of the Afghans (Pashtuns). The book was formally dedicated to Khānjahān Lodī (d. 1631), the Mughal general of Pashtun descent and Niʿmatallāh’s employer at the time. Its double title Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī (‘The Khānjahān’s History and the Afghan Treasury’) was perhaps not just a typical rhetorical embellishment, but an indication that Niʿmatallāh’s work combined two series of narratives. A few decades later, the book’s abridged version began to circulate widely under the title Makhzan-i Afghānī. Lacking some sections of the larger version, such as the laudatory biographies of Khānjahān and Emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627), which corresponded well to the first part of the book’s official title, the Makhzan-i Afghānī received greater acclaim among an educated Pashtun readership both in India and in Pashtun tribal areas to the west of the Indus.³ In 1720–1721, the Makhzan-i Afghānī was rendered into Pashto in the town of Lakkī (present-day Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) by the ruler of the Khaṫak tribe Afżal Khān (1665/1666–circa 1740/1741) who expected that this important book would be more accessible to his countrymen in their native language.⁴

As may be inferred from Niʿmatallāh’s introductory comments, initially the book was conceived as an original essay on the almost unknown history of the Pashtuns before the reign of the Lodī (r. 1451–1526) and the Sūrī (r. 1540–1555) dynasties in the Delhi Sultanate. Its preliminary draft (circa 1610), which became the framework for the subsequent voluminous compilation, was a mixture of mytho-histories, folk stories, and tribal genealogies. The author’s remarks in the introduction and the afterword to the book’s official version also tell that it was written on the initiative and with the direct assistance of Haybat Khān Kākaṙ, a nobleman from the Indo-Afghan diaspora.⁵ In the preface to the Makhzan-i Afghānī, it is stated that Haybat Khān provided Niʿmatallāh with unique material on Pashtun genealogical traditions.⁶ The genealogies, collected and arranged by Haybat Khān, seem to have reflected historical realities from around the mid-twelfth century when the Ghūrids began to overpower the Ghaznawids in the southeast Hindu Kush.⁷

Niʿmatallāh’s brief explanation of the reasons for composing the book suggests that its main goal was to fill lacunae in the early history of the Pashtuns and prove their ancient origins which allegedly went back to the pre-Islamic patriarchs Yaʿqūb (bibl. Jacob) and Ṭālūt (bibl. Saul).⁸ Of course, the scholarly tasks of this ‘research project’ were paired with the poorly concealed political objective to legitimize the claims of the Indo-Afghan elite to supremacy in India. The original enquiry into the remote past of the Pashtun people was extended by longer narratives recounting the well-studied histories of the Lodīs and the Sūrīs. Formally dedicating such a pretentious and rather ambiguous essay to Khānjahān Lodī was aimed foremost at obtaining the endorsement of a high-ranking Mughal officer in order to secure its public release.

At the final stage of preparing the book’s official version, its main concept was also revised to highlight the idea of the primordial and continuous adherence of Pashtuns to Islam. This idea was formulated in a passage ineptly inserted into the previously written introduction. The assertion that Afghans were permanently attached to ‘the laws of Islam’ (sharāʾiʿ-i islām) through the assiduous efforts of their spiritual masters (ṣāḥib-i walāyat wa arbāb-i hidāyat) immediately follows the statement that they had been living in their mountains and wastelands since the times of Mūsā (bibl. Moses) and Bakhtnaṣr (bibl. Nebuchadnezzar). After a note stating that accounts of these men of religion are included in the book’s closing part (khātima), the author continues to speak of biblical times.⁹ Thus, by adding this note to the already written text, Niʿmatallāh announced the inclusion of a large hagiographical section on the Afghan sheikhs (mashāʾikh-i ṭāʾifa-i afghāniya) as a supplement to his book.¹⁰ In the abridged and slightly restructured Makhzan-i Afghānī, this ideologically significant supplement has become a chapter, while tribal genealogies have taken its place at the end of the book. A short prayer for Haybat Khān Kākaṙ, which opens the hagiographical section in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī, suggests that he was the mastermind behind this part of the book as well and, as in the case of genealogies, supplied the author with relevant data and documents.

Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection and Indo-Persian hagiographies

While the conceptual decision of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s co-authors to complement the essay on the history of the Pashtuns with hagiographies was motivated by the desire to add stronger argumentation to justify the rights of the Indo-Afghan elite to political leadership in Muslim India, the very idea of combining historiographical and hagiographical narratives is likely to have been borrowed by them from authoritative works of Mughal court literature, such as the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī (1592) by Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Harawī (d. 1594) and the Āʾin-i Akbarī by Abu ʾl-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602).¹¹ The former is mentioned in the introduction to the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī, among a few other main reference sources of this book. Along with chapters that recount the history of Islamic dynasties in India, beginning with the Ghaznawids, the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī contains a series of biographical dictionaries (taẕkira), two of them listing the names of about 170 religious scholars (ʿulamā wa fużalā) and spiritual masters (mashāʾikh) in order to illustrate the intensity of religious and intellectual life in India after the rise of the Mughals.¹² Unlike Niẓām al-Dīn’s brief biographical dictionaries that reported on contemporaneous sheikhs and scholars, the work of Abu ʾl-Fażl more closely followed the long-standing traditions of the hagiographical genre per se canonized in Persian literature by such popular books as Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s (d. circa 1220) Taẕkirat al-awliyā and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s (d. 1492) Nafaḥāt al-uns.¹³ Included in his voluminous ‘gazetteer’ Āʾin-i Akbarī under the self-explanatory title ‘Saints of India’ (Awliyā-yi Hind), Abu ʾl-Fażl’s anthology was not only a collection of biographies, but also a brief excursus into the history of Sufi communities in India over five centuries.¹⁴

The approach employed by Niẓām al-Dīn in the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī was repeated by ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾunī (d. circa 1615) in his Muntakhab al-tawārīkh (1596), though this work might have been unknown to Niʿmatallāh since it was presumably put into circulation in the mid-1610s, having been kept secret for about two decades because of its anti-Akbar rhetoric.¹⁵ Due to Badāʾunī’s originality and talent as a polemicist, his anthology of contemporaneous spiritual masters and learned men represented a further step in adapting the hagiographical genre to the secular contents of court historiography.¹⁶ In many ways, Badāʾunī’s anthology occupies an intermediate position between Niẓām al-Dīn’s dictionary and the exemplary Indo-Persian collection of Sufi hagiographies Akhbār al-akhyār composed around the same time, probably in 1590/1591, by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis Dihlawī (d. 1642).¹⁷ In turn, the Akhbār al-akhyār, a comprehensive anthology describing the evolution of all Sufi communities in India from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth centuries, updated the earlier Indo-Persian traditions of hagiographical literature initiated in the mid-fourteenth century by the Siyar al-awliyā of Amīr Khurd Kirmānī who had focused exclusively on the life stories of sheikhs associated with the Chishtiyya spiritual lineage.¹⁸ The final version of the Akhbār al-akhyār appeared only towards 1619 when it was officially presented to Emperor Jahāngīr, but Badāʾunī mentions it and discusses its author in one of the entries in his own anthology.¹⁹ This means that Niʿmatallāh, as well as Abu ʾl-Fażl ʿAllāmī whose anthology echoes the content of the Akhbār al-akhyār, could also have access to the first edition of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s work.

