PAKISTAN: Conversions, Modernity Change Lives of Small Community

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadeem Yaqub

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 8 2004 (IPS) - Mir Swat Khan, who fought alongside the Taliban after the U.S.-led attacks against Afghanistan in November 2001, is waiting to be freed by Pakistani authorities from Central Jail here.

Hailing from Chitral district in Pakistan, some 400 kilometres from here, the 23-year-old is fair, red-headed, and sports a beard. Change the local dress and the cap and he can easily pass for a European.

Mir hails from Birir, one of the three remote valleys – Rambur and Bamburet being other two – inhabited by the Kalash, a small religious minority in the Hindukush valleys in northern Pakistan.

Members of the indigenous community of about 3,000 people, whose religion is polytheistic and based on the separation of the ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ realms, are considered to be descendants of the expeditionary forces of Alexander the Great.

Today many of this group are struggling to make ends meet. They live in wood and stone houses, grow wheat, maize and vegetables and raise goats.

Mir Swat however is also what some say is an example of the decline of the Kalash, whose lives have been changing due to the religious conversions of its members, and a combination of modernity and consumerism as well.

”I would like to meet my family when I am released, spend some time with them and then I wish to complete my Deeni (religious) studies,” says Mir, who started reading Islamic books as a schoolboy and in 1993 converted to Islam, the religion of majority of Pakistanis.

”I was impressed by the teachings of Islam. It’s a complete code of life,” Mir Swat tells IPS. In 2001, he went to a ‘madrasah’ or Islamic school in Karachi just before fighting in Afghanistan, where he felt bound to defend the Taliban.

But while he was a Kalash by birth, his life has become quite different from that of his community, which has its own festivals and customs.

For years Mir Swat’s family did not know he had been jailed in Kabul and found out only when they received a letter from the Red Cross early last year.

Many converts actually still live with their families but most move to other places. ”It’s a common phenomenon among the Kalash families,” says Maurine Lines, a 66-year-old British writer, photographer and health worker, who has been living amid the Kalash for 15 years.

”The young Talib (Taliban is plural) does not want to convert his other family members but says, ”I will be happy if they embrace Islam”.

Less than half-a-kilometre from Central Jail Peshawar where Mir Swat is lives a Kalash boy, Subhan (one name), who denies he has converted – but who local folk say did so in 2000. Subhan, who hails from Bamburet, is in third year of his studies at the prestigious Edwards College. Christian conversions are a more recent phenomenon.

Many Kalash, especially as they move out of the valleys to other areas and cities, find themselves exposed to other cultures and this one of the ways conversions happen.

Some however draw a link between the access that conversions can bring to improving economic and social standing, apart from the fact that they reflect social change.

Dr Shahjehan Sayed, chairman of the department of journalism and mass communication at the University of Peshawar who has visited the valleys several times, believes that economic depravity and outside influences are factors behind conversions.

”In the past the Kalash did not have much interaction with the outside world. But now they are exposed to the outside influences, so they want to change their conditions,” he says.

”Young Kalash people get frustrated when they get no jobs and have nothing to do. That frustration results in conversions and migration,” adds Lines.

But Hafiz Akhtar Ali, minister of religious and minorities affairs at Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, says it is risky to say that all conversions are not driven by spiritual reasons. ”Preaching Islam among the non-Muslims is very much in accordance with the Islamic teachers and it is every Muslim’s responsibility,” Ali says.

”If they are impressed by Islam and convert on their own free will, that makes me happy,” he adds, but also stresses that the government is duty bound to protect the rights of minority groups.

Traditionally, Kalash society uses a barter system and a money economy is a recent phenomenon in the valleys. But more young people these days opt to leave the valleys in search of education – some of them supported by Christian missionaries for instance – and paid work elsewhere.

In other signs that the changing times are catching up with the Kalash, television, satellite dishes and tourism have brought major changes in the lives of the community.

For instance, Karakal is the abode of some 40 Kalash families in Bamburet. During the last few years, four satellite antennas have appeared on rooftops in the remote valley. There is now also a small roadside theatre where young boys from the village and adults watch films.

Shahzada Khan, who lives in Karakal, says he is worried about his teenage son Yohanna because he spends a lot of time watching television, taking in images of a lifestyle far removed from home. ”He has been spoiled,” Khan says.

In once case in Birir, a man from down-country rented a house from a Kalash family and set up a satellite antenna. But when residents did not like what they felt was television’s less than desirable effects on youngsters, they drove the man from the valley.

Tourism has also brought revenues and change, not all of it welcome. Hotels that have sprung up in Bamburet, which some critics call ugly cemented structures, are owned by outsiders.

Lines says the lack of proper planning and deforestation as well as commercialisation is damaging not just the environment but Kalash culture.

She says the small water channels that flow in the Bamburet and Rambur valleys and on which the Kalash people and their livestock depend heavily, are more polluted now because all the hotels discharge their sewage and waste in them.

Sayed says that it is due to pressure from tourists, who do not understand local culture and customs, that some Kalash have started brewing ‘thara’ liquor, when families only make traditional wine for their own consumption during religious festivals.

Adds Sayed: ”Everybody seems busy in selling the Kalash culture and making money out of it. But no one is bothered.”