—————
Muslim it now may be, but Nuristan is as fierce and untamable as it was before Abdur Rahman. At dawn on July 13, 2008, forty-nine US soldiers in a makeshift camp in Wanat, Nuristan province, woke up to a sinister sight: figures in the half-light emerging over distant ridges. Closer observation revealed that the figures were Taliban with rocket launchers. More and more of the silhouettes appeared, until there were nearly two hundred of them. Suddenly they opened fire, taking out the US camp’s heavy weaponry in the first few minutes. The next few hours were a confusion of blood and noise. At one point the attackers broke through the camp’s defenses, and when they finally withdrew after a few hours of sustained assault, they left nine Americans dead and twenty-seven wounded. The battle of Wanat, as it came to be known, was the costliest American engagement in Afghanistan since 2001. Reports of the battle in the American press highlighted Nuristan’s reputation as the “deadliest place on earth” and “Al-Qaeda and Taliban central.” Three things made it especially attractive to Islamic militants: its stark topography (the mountains that make up the province are up to 19,500 feet high), the fact that it sits alongside the border with Pakistan, and the religious fervor and battle-hardiness of its people (it was the first province to declare jihad against the Soviets in 1979). Just as in Alexander’s time, they and their neighbors in Kunar province, a little to the south, proved to be the fiercest fighters in the region.
Yet during the battle, and just a few miles away from it as the crow flies, a Greek teacher peacefully slept through it all. Athanasios Lerounis lived in a village called Bomboret and dressed like a local, with flowers tucked into a flat brown woolen cap. Though he was an outsider, he was allowed to join in the local solstice celebrations: the sacrifice of goats to their many gods and goddesses, the drinking of homemade wine and powerful brandy, and all-night dancing that saw women in bright red-and-yellow costumes and cowrie-shell headdresses form circles around the men and sway decorously to the sound of chanting. Almost right at the geographical heart of militant Islam, he was living among the last pagans of Pakistan.
These people were the Kalasha. They survived the forced conversion of their Kafir cousins in the high mountains: the mehtars of Chitral were under British protection and Abdur Rahman could not enter their territory. It is for this reason, too, that their valley is in Pakistan, which annexed Chitral in 1969. There was a time, the Kalasha say, when all of Chitral followed their religion—but now all save four thousand are Muslim. The four thousand remaining Kalasha all live in three valleys in Chitral next to the border with Nuristan. Living in the mountains has left them no choice but to practice subsistence agriculture—growing wheat for bread and grapes for wine, herding wiry goats and sheep and rather bony cattle—and in winter their land freezes and they become snowbound. The mountains, however, have also protected them from almost all invaders, and their valleys can still be peaceful even when there is chaos and violence just a few miles away.
In 1839, the first British political agent in Afghanistan, Sir William Macnaghten, was told by the Afghans: “Here are your relations coming!” They meant a delegation from Kafiristan. The notion that the people of this delegation were “poor cousins of the European,” as they were sometimes described, was a result of their pale skins and various habits that were seen as distinctively European—sitting on chairs and shaking hands instead of, like most Afghans, sitting on the floor and grasping the shoulders. At some point, the theory of European origins for the people of the Hindu Kush took on more detail. It was said that they were descendants of Alexander the Great and his soldiers. The story spread, in Athens and Thessaloniki and beyond, that the Kalasha specifically were a lost Hellenic tribe. Donations poured in. At one point Greek tourists arrived in Pakistani villages bringing pictures of Alexander to compare his features with those of the Kalasha, some of whom have blond hair and blue eyes. The idea has caught on among the Kalasha, too: one local boy changed his name to Alexandros when he turned eighteen. Lerounis, meanwhile, used the donations to establish a clean water supply, latrines, schools, and a museum that celebrated and preserved the Kalasha’s heritage and religion.