Although the secularized versions of Sufi biographies in the works of Niẓām al-Dīn and Badāʾunī conformed better to Niʿmatallāh’s literary and extra-literary tasks in ideological terms, as regards style, the hagiographical accounts in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī to a greater extent emulated classical patterns of this genre in religious literature and shared more similarities with ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s Akhbār al-akhyār. Composed as a typical ‘anthology of saints’ (taẕkirat al-awliyā), Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection consists of reports focusing mostly on the spiritual masters’ miraculous powers (karāmāt), extraordinary and marvellous deeds (khawāriq al-ʿādāt), and remarkable pious behaviours (manāqib). Each entry devoted to a particular individual is named ẕikr (‘mention’) and most stories begin with the standard formula naql-ast (‘it is reported’).²⁰

On the other hand, Niʿmatallāh’s ‘Anthology of Saints’ demonstrates a certain breakaway from both Sufi hagiographies and their secularized versions since the selection of characters here is based on the criterion of ethnicity, namely, the real or purported affiliation of spiritual masters with Pashtun tribes. Moreover, Niʿmatallāh’s anthology is structured according to Pashtun tribal divisions, similarly to the genealogical section of his book. Saintly characters are grouped in it by the principle of descent from three major Pashtun tribal branches—Saṙban, Beṫan, and Ghūrghusht—whereas their attachment to any particular religious community or spiritual lineage can be deduced only from occasional mentions of their alleged connections or discipleship with some well-known historical figures.²¹ In each of the anthology’s three subsections, Niʿmatallāh attempted to introduce his characters in chronological order. However, because of the paucity of information about most of them and the inherent entwining of fiction and historicity in hagiographies, he failed to apply a coherent genealogical approach. Nevertheless, an obvious interconnection between the hagiographical and genealogical sections in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī testifies to the fact that tribalist ideology dominated the minds of the Indo-Afghan military-administrative elite whose views shaped the concept of Niʿmatallāh’s book through the co-authorship of Haybat Khān Kākaṙ.

Among Niʿmatallāh’s Indo-Afghan companions and interlocutors were also men of religion, such as the sheikhs Bustān Baṙets (Pers. ‘Barīchī’, d. 1593) and Aḥmad Shūn, who are described in his hagiographical anthology along with approximately 70 other spiritual masters and holy people. The notes on Bustān Baṙets and Aḥmad Shūn reveal that both of them, while professing a cosmopolitan Islamic ideology, did not forget their ethnic background—the former used to sing Pashto verses and the latter defied the authority of Jahāngīr by refusing to bow before the emperor according to Chaghatay (that is, Turkic) custom. Their different tribal affiliations, identified by the patronymics ‘Baṙets’ and ‘Shūn’, were the only grounds for discussing their personalities in the anthology’s different subsections on the Saṙban and the Ghūrghusht sheikhs respectively.²² Following the structure and the spirit of genealogies, Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection deliberately underscored those aspects of his book that allow it to be considered not so much a variation of the Indo-Persian mainstream court historiography as, essentially, a rare attempt at research on ethnohistory.²³

Like the other original parts of the book, the hagiographical section of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī was intended to issue new, previously unrecorded material on the Pashtuns, in this case on their religious traditions. Niẓām al-Dīn’s laconic biographical dictionary in the Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī includes such names as Shaykh Khalīl Afghān and Mullā Qāsim Waḥīd al-ʿAyn Qandahārī, but the first is left without comments, while the second does not necessarily indicate that this person had any connections with Pashtun tribes.²⁴ In Niʿmatallāh’s collection, three characters have the component ‘Khalīl’ in their names—Shaykh Mutī Khalīl, Miyān Qāsim Khalīl, and Shaykh Khalīl Batanī—but it is unlikely that any of them can be identified as Shaykh Khalīl Afghān from the Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī.²⁵ It is more likely that Shaykh Khalīl Afghān is the same person as Shaykh Khalīl mentioned in the other section of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī as a descendant of the eminent Chishtī sheikh, Farīd al-Dīn ‘Ganj-i Shakar’ (d. 1265), and a mediator in the negotiations between Shīr Shāh Sūrī (r. 1540–1545) and Emperor Humāyūn (r. 1530–1540, 1555–1556).²⁶

In his Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, Badāʾunī more accurately indicated the Pashtun descent of two sheikhs—Miyān ʿAbdallāh Niyāzī, a Chishtī master from the town of Sirhind in Punjab, and Shaykh Ḥamza from Lucknow. According to Badāʾunī, the former came from the Niyāzays, ‘an Afghan tribe’ (ṭāʾifa-yī-st az afghānān), and the latter was a grandson of Malik Ādam Kākaṙ, ‘one of the nobles (umarā)’ of the Lodī rulers Sulṭān Sikandar (r. 1488–1517) and Sulṭān Ibrāhīm (r. 1517–1526).²⁷ Both of them are included in Niʿmatallāh’s anthology and characterized in almost the same way as in Badāʾunī’s notes, except that Niʿmatallāh calls Shaykh Ḥamza the son of Malik Ādam Kākaṙ.²⁸ Niʿmatallāh also added to his collection a separate entry on Malik Ādam, but his remark that this nobleman at the court of the Lodī sultans ‘disguised himself as a man of the mundane world’ offered a very contrived explanation for listing him among the saints.²⁹ In fact, it was a popular anecdote portraying Malik Ādam and his patron Sulṭān Sikandar as divine rescuers who saved an abducted woman and restored to life her beheaded husband that motivated Niʿmatallāh to create a hagiographical character of an administrative officer and, thus, expand the list of Afghan saints.³⁰ In Badāʾunī’s anthology, there is also a record about Shaykh Mubārak from Alwar, a town in the neighbourhood of Agra. Badāʾunī tells that this blessed man, who claimed to be a sayyid (a descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad), ‘enjoyed a great repute among the Afghans’, but the absence of his name in Niʿmatallāh’s anthology suggests that he was not affiliated to any particular Pashtun tribe.³¹

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī registered the name of Khwāja Ḥasan Afghān in the Akhbār al-akhyār, recorded by Niʿmatallāh as Shaykh Ḥasan Afghān among the spiritual masters of the Ghūrghusht branch.³² The authors of both anthologies call him a disciple of Bahā al-Dīn Zakariyyā (d. 1262), the famous founder of the Suhrawardī Sufi community in India, and retell the same story in which Shaykh Ḥasan reprimands an imam of a mosque for being unworthily engaged in the slave trade. Bearing in mind that the first version of the Akhbār al-akhyār came out in 1590/1591 and its final edition was released in the late 1610s, it is difficult to establish here the fact of direct borrowing. Besides, Niʿmatallāh related three other anecdotes about Shaykh Ḥasan that are absent in the Akhbār al-akhyār. Obviously, such personalities as Shaykh Ḥasan, or the abovementioned characters from Badāʾunī’s anthology, belonged to the common stock of popular hagiographical traditions which circulated widely in the Mughal empire.

Niʿmatallāh does not refer to any written or oral sources for his hagiographical accounts, which amalgamate historical realities, popular Islamic perceptions of piety, and pure fiction. Chronologically, these accounts cover the period after the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate in the early thirteenth century, but various elements reflect predominantly the social and spiritual experience of Pashtun migrants in North India from when the Lodī dynasty came to power in Delhi, that is, a century and a half before the writing of the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī. As a product of the urban culture of Muslim India, Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection depicts its characters mostly in the contexts that are poorly consistent with rural life in Pashtun tribal areas and even less pertinent to the historical past of the tribes in their homelands.³³ The largest part of the book’s historiographical section is dedicated to the ‘Indian’ history of the Lodīs and the Sūrīs which is narrated on the basis of the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī and such works as ʿAbbās Khān Sarwānī’s Tārīkh-i Shīrshāhī (circa 1582) and Rizqallāh Mushtāqī’s (d. 1581) Wāqiʿāt mentioned by Niʿmatallāh in the introduction. The latter work abounds in stories about miraculous events and therefore might have exerted a particular influence on Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection.³⁴ Authentic folk stories and legends related to Pashtun tribal territories can also be detected in Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographies. The sources of this kind of literary material were Niʿmatallāh’s friends from the Indo-Afghan diaspora, like his inspirer and co-author Haybat Khān Kākaṙ or the sheikh and poet Bustān Baṙets. Being very scarce and mostly fictional, the stories recounted by Niʿmatallāh’s informants about their ancestral homelands offered not so much evidence of real religious beliefs and practices among Pashtun tribes throughout several centuries as an abstract image of the tribal areas perceived as an indigenous domain of Islam in the collective consciousness of the Indo-Afghan diaspora.

Hagiographical substantiation of political leadership among tribal groups

A close reading of Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection brings one to the conclusion that, along with the main goal of proving the long-term and steadfast commitment of Pashtuns to the Muslim faith, it also pursued the aim of assigning the exclusive right of spiritual and, consequently, political authority to the Beṫan tribes. Both Pashtun ruling dynasties in the Delhi Sultanate, the Lodīs and the Sūrīs, as well as the dedicatee of Niʿmatallāh’s book Khānjahān, belonged to the Beṫan tribal group. Its legendary progenitor Beṫan (Pers. ‘Batanī’), unlike his brothers Saṙban and Ghūrghusht, two other sons of the common Pashtun ancestor Qays ʿAbd al-Rashīd Pathān, is introduced not only in the genealogical section of Niʿmatallāh’s book, but also in the hagiographies where, under the soubriquet ‘Shaykh Bayt’, he opens the list of the Beṫan spiritual masters.³⁵

In the hagiographical notes, Beṫan’s saintly behaviours are not specified, which can be an indication that in tribal folklore he did not enjoy the reputation of a holy man. In fact, the hagiographical section contains the same legends about Beṫan that have been told earlier in the genealogies. His only ‘miracle’ characterizes him more as an experienced and sagacious paterfamilias rather than a Muslim spiritual instructor. The story tells how Beṫan (Shaykh Bayt) returned with his family to their house in the mountains after spending winter in the warmer foothills and ordered his wife to bake bread without wasting much time on making a fire since, due to his heavenly insight, he knew that there were still burning coals in the oven. This episode precedes the story’s key point, which is a fanciful explanation of why the Lodīs were honoured with a special status among the Beṫan tribes. Beṫan’s youngest grandson Ibrāhīm displayed much dexterity to be the first among the children to bring a baked loaf to his grandfather who then blessed him by putting a piece of this loaf into his mouth and declaring that ‘he is great’ (loy dəy in Pashto). This epithet is said to have eventually replaced the boy’s first name and, owing to Beṫan’s good prayers, God granted his descendants (known later as ‘the Lodī lineage’ or silsila-yi lodiya) eminence, glory, and the right to rule people (ḥaqq-i taʿālā dar īn silsila salṭanat-i ʿālam marḥamat namūd wa ba farmānrawāyī mukarram sākht).³⁶ It is also important that according to genealogical legends Ibrāhīm ‘Lodī’ was of Pashtun descent only through his mother, Beṫan’s daughter Bībī Mato, while the origin of his alleged father Shāh Ḥusayn is rather vaguely traced back to ‘the rulers of Ghūr’.³⁷

Moreover, it is claimed that Beṫan was the true father of Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī, the first spiritual master of the Saṙban tribes. The legend goes that Beṫan’s elder brother Saṙban, the progenitor of the Saṙban tribal group, was a poor and destitute man who succeeded only after he adopted and raised Beṫan’s son Ismaʿīl who was endowed with divine blessing. If Beṫan’s country is imprecisely described as a mountainous area with cold winters which forced tribes to descend seasonally into the warmer plains, the homeland of Shaykh Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī is directly identified as Roh and his tomb is said to be located in the Sulaiman mountains in a place named Wādīkhwāh.³⁸ In other hagiographical stories, as also in the historiographical accounts and genealogies, Pashtun ancestral homelands (Paẋtūnkhwā) are always called ‘Roh’ which is associated primarily with the Sulaiman mountain range (Kūh-i Sulaymān) of the southern Hindu Kush and adjoining areas.³⁹

Another clear piece of evidence of Niʿmatallāh’s intent to underline the superior spiritual status of the Beṫans is that the legend about Shaykh Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī incorporates a fragment from the hagiography of Shaykh Aḥmad Sarwānī, a prominent spiritual master of Beṫan origin, who, according to genealogies, lived eight generations later, approximately at the turn of the fifteenth century. In a mixture of heterogeneous stories, Shaykh Aḥmad is portrayed as a powerful religious teacher of Roh who befriends Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī and shares with him the spiritual leadership of the local populace.

Tribal homelands and the formation of Pashtun spiritual lineages

For a number of reasons, the figure of Shaykh Aḥmad Sarwānī (also Aḥmad Jawānmard or Shaykh Aḥmad Kakpūr) may help us to better understand the provenance, varied content, and intersecting ideologies of the Indo-Afghan hagiographies collected in Niʿmatallāh Harawī’s book. In the case of Shaykh Aḥmad, we are dealing with a typical example of how a real person could be mythologized, having been turned into a hagiographical character. In the Beṫan genealogies, Shaykh Aḥmad, a son of Mūsā Sarwānī, appears as a patriarch of an esteemed Indo-Afghan family. His numerous descendants preferred to choose the spiritual path, although some opted for military-administrative careers. One of his great-grandsons, ʿUmar Khān, reached a high rank in the service of Sulṭān Sikandar Lodī (r. 1489–1517), while another one, Shaykh Bāyazīd, became renowned for his piety in the time of Sher Shāh Sūrī (r. 1540–1545). However, in a series of hagiographical stories about the most outstanding members of his family, Shaykh Aḥmad is repeatedly called a disciple of the Suhrawardī sheikh Bahā al-Dīn Zakariyyā, and his son and spiritual successor Shaykh Sulaymān Dānā was once said to have lived during the reign of the Delhi sultan ʿAlā al-Dīn Khaljī (r. 1296–1316). In the Makhzan-i Afghānī, Shaykh Aḥmad Sarwānī is erroneously confused with another character, Shaykh Aḥmad Lohānī (Pashto ‘Lohāṅay’), who in the Tārīkh-i khānjahānī is mentioned in a separate entry without an indication as to when and where he lived; this also proves that the image of Shaykh Aḥmad in Niʿmatallāh’s book combines features of several historical and fictional personalities.⁴⁰