There might be more than one explanation for the European-seeming traits of these isolated tribes in the Hindu Kush. Living in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009 and learning its languages, I often encountered English-sounding words. In one of Afghanistan’s two main languages, Dari, the words lip, bad, and am are used, and carry the same meanings as they do in English. Madar, baradar, and dokhtar sound almost exactly like their English meanings: “mother,” “brother,” and “daughter.” Tu, the word for “you,” is close to the old English thou. Entire sentences might almost match their English equivalent. Baradar e-tu am means “I am your brother.” Whenever I heard these phrases in the often alien-seeming environment of Kabul, amid its snowy mountains, from men in multicolored chapan coats and flat woolen pakol caps who had lived through more mayhem and murder than I would ever see, it felt as if—borrowing a phrase from Alan Bennett about the feeling of finding sympathetic characters in history—“a hand has reached out, and taken yours.”
The reason for this goes back three to four thousand years, long before the British Empire or even the earlier Afghan empires came into existence, when both Europe and Afghanistan were colonized by the same people: nomadic herdsmen from the Caucasus who spread their Indo-European language across a vast swath of land. In the Taklamakan Desert, east of the Hindu Kush, a mummified corpse of one of these settlers was discovered in 1980. Dating back approximately 3,800 years, the mummy is called the “Loulan Beauty.” She had auburn hair, high cheekbones, and a high-bridged nose. Her presence in what is now western China shows how far the Indo-European settlers reached. No wonder Alexander, when he reached the Hindu Kush, was reminded of home and sought places that featured in his people’s mythology. He hoped to find in the Hindu Kush the mountain where Prometheus had been bound in chains, punished by the gods for teaching man the secret of fire; as he marched south toward India, he was persuaded that he was treading in the footsteps of the god Dionysus, whose ceremonies he thought he recognized among the local customs. Perhaps he believed he had reached the end of the world—a place where myths came true—and was overinterpreting coincidences. Or perhaps he was seeing cultural similarities that dated back to that earlier settlement.
So blond hair and blue eyes among the Kalasha do not prove them to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers, but there was never anything impossible about the idea. After Alexander’s death, Greek kings ruled southern Afghanistan and a large part of Pakistan for more than two centuries. Their “empire of a thousand cities” was famously wealthy and conducted commerce with China and diplomatic relations with Indian kings. The name Sekandar (Alexander) remains popular in Kashmir, and the Afghan city of Kandahar still recognizably bears the Greek king’s name. The Muslim rulers of Badakhshan, a province just north of Kafiristan, continued to claim descent from Alexander himself as late as the fifteenth century. Greece’s neighbor Macedonia, which also lays claim to Alexander’s heritage, was not willing to be outdone by the Greeks and their Kalasha connection. It invited the prince of Hunza for a special visit in 2008, for this prince, living in a region just north of Chitral, also claims descent from Alexander. The Kalasha have an oral tradition tracing their origin to “Shalak Shah,” a possible reference to Alexander’s general Seleucus. Indeed, a study of the DNA of the Kalasha population conducted in 2014 seemed to bear out the Kalasha legend. It showed that at some point between 990 and 206 bc foreign genes, possibly European, entered the Kalasha gene pool.
—————
I learned about Nuristan soon after I arrived in Kabul. The white-capped mountains that tower over the Afghan capital on its eastern side—part of the Hindu Kush—were not even visible then, because of the summer haze of fumes and smoke that hung over the city, but when mortar shells landed in the city, I was told they had been fired from those mountains. From the
n on I saw them as places of terror as well as beauty. The name Kush, after all, sounded very much like the Afghan word for “killing,” kushtan. Even so, it intrigued me that there were still places in those mountains that were beyond my reach; I read avidly the books of people who had visited Nuristan, including Robertson and also Eric Newby, a British travel writer who reached the province in 1956. I sometimes came near the place, and I saw pictures of its extraordinary and precarious mountainside villages, but I never actually set foot on Nuristani soil.