In hagiographical narratives, the figure of Shaykh Aḥmad represents a link between the historical reality associated mostly with India after the rise of the Lodī dynasty and the obscured past of the indigenous Pashtun lands in the southern Hindu Kush. The stories about this sheikh in two different entries—the one dealing with him and the other with Shaykh Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī—share similar details, which point to a common folklore source and illustrate the same socio-economic background, more typical of the rural life of Pashtun tribes than the urban milieus of the Indo-Afghan diaspora. The main idea of both stories is to encourage the communalist practice of regular food distribution among all those in need, be they fellow tribesmen or outsiders accepted as guests. To soothe people’s natural anxieties about the shortage of livelihoods, the stories promoted a belief in the miraculous powers of the holy people responsible for the equitable distribution of meals and who are capable of restoring vital resources. One tale very briefly relates that 400 to 500 sheep were slaughtered daily in the kitchen of Shaykh Ismaʿīl and Shaykh Aḥmad, but the next day the animals reappeared, alive again because their skins and bones were purposely kept intact. The other tale narrates in greater detail how in childhood Shaykh Aḥmad gave all the sheep of his family’s small herd to a group of wandering holy men for subsistence, but when his father was about to punish him, one of the saintly strangers lent him his staff and explained that he could revive the animals by beating the leftover skins and bones with this staff and saying prayers to God. The content of these hagiographical tales does not relate specifically to Islamic realities. What actually connects Shaykh Ismaʿīl and Shaykh Aḥmad with Islam is a reference in both entries to Bahā al-Dīn Zakariyyā. The iconic figure of Bahā al-Dīn appears in these narratives only to integrate Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī and Aḥmad Sarwānī within the framework of the institutionalized Sufi traditions. It is told in one story that as a token of appreciation for the missionary work of these Pashtun sheikhs Bahā al-Dīn sent them two sacred cloaks (khirqa) and two prayer-mats (sajjāda) as his blessing. In the other story, young Aḥmad Sarwānī decides to become a disciple of Bahā al-Dīn on the advice of the holy men who consumed his family’s sheep. The conventional Sufi motif of blessing received through a garment is also repeated here: the same person who instructs Aḥmad how to revive the animals puts his own shirt (pīrāhan) on him.

Of the 21 individuals classified in Niʿmatallāh’s book as the Beṫan spiritual masters, five men—Shaykh Aḥmad, Shaykh Sulaymān Dānā, Shaykh Mulhī Qattāl, Shaykh Maḥmūd Ḥājī, and Shaykh Bāyazīd—and a blessed woman (Bībī Dūya, or Dawiya?) represent four generations of the family of the Sarwānī sheikhs. The dispersed records about these people seem to be interrelated and derived from one source, supposedly a kind of a family archive or a draft of a familial hagiography. Similar sources were likely to have been used by Niʿmatallāh in the case of the Bakhtiyārs, a family of spiritual masters associated with the Saṙban tribal group. Ten men and two women from among the blessed people of the Saṙbans represent this family in the likewise scattered hagiographical entries.⁴¹

Although the Bakhtiyārs, unlike the Sarwānīs, do not have a clear position in tribal genealogies and appear to be of non-Pashtun ethnic origin, their patriarch Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār (Khwāja Yaḥyā Kabīr, d. 1430) occupies the most prominent place in Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical collection. The stories about him constitute a disproportionately large number of texts which vary considerably in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī and the Makhzan-i Afghānī, the former even having an appendix (żamīma) with an additional selection of analogous accounts. Among the Saṙban sheikhs, Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār comes third after Khwāja Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār Kākī and the abovementioned Ismaʿīl Saṙbanī. It is very probable that the well-known Chishtī sheikh Khwāja Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār Kākī (d. 1235) tops Niʿmatallāh’s anthology, in both the list of the Saṙban spiritual masters and the common list of all the Afghan saints, owing in part to the high esteem he enjoyed in the entourage of the Lodī sultans, but also because of the resemblance of his name to that of Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār. One of the founding fathers of the Chishtiyya community, Khwāja Quṭb al-Dīn was a much-venerated personality among the Indo-Afghan elites, but there is no direct evidence that he had close ties with Pashtun tribes in the early thirteenth century.⁴² Niʿmatallāh also does not report any details that would at least hint at such ties, nor does he verbally admit any relationship between Khwāja Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār and Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār.⁴³ On the other hand, it is evident that the popular hagiographical image of Khwāja Quṭb al-Dīn became a model for creating the literary character of Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār. In Niʿmatallāh’s stories, both sheikhs travel along the same routes in the vast geographical space that stretches from Central Asia to southern Punjab and share some similarities in their wondrous deeds.

The fragmented hagiographies of the two devout Indo-Afghan families—the Sarwānīs and the Bakhtiyārs—exemplify two basic types of kinship groups that exercised spiritual leadership among Pashtuns. Such groups could be created either by ethnic Pashtuns with verified tribal lineages like that of the Sarwānīs, or by non-Pashtun incomers who, like the Bakhtiyārs, became affiliated with or wholly assimilated by a particular tribe. While the native claimants to spiritual guidance had only to prove their superior religious experience and extraordinary abilities to fellow tribesmen, the incoming preachers also faced the challenging task of naturalization in tribal society based on kinship ties. In the second case, a strong argument for legitimizing the status of blessed people to which they aspired was the claim to the title of sayyid, that is, to having the descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad in their lineage. Among the patchy records at the end of the genealogical section of Niʿmatallāh’s book, there are a few notes on Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār’s lineage which state that he was a descendant of a sayyid named Isḥāq who had come to Paẋtūnkhwā from the town of Ūch, had a son with a girl of the Shīrānī tribe, and died on the way back to his homeland.⁴⁴

To prove and secure the status of sayyid in Pashtun tribes was not an easy task. The recognition of this title depended mostly on the attitude of tribal chiefs, who were guided by expediency and considerations of prestige in each case. The legendary story of Abī Saʿīd, the son of the abovementioned sayyid Isḥaq and Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār’s ancestor, well reflects historical realities in terms of the difficulties encountered by claimants to this title. Having been adopted by a humble man from a clan of the Shīrānīs, his mother’s tribe, Abī Saʿīd received the second Persian name Bakhtiyār (lit. ‘fortunate’) on the grounds that his blessed descent helped his foster-father to quickly become a wealthy person.⁴⁵ However, the latter then decided to divide his patrimony in favour of his own son, a full-blooded Pashtun, and only the interference of the tribal ruler (raʾīs-i ān qabāʾil) at the request of Abī Saʿīd Bakhtiyār’s mother helped to confirm the property rights of this descendant of a sayyid and even increase his share in view of his high spiritual status.⁴⁶ In another story, the sayyid Abū Isḥāq Dāwī, who lived in the times of Islām Shāh Sūrī (r. 1545–1554), is also acknowledged as a Pashtun only on the grounds of his mother’s ethnicity.⁴⁷ Enumerating the clans of sayyids (sayyid-zāda) among various Pashtun tribes, Niʿmatallāh underscores the idea that they are considered and called Afghans only because of their relationship with these people on their maternal side (ba wāsiṭa-yi nisbat-i mādarī ba afghān shuhrat dārand).⁴⁸ If the title of sayyid was to a greater extent a matter of prestige and esteem, then verified Pashtun descent on both paternal and maternal sides guaranteed full legal and social status in Pashtun tribes and therefore lawful access to limited material resources, particularly land, which was especially important in the tribal areas.