Instead in 2008 I decided to venture into the Hindu Kush from the other side. From Beijing, I traveled by train and road west through China’s troubled province of Xinjiang and into a northern province of Pakistan called Hunza. Robertson had visited this place and wrote afterward how he found himself obliged to shin up a tree in his full ceremonial uniform, sword and brass helmet, since the local ruler lived in its branches to avoid assassination. The area was in many respects very similar to Afghanistan, but free of danger. I could ride the local minibuses, go shopping in the markets, and talk freely to people (in a little Dari, and mostly English widely spoken because the region has no single universal language). It was an exhilarating feeling. Since it was winter, the polo fields, which I imagined in summer must be full of local notables on horseback jostling and shouting and chasing after a white ball, were empty. Bony cattle grazed on the unused lawns of local hotels, which in previous summers had hosted tourists. A boy in the mountains practiced cricket with me and said he wanted to play for England—though his name was Saddam Hussein. Girls sat in a schoolyard overlooking the main road and teased boys as they walked past. I went unteased: all their insults would have been lost on me. Instead they summoned me into a singing contest, each in our own language.
I was staying at the home of a man named Hussein, and he invited me to visit the local shaman, as he called her. We walked to her house along the little footpaths of the village. “She lives right by the mountainside,” he said. “All shamans do.” In her house—traditional, built of stone, the hearth fire smoldering under a pan of almost-cooked bread—she stooped over a tray on which she had scattered a collection of pins. Hussein, a powerful local figure from a wealthy family, got a rather pointed set of predictions: “Some people in the village will dislike you—they feel that you are away too much, that you pay your community too little attention.” For me, she prayed in Arabic and declared good fortune: “You will finish your book.” I had not told anyone that I was writing one.
Leaving, I asked Hussein how a person living in a house huddled under the great mountains became a shaman. He said it was a matter of spending some months up in the high peaks, where the ibex lives, eating only bread and drinking only tea. When the ibex delivered her young, the would-be shaman had to drink its milk, and then descend to the valley to test his or her newfound powers of prophecy. A belief that fairies (peri in the local language) inhabit the high mountains is partly what lies behind this tradition. Spending time among the fairies is thought to give a person supernatural powers (and the word perichahra, “fairy-face,” is a local compliment). Traditions and beliefs like these were once so widespread in that region, even among Muslims, that one book proposed that the whole Hindu Kush region, Hunza and Wakhan and Nuristan and Chitral, could be called “Peristan”—the land of the fairies. Hussein told me that there was a tribe called the Kalasha that had not yet converted, and offered me the chance to go and see them. It was a journey of a few days by jeep over unpaved mountain roads from Hunza to Chitral. I could not spare the time for it then, but promised myself that I would come back.
—————
It was four years before I tried to return, and this time acquiring a Pakistani visa had become much trickier. I was summoned by the country’s High Commission in London, many months after I applied. I introduced myself at the counter. “Ah yes,” said a small, energetic man with a long beard, “Mr. Russell. We all know about you. Yours is a famous case!” They had been working on it for weeks, he told me. Perhaps that was why the file on me had become so thick. I saw it when I was asked to call on a polite but weary official in a huge, once-elegant office. The file was open on the desk in front of him. “Someone in Pakistan has been putting a finger on your reputation,” he said. “What is the reason for that?”
When I said I had worked in Kabul, a look of comprehension flickered briefly in his eyes, and he stopped asking me any further questions. I knew that Afghanistan and Pakistan regarded each other with a large measure of mutual suspicion: clearly, even just having lived in one was a hindrance to visiting the other. Eventually the visa came through, and a few weeks later I was in the somewhat chaotic airport of Islamabad, Pakistan’s all-modern capital city. But I still faced one more challenge before I could reach my destination. Chitral sits 150 miles to the north of Islamabad, on the Afghan border. The region is surrounded by mountains, and there is only one low-altitude road leading in or out, which (thanks to the British-drawn border, as the locals pointed out to me) ran through Afghanistan and was now blocked off. So I would have to take a plane to get there, and although Chitral was a popular and sunny tourist resort in summer, the delay in getting my visa meant that it was now midwinter, when snow and high winds are common. The compensation was that if I made it to the Kalasha valley I might be in time for the winter solstice, when they hold a week-long festival called Chaumos.
My first flight attempted to reach the Chitral airport but, owing to the weather, ended up flying in wide circles around the next valley, giving me a spectacular view of the Hindu Kush. I could understand how Alexander the Great had imagined that the mountains were the edge of the world: even from a plane, nothing was visible but peak after peak, cliff after cliff, as far as the eye could see through the bright clouds and mist that covered them. Below me, and above Chitral, the clouds were darker and very thick: the plane tentatively nosed its way down through the top layers of cloud but soon gave up and turned back. It would be a few more days and trips to the airport before I managed to make it to the valley beneath those clouds.
Each time I came to the airport, I saw a sign saying farewell. Allah hafez, it said—a reminder of how the linguistic legacy of the region’s ancient Indo-European settlers is now being contested. Khoda hafez was the old phrase for “goodbye” in Pakistan, as it still is in Afghanistan and Iran. Some Muslims, however, believe that the old word for God, Khoda (a cousin of the English word, with kh instead of g), is less truly Islamic than the Arabic Allah. I had seen in Iran how Persian poetry had emphasized the difference between Persian and Arab by reviving the ancient pre-Islamic language. Pakistan was going in the opposite direction—partly influenced by its commercial and political ties to the Arab world, where tens of thousands of Pakistanis work, and which traditionally views Iran and everything Persian with some suspicion.
The campaign to replace Persian words with Arabic ones dates back to the time of Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who deposed Pakistan’s democratic socialist president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1978. Despite his politics, Bhutto had already put Pakistan on a road toward Islamic conservatism by passing a law against blasphemy, many of whose victims have been from religious minorities. Zia took things much further, imposing public whipping as a penalty for drinking alcohol and stoning to death as a penalty for adultery. Pakistan backed the most brutally militant of rebel groups in neighboring Afghanistan against the Soviets. Promoting Islamic causes gave a clearer, unifying purpose to Pakistan, a country stitched together in 1948 from a collection of provinces—including Chitral—that had little but religion in common. Constant tension with India, Pakistan’s majority-Hindu eastern neighbor, also helped create a feeling that being more Islamic was the same as being more patriotic. Widespread corruption created a sense that only the pious could be trusted to run things honestly. Zia’s successors never quite rolled back the changes he had made.
When eventually a plane reached Chitral, with me on board, I saw that the valley’s flo
or was flat and green with buildings scattered across it haphazardly; a wide river flowed down its southern edge, and steep and bare mountainsides rose on either side. At one point we passed the steep slope down which McNair had come, past corpses of dead travelers. A slight mist hung over the valley, the only trace that remained of the thick storm clouds. This valley had been an independent princely state, ruled by mehtars, when McNair and Robertson came through. I headed for a hotel that belonged to a cousin of the present mehtar. His great-grandfather had ruled the valley in Robertson’s time, and done everything possible to stop Robertson from reaching the Kam Kafirs—even going as far as bribing the Kam to kill him—out of fear that the British might be hoping to annex Kafiristan and Chitral along with it. (In reality, Chitral remained a princely state, with control over its internal affairs, until its 1969 annexation by Pakistan.)
His descendant, Shahzada Siraj ul-Mulk, was by contrast immensely helpful. He had once worked as an airline pilot, and his wife, Ghazala, had a degree in catering. When they were not entertaining diplomats at their elegant salon in Islamabad, they were looking after hunters, hikers, and writers at the hotel they ran together. As I sat by an open fire in its dining hall Siraj handed me an eighty-year-old book, falling apart at the spine, written by Colonel Reginald Schomberg. A speaker of six languages and holder of several military medals and one from the Royal Geographical Society, Schomberg visited Chitral in the course of twenty years spent exploring central Asia. (At the end of his life he would join the Catholic priesthood.) He wrote this book, Kafirs and Glaciers, during his travels. Marginalia written in irritation showed where Siraj’s father had once disputed the book’s unkinder observations on the Chitralis. Schomberg had made a gloomy prediction about the Kalasha, the only non-Muslims in Chitral, in particular. “Before very long,” he had written, “they will be persuaded—so gently, so blandly, but so firmly—to become Mohammedans and will be bad Muslims instead of good pagans.”
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 29