The formation of spiritual lineages within the tribal structure in Pashtun indigenous territories can be examined more closely in the example of the Yāsīnkhel clan of the Khaṫak tribe. The family of the Khaṫak sheikhs belonging to this clan turned into the stāna, that is, the kinship group with the special status of tribal spiritual leaders, in the second half of the seventeenth century owing to the personal charisma and activities of Shaykh Raḥmkār (d. 1653). An original collection of hagiographical stories and memoirs about this sheikh, his family, and disciples was included by Afżal Khān Khaṫak in a supplement to his Pashto translation of Niʿmatallāh’s anthology.⁴⁹ Other original sections of the Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ written by Afżal Khān and his grandfather Khūshḥāl Khān (1613–1689) also provide very important information on the Khaṫak sheikhs and their involvement in the real politics of their tribe. All these accounts are based on first-hand evidence and may give a rough idea of how Pashtun stāna-clans emerged and exercised their powers in the tribal areas. Unlike the families of the Indo-Afghan sheikhs, such as the Sarwānīs and the Bakhtiyārs, Shaykh Raḥmkār and his numerous descendants were fully integrated into the social and economic life of Pashtun tribes in their indigenous territories to the west of the Indus. Towards the nineteenth century, the large and powerful stāna-clan of Raḥmkār’s descendants became known as Kākākhel after the sheikh’s honorary name ‘Kākā Ṣāḥib’. On the grounds of its distinctive societal role and political influence, the Kākākhel clan was even separately indexed in the Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes by the British colonial administration.⁵⁰

Folktales and Islamic traditions in the hagiographical stories related to the tribal areas

The content of Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical stories that may be either directly or assumed to be associated with the tribal areas focuses above all on matters pertaining to livelihoods and survival in the face of the scarcity of natural resources. Such narratives draw a picture of a society in which the primary issue is that of water supply and the main actors are not individuals but conflicting kinship groups. For example, a Beṫan legend relates that in order to reconcile two tribes (qabīla) that struggled for fertile land, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Nabī enforced a rule according to which one tribe had to sow this land in the spring and the other in the autumn. The crops of those who violated the rule dried up even if they had been watered by heavy rains and snow and so could not be harvested.⁵¹ According to the note of the editor of Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī, S. M. Imāmuddīn, the name of this semi-fictional sheikh, identified as a contemporary of Amīr Tīmūr (Tamerlane, d. 1405), in some manuscripts has an alternative variant—‘ʿAbd al-Batanī’—which demonstrates that copyists hesitated in choosing between a familiar Islamic name and, probably, a corrupted original one. The conflicting tribes in the legend are called Nūḥānī (Lohāṅay) and Batanī (Beṫan), although the former is a subgroup of the latter, and it is ‘the Batanīs’, that is, an unspecified Beṫan tribe, who are said to have once transgressed the law of seasonal plowing. These facts suggest that a folk story about a usual conflict over land originated among the Lohāṅays and was later adapted for the Indo-Afghan hagiographies with the primary purpose of highlighting the authority of the Beṫan spiritual leaders.

Another folktale of similar origin tells of how an unspecified Beṫan tribe, suffering from a lack of water and fertile soil, made an unsuccessful attempt to encroach on the estates of the well-off Sarwānīs with the help of Mulān Khiżr, a putative descendant of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Nabī.⁵² The involvement of Mulān Khiżr, apparently a personification of the legendary prophet Khiżr, responsible in popular Muslim culture for water resources, crops, and fertility, transformed the story about a routine tribal conflict into a tale based on religious mythology.⁵³ Mulān Khiżr travels through the Sulaiman mountains and on reaching the river Darābhan (?) in the lands of the Sarwānīs magically forces it to change its course and run to the territories of the disadvantaged Beṫan tribe. However, his miraculous powers are quickly neutralized by those of the Sarwānī spiritual guide Shaykh Sulaymān Dānā (see above) who orders the river to return to its natural course. A colourful detail in this story appears to be an allusion to the Qurʾānic legends about the prophet Mūsā: by the will of God, the mountains through which Mulān Khiżr has to traverse open a passage for him, thus transforming a hard three-day journey into a one-hour walk along a creek. In the Qurʾān, Mūsā crosses the sea, which parts before him in the shape of ‘huge mounds’, and opens 12 springs in a rock to provide his thirsty people with drinking water (Qurʾān, 26:63, 2:57/60). Moreover, the anonymous ‘servant’ who accompanied Mūsā on his two mystical journeys to and over the sea is usually identified with Khiżr (Qurʾān, 18:60/61–81/82).

Mulān Khiżr’s other ‘exploit’ has nothing to do with miracles at all. This is a rigid directive of a chieftain to protect his tribe’s crops from being trampled by other people’s cattle. Contrasting elements in the stories about Mulān Khiżr testify that we are dealing here with a mixture of Pashtun tribal folklore and popular Islamic traditions. In Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical anthology, the image of Mulān Khiżr echoes three other legendary characters bearing the same name. These are Khwāja Khiżr, evidently the oldest representation of the Islamic prophet in Pashtun folklore; Shaykh Khiżr Sarwānī, the alter ego of Mulān Khiżr; and Khwāja Khiżr Kākar, the patriarch of the Ghūrghusht sheikhs. While the first two are said to be buried in the Sulaiman mountains, the ‘original homeland’ (waṭan-i aṣlī) of Khiżr Kākar is transferred to India to the banks of the Ganges.⁵⁴ A short folk legend connected with Shaykh Khiżr Sarwānī tells of a miraculous jug of water always standing on his grave near the bank of the abovementioned river Darābhan. The jug served to resolve disputes, thus substituting for the late saint in his role of an arbitrator. The litigants had to drink water from this jug: the one whose claims were right remained alive and the liar died.⁵⁵

The prophet Khiżr’s archetypical function of discovering water resources is performed in Indo-Afghan hagiographies by a fair number of characters, such as Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār who touched a stone with his toothpick (miswāk) to cause water to flow in a dried creek in an olive grove, or Shaykh Bihdīn Bakhtiyār who discovered a spring in the foothills by striking his staff against a rock, or Shaykh Ḥamza who revived the well in his father’s garden by throwing a brick into it and pronouncing an invocation.⁵⁶ However, among these individuals, besides Mulān Khiżr, only Shaykh Thābit Barīch (Baṙets), a Saṙban spiritual master, is unambiguously described as a resident of Pashtun tribal areas.⁵⁷ The story goes that Shaykh Thābit protected his fellow clansmen against three dangers affecting the land where they settled after migration. The main trouble was that of the shortage of drinking water, which is highlighted in the land’s name ‘Shurāwak’ (from Persian shūrāba, ‘saline’). Two other threats were poisonous snakes and unfriendly Baloch tribes living in the neighbourhood. The toponym ‘Shurāwak’, as well as the vicinity of the Baloch people and the localization of Shaykh Thābit’s grave in the mountain territories where the Tarīn tribes, including the Awdals (Abdālīs), resided after their migration imply that the legends about this sheikh could have emerged somewhere in the highlands to the west of present-day Quetta.⁵⁸

In one legend, Shaykh Thābit and his rival Shaykh Ilyās Barīch are presented as the disciples of Mawdūd Chishtī, a poorly known forerunner of the Chishtī community, who probably lived at the turn of the twelfth century.⁵⁹ The other legend transports Shaykh Thābit into the times of the Ṣafawids (r. 1501–1722), for it tells that the sheikh saved his people from the attack of the army sent by a Qandahār ruler identified as Qizilbāsh. Of particular interest is an anecdote in which young Shaykh Thābit predicts that the Afghan people (mardum-i afghān) invited by his father to the feast will not be able to digest the food. He proposes to bring other people, but his father insists and after the meal their Afghan guests vomit before leaving the house. To whatever degree the personality of Shaykh Thābit may have been mythologized, this anecdote seems to allude to a typical situation in which a family of Islamic religious missionaries with an ostensibly non-Pashtun ethnic background faces hardships in naturalizing itself in the tribal environment.

The fact that Niʿmatallāh and his sources had little knowledge of the real activities of Islamic spiritual teachers in the tribal areas throughout four centuries of Pashtun genealogical history is attested best of all by the hagiographies of the Ghūrghusht sheikhs whose residence and agency almost entirely pertain to India. This is particularly noteworthy since Haybat Khān Kākaṙ, Niʿmatallāh’s main informant and co-author, was a Ghūrghusht Pashtun himself. As the domicile, or more precisely the burial place of the Ghūrghusht saints, Roh (Pakhtunkhwa) is mentioned once in a story about ‘the holy men of the Kākaṙ tribe’ (mardān-i khudā az qawm-i kākar), unambiguously depicted as fairy-tale characters of unknown times.⁶⁰ The image of these nine Kākaṙ saints was presumably inspired by the popular myth about ‘those of the cave’ from the Qurʾānic sūra al-Kahf (‘The Cave’), based in its turn on the Christian legend of ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’ (Qurʾān 18: 9–26).⁶¹ Similar to the Qurʾānic aṣḥāb al-kahf, the nine Kākaṙ saints retired in a cell (ḥujra) seeking both unhindered closeness with God and refuge from their ignorant fellow villagers. However, unlike ‘those of the cave’, they were sealed in their cell forever but promised to solicit God for fulfilment of people’s desires, provided that prayers and a donation of nine breads with sugar and oil are made by a supplicant. What forced them into seclusion was their fellow villagers’ inappropriate request to show miracles as a proof of their saintliness and hence earn the right to be spiritual guides in the community. The only miracle that the Kākaṙ saints consented to demonstrate before their reclusion was indirectly related, like the abovementioned donation, to the holy men’s basic function of supplying meals: they were boiled in nine buckets together with beef but stayed alive due to the intervention of divine powers. The cell in which the Kākaṙ saints made shelter is said to have become a shrine and a popular place of pilgrimage. Thus, this story is a perfect example of how a place of worship in Pashtun tribal territories could acquire a ‘history’, thus explaining the reason why it became an Islamic sanctuary.

The miracle accomplished by the nine Kākaṙ saints has its parallel in the story of Shaykh ʿĀrif Tarīn Awdal, the ecstatic Sufi of the Saṙban background, who allegedly lived in the vicinities of Qandahār on the banks of the river Arghān (Arghistān or Arghandāb) in the times of the Ṣafawid ruler Shāh Tahmāsp (r. 1524–1576). In this story, which appears as another folktale adapted for hagiographies, Shaykh ʿĀrif is described as an ‘intoxicated and mad’ (mast wa dīwāna) seeker of divine truth. Such a characterization seems to have been aimed foremost at justifying his asocial behaviour in the story. On coming across a beautiful Mughal woman in the Qandahār bazaar (which means that the woman did not wear a veil and thereby also behaved against strict ethical and legal norms), the sheikh, enraptured by her good looks, hugged her without hesitation. As a punishment, they both were thrown into the burning oven by order of the city’s governor Ḥusayn Mirzā. When, after a while, people enquired about their state, they discovered that the sheikh and the woman were safe and sound, and were enjoying the goat meat that was being fried in this oven. An attempt to punish the sheikh by hanging him also failed because all gallows-trees broke under his weight, indicating that this man was under God’s protection. Niʿmatallāh even reports the precise year of these miraculous events—974 ah (1566/67).⁶²

Pashtun tribal territories in the region of the Sulaiman mountains are also mentioned in a tale from a long series of stories about Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār. The revered Indo-Afghan sheikh acts in this tale as a defender of the residents of Pashtun indigenous lands against the army of Amīr Tīmūr who in 1398 launched an invasion into the Delhi Sultanate and marched through Pakhtunkhwa. To put the Pashtuns out of sight of Tīmūr’s troops, Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār performed a miracle by creating a screen of dust which blinded the invaders. When Tīmūr found out that he had been challenged by Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār, he tried to show his respect to this renowned sheikh by sending him a horse as a gift. The refusal of Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār to accept the horse and, later, some other gifts reads as not only the common Sufi rejection of material goods, but also as an expression of political ideology related to the confrontation between the Mughals and the Pashtuns in the sixteenth century when this story is likely to have been invented.⁶³

The language of ancestors

F. Barth’s empirical description of the main components of Pashtun identity, namely, patrilineal descent, Islam, and Pashtun custom, partly intersects with the well-known popular view that being Pashtun means ‘having Pashto’ (paẋto larəl), ‘speaking Pashto’ (paẋto wayəl), and ‘doing Pashto’ (paẋto kawəl).⁶⁴ While in Barth’s anthropological taxonomy the language is not mentioned but implied as a part of a complex notion of customs, the popular view gives higher priority to the linguistic criterion of self-identity, obviously taking the confessional one for granted. As an important written document that articulates the perceptions of ethnic self-identity among the Pashtun diaspora of India in early modern times, Niʿmatallāh Harawī’s book lays stress only on the two above-indicated criteria—genealogical and religious—while for obvious reasons the issues of language and customs are touched upon only in passing. The book was composed in Persian in the vein of Indo-Persian historiography by a native Persian speaker who lived in the Persophone cultural environment far from Pashtun indigenous territories. However, Niʿmatallāh’s personal close contacts with various representatives of the Indo-Afghan diaspora, beginning with his co-author Haybat Khān Kākaṙ, resulted in his increased focus on the linguistic aspects of the folk material he had at his disposal.

Unlike most Persian authors, Niʿmatallāh sporadically employed in his accounts the Indo-Afghan ethnonym pathān, probably a distorted Indo-Arian or Indo-Persian rendering of the Pashto plural form paẋtānə (‘Pashtuns’), as an equivalent of the conventional exonym afghān.⁶⁵ In the pseudohistorical account of how the Pashtun progenitor Qays visited the Muslim prophet in Medina and was converted by him to Islam, Niʿmatallāh tells that it was Muḥammad himself who gave Qays ʿAbd al-Rashīd the sobriquet ‘Pathān’ which was allegedly a special word for ‘keel’ in the language of a ‘sea-people’ (mardum-i daryābār). According to Niʿmatallāh, Muḥammad did this because he received a prediction from the archangel Jabraʾīl (that is, a revelation from God) that the descendants of Qays (Pashtuns) would become ‘a pillar of the house of Islam’ (sutūn-i khāna-yi islām) like the keel of a ship.⁶⁶

In parallel to the ethnonym ‘Pathān’, Niʿmatallāh also occasionally used the authentic name of the Pashto language pashtū (or zabān-i pashtū) as a synonym of its common Persian literary variant afghānī. Of particular interest are the cases where Niʿmatallāh mentions Pashto lexemes and even phrases which point to the genuine, most likely oral, Pashto sources of his accounts. In some of these cases, the discretionary use of Pashto words directly confirms that the stories were told to Niʿmatallāh by bilingual Pashtuns, such as ‘[The sheikh] said to him in the Pashto language, “Rāyishā” that is “Come here”’, or ‘Many years later his tarbūr (Pashto tərbūr), which in the Pashto language means “cousin,” has arrived.’⁶⁷ The political connotation of the folk etymology of the ethnonym ‘Lodī’ explained as a combination of two Pashto words—the adjective loy (‘big, great’) and the copula dəy—is mentioned above. In a note on Shaykh Mīchan Lodī, Niʿmatallāh explicated the meaning of this sheikh’s name or, more exactly, his moniker (laqab). According to Niʿmatallāh, when the sheikh once returned home swaying in a state of rapture because he was affected by a ‘wind of God’s generosity’ people said that he was rotating like a mill (āsyā), ‘and in the Pashto language āsyā is called mīchan (Pashto mechən, “grain grinder”)’.⁶⁸ In a similar case, the moniker ‘Dankar’ (Pashto ḋangar, ‘lean, skinny’) of Shaykh ʿAlī, a purported brother of Yaḥyā Bakhtiyār, is properly interpreted in Persian as lāghar, żaʿīf, nazār, but the original language of this word is not indicated, for no other reason than that it was a self-evident fact for Niʿmatallāh’s Pashto-speaking informants.⁶⁹ In another case, a Pashto word is used without any explanation of its meaning as if it was a commonplace borrowing in the Persian language of the Indo-Afghans. It is said in the brief characterization of Shaykh Ḥasan Kīthar Kānsī that only a glance of resentment thrown by this stern man at a galī (?) or a tūman (‘people, tribe, populated area’ from Turkic ‘ten thousand’) could cause ‘forty funerals’.⁷⁰ The word galī here is very likely Pashto kəlay (‘village’).

An intriguing example of a Pashto quotation is found in the story about the nine Kākaṙ saints (see the previous section). The prayer with the invocation to these holy men is said to have begun with Pashto words spelled as awnitan zalghūzī and translated into Persian as nuh tan mard ḥāżir shawīd (‘Nine men, come into sight’).⁷¹ If ‘Zalghūzay’ in this quotation is the name of a Kākaṙ tribe with whom these saints were allegedly affiliated, the phrase should be interpreted as aw nəho tano zalghūzīo (lit. ‘O the nine Zalghūzays’). However, taking into account its Persian translation, the invocation may be understood also as the incorrectly recorded Pashto phrase aw nəho tano zalm(ī)o wuzəy (‘O nine young men, come out’), or even owo nihāno zalm(ī)o wuzəy (‘Seven hidden young men, come out’). In the latter case, the words of the invocation better conform to the plot of the story and the number of the saints corresponds to that in the popular versions of the Qurʾānic legend about ‘those of the cave’ and the Christian legend underlying it.

Of special importance are two stories where Pashto is mentioned by Niʿmatallāh as a means of creative self-expression by the Indo-Afghan sheikhs. These hagiographical notes add the names of Bustān Baṙets and ʿĪsā Məshwāṅay (Pers. ‘Maswānī’) to the small list of the early Pashtun litterateurs known to us who composed verses in their native vernacular in the sixteenth century.⁷² As was said before in the second section of this article, Niʿmatallāh was personally acquainted with Bustān Baṙets. He closely communicated with this sheikh for about two years, obviously attracted by his spiritual charisma, and even accompanied him on a sea trip to Goa. According to Niʿmatallāh, at a young age Bustān Baṙets left his homeland in Roh for India where he settled in the town of Sāmāna, located in the vicinity of modern Patiala in Punjab, and for some time was engaged in trade. Niʿmatallāh does not provide any information on how Bustān Baṙets attained the status of a blessed man and a renowned spiritual guide, but speaks of him as a highly emotional and sensitive man who ‘sometimes recited Pashto verses (ashʿār-i pashtū) in such a sad and dolorous voice that could have made a stone cry’.⁷³ Bustān Baṙets died, apparently of dysentery (ishāl-i kabad), right after travelling to Goa on 31 December 1593 (07.04.1002 ah), and Niʿmatallāh was among those who organized his funeral.

Shaykh ʿĪsā Məshwāṅay lived a little earlier, for he is called a contemporary of Shīr Shāh Sūrī (r. 1540–1545).⁷⁴ In one story, Shīr Shāh sends his emissary to check rumours that Shaykh ʿĪsā had a bad habit of drinking wine. However, a suspicious flask always standing beside the sheikh turned out to be filled with pure milk. In reply, Shaykh ʿĪsā reprimands the Pashtun ruler of India for his inappropriate enquiry into the personal life of blessed people and cites a meaningful verse from Ḥāfiẓ, ‘We display faithfulness and endure reproaches, but feel fine/since suffering on our Path is a blasphemy’.⁷⁵ Such quotations are rare in Niʿmatallāh’s hagiographical anthology. The reference to the eminent Persian poet distinguishes Shaykh ʿĪsā from other Indo-Afghan spiritual masters and characterizes him as a well-educated individual with a predilection for poetry.

Niʿmatallāh describes him also as a rich and powerful man who once performed the role of an arbitrator in a dispute over land. This folk story deserves attention because it aimed at explaining the reasons for transferring land ownership from one Pashtun kinship group to another. Its plot was probably based on some real events that may have taken place either somewhere in North India or in the tribal areas. The story goes that the sheikh granted a plot of cultivated land to a man from the Tarīn tribe, but then his own cousin, that is, a Məshwāṅay, claimed his right to this land, presumably appealing to an old Pashtun custom of wesh that regulated the periodical redistribution of fertile soils and pastures between kinship groups.⁷⁶ At the public trial, Shaykh ʿĪsā awarded the land to the Tarīn man for a reason that imbues the story with hagiographical flavour: the Tarīn obeyed the order of the sheikh to bow at the feet of the claimant, while the latter refused out of pride to do the same to the defendant. It is noteworthy that Tarīn is a Saṙban tribal division closely related to the Abdālīs from whom the Sadozay and the Bārakzay dynasties of the later Afghanistan rulers descended.⁷⁷ As for the Məshwāṅays, Pashtun genealogical traditions differ in that they regard them either as the descendants of a sayyid affiliated with the Kākaṙs, or as a small branch of the Lodī tribes.⁷⁸

Niʿmatallāh asserts that ʿĪsā Məshwāṅay was the author of a treatise on monotheism (dar tawḥīd risāla) written in three parts and in three languages—Pashto, Persian, and Hindustani (hindawī). In all three languages three quotations from this risāla are verses, so it is very likely that the ‘treatise’ was in fact a collection of poetry, the multilingual dīwān containing standard Sufi lyrics. The fragment in Pashto, transcribed in Persian letters, goes first. It consists of four rhymed lines which seem to be slightly corrupted, but nevertheless allow us to perfectly understand them as a Sufi prayer to God, ‘You do things on Your own, You reject [those striving for You] on Your own./I am astonished: sometimes You make me dear to You, sometimes You humble me./You are powerful over Your attributes (ṣifatūna); sometimes You put me in fire./ʿĪsā is amazed by this attribute: sometimes you make me Your friend, sometimes You make me an alien to You’.⁷⁹

While Pashto verses sung by Shaykh Bustān Baṙets evidently had only an oral form and could be of folk origin in part, the specimens of Pashto poetry ascribed to the authorship of Shaykh ʿĪsā Məshwāṅay were at the disposal of Niʿmatallāh as written texts. This means that the Persian alphabet was being used from time to time by learned Indo-Afghans for personal records in Pashto, including their literary compositions. The earliest authentic texts in Pashto which have come down to us in two variants of Pashto script proper are didactic works by the founder of the Roshani community Bāyazīd Anṣārī (d. circa 1572), his follower and poet Arzānī Khweẋkay (d. after 1601), and the traditionalist theologian Ākhūnd Darweza (d. after 1615). Niʿmatallāh’s notes on the two Indo-Afghan sheikhs and poets, especially a quote from Shaykh ʿĪsā’s lyrics, provide valuable facts for drawing a more detailed picture of the actual presence of the Pashto language and the circulation of Pashto literary texts in sixteenth-century India.

Conclusion

The large hagiographical section in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī wa Makhzan-i Afghānī—a book without precedent on Pashtun ethnohistory compiled in the Indo-Afghan diaspora in the early seventeenth century—pursued two interconnected goals. First, it had to prove the idealized concept of the long-lasting and firm adherence of Pashtuns to Islam by both didactic and entertaining stories derived from various, mostly oral, folklore sources. Second, the affirmation of this concept aimed at supporting the claims of the Indo-Afghan elite to political leadership in Muslim India in the face of the ongoing competition with the Mughals. Following the structure of the book’s genealogical section, the hagiographies also echoed its covert ideological objective and emphasized the supremacy of spiritual masters affiliated with the Beṫan tribal group to which the former Pashtun ruling dynasties of the Delhi sultanate—the Lodīs and the Sūrīs—belonged. With regard to its composition and stylistic features, the hagiographical collection in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī continued traditions of the taẕkirat al-awliyā genre in Indo-Persian literature and shared similarities with two kinds of works—the religious Sufi anthologies such as the Siyar al-awliyā and the Akhbār al-akhyār, and the biographical sections in historiographical books such as the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, the Muntakhab al-tawārīkh, and the Āʾin-i Akbarī.

Despite its direct link with tribal genealogies and implicit reliance on the tribalist ideology of Pashtun segmentary society, the hagiographical collection in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī attests foremost to the cultural and spiritual experience of Indo-Afghans after the rise of the Lodī dynasty in the Delhi sultanate in the mid-fifteenth century, that is, in the period spanning the century-and-a-half before the book was written. The socio-cultural realities of Pashtun tribal areas to the west of the Indus are reflected in it only fragmentarily and do not shed much light on the factual religious beliefs and practices of the Pashtuns over several centuries. In hagiographical stories, the tribal territories are depicted mostly as imaginary highland areas, associated mainly with the Sulaiman mountains, where spiritual masters often perform the functions of chieftains rather than saints. In some cases, hagiographical characters seem to be reinterpreted personalities of Islamic mythology such as the prophets Mūsā and Khiżr, or ‘those of the cave’ (aṣḥāb al-kahf) from a Qurʾānic legend.

A number of stories allow us to distinguish two basic patterns of the emergence of spiritual lineages in the tribes. Before the Lodīs came to power in Delhi, spiritual teachers and blessed men among the Pashtuns were mostly incomers who often declared their descent from the Prophet Muḥammad, that is, they claimed to be sayyids, and strove to become naturalized in tribal society by obtaining permission to marry Pashtun women. Where their missionary services were accepted by tribal rulers, their progeny could be incorporated into the tribal structure with an emphasized proviso in the genealogies on applying the matrilineal kinship principle. The second pattern began to evolve in the fifteenth century when large-scale Pashtun migration to India gave ethnic Pashtuns more social opportunities to pursue careers as religious instructors or to exercise the sacral authority of inspired mystics in a cosmopolitan environment. The formation of spiritual clans (stāna) of Pashtun descent in the tribal territories can be traced in the available sources from the mid-sixteenth century, but the hagiographies in the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī lack genuine information on this process.

The presence of Pashtun ancestral homelands in the Indo-Afghan hagiographies is most noticeable in those folk stories that contain some linguistic material related to the Pashto language, often referred to by its original glossonym pashtū instead of the common Persian appellation afghānī. This material includes not only single lexemes, mentioned to explicate the meaning of Pashtun personal names or unintentionally employed by bilingual narrators, but also a quote from a Pashto poem by the sheikh ʿĪsā Məshwāṅay. Similarly, the Indo-Afghan ethnonym pathān is occasionally used in the hagiographies as an equivalent to the exonym afghān, which had prevailed in Persian writings since its first appearance in the anonymous geographical work Ḥudūd al-ʿālam in the late tenth century. Aimed at strengthening ideological grounds for the political claims of the Indo-Afghan elites, the Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī’s hagiographical collection significantly contributed to the conceptualization of the confessional criterion of Pashtuns’ self-identity. However, recurring remarks on the Pashto language in the hagiographies imply that the linguistic aspect, defined in popular tradition as ‘speaking Pashto’ (paẋto wayəl), was also considered among the basic components of Pashtun identity at a time when this regional vernacular was gradually acquiring its written form.