February 24, 2008

Sana Haroon began her research on the ethnography and colonial era history of the Indo-Afghan tribal areas in 2001, when the world had just begun to refocus on Afghanistan after a decade-long hiatus. Her book, aptly subtitled ‘Islam in the Indo-Afghan borderland,’ could not have been published at a more opportune time, when the progression and direction of the war on terror has brought the region into sharp relief. As the risk of possible US military action in the region increases, the conflict between the Pakistan army and the tribes has escalated and spilled over into the provinces thus posing a threat to the very foundations of the state.

But for all the fact that the tribal areas are front-page news, most Pakistanis are as perplexed by the turn of events there as is the international community. There is little or no understanding of the forces that shape opinions and dictate action amongst the people of the tribal belt. Frontier of Faith, which focuses on religious organisation and history of armed mobilisation in the region in the pre-Partition era, is an attempt to fill this gap.

Haroon begins with a narrative on British India’s early engagement with the tribes of the Northwest frontier, which took place in the aftermath of the conquest of Punjab in 1849. By the end of the century the frontier tribes had been mapped and a unique administrative model developed for the region, wherein tribes were paid for the protection of infrastructure and for policing the borders of the administered or ‘settled’ districts of British India. She also gives a fascinating account of the negotiations underpinning the delineation of the Durand Line, where the Amir of Afghanistan was asked to define the extent of his sphere of influence and political suzerainty, and British authority over the region which now constitutes the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) was formally acknowledged. Even after the formation in 1901 of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), which comprised five administered districts and five tribal agencies, the relationship of the Crown with the Pakhtoon tribes remained unchanged. The system of raising tribal levies remained intact, as did the practice of monetary compensation to the maliks for ‘good behaviour.’

Having established the terms of the relationship between the tribes of the frontier regions and the state, Haroon goes on to explore the nature of religious organisations and Islamic revivalism in the area. She traces the development of Sufism in the Pakhtoon highlands, and documents how the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya order, with its emphasis on the study of hadith, came to dominate the Islamic revivalist agenda, furthered by teachers trained at the Darul Uloom Deoband.
 

Haroon describes how the dictates of the mullahs were enforced by their lashkars or armed militias, with the size of the lashkar varying proportionately with the authority and renown of the mullah. The lashkars were used to enforce agreements or punish the violation of the same, deal with moral transgression, and to further the mullahs’ political strategy which generally took the form of swift attacks on state property, if the state was perceived to have violated the terms of its agreements with the clans.
 

But it is Haroon’s discussion of religious authority amongst the Pakhtoon clans that in some ways forms the core of her study, tracing as she does the way mullahs or local religious leaders used their authority to weld together the dictates of Pakhtoonwali or the tribal code with Islamic tradition. The mullahs were caretakers of the main point of congregation and male social interaction in the community, that is the mosque, and as such wielded significant power in terms of control over the dissemination of information and interpersonal relationships in the community. In particular, they had the power of ex-communication, which inevitably led to ostracism from society — a punishment that had severe implications in a close-knit community placed in a harsh physical environment. In a section on the militarisation of religious authority, Haroon describes how the dictates of the mullahs were enforced by their lashkars or armed militias, with the size of the lashkar varying proportionately with the authority and renown of the mullah. The lashkars were used to enforce agreements or punish the violation of the same, deal with moral transgression, and to further the mullahs’ political strategy which generally took the form of swift attacks on state property, if the state was perceived to have violated the terms of its agreements with the clans.

The author concludes her work in a more descriptive mode, tracing the history of the consolidation of autonomy by religious leaders in the region in the pre-Partition and immediately post-Partition era, a period when nationalist Pakhtoon movements offered unqualified support to the mullahs of the tribal areas in their effort to resist the forward policy of the British, aimed at countering the authority of the mullahs and of tribal leadership. An epilogue highlights how the existence of an ‘autonomous space’ could be — and has been — utilised by non-state actors such as participants of the Afghan jihad and now al Qaeda to protect their interests.

For a non-academic reader or the policy practitioner, it is this last linkage, briefly touched upon in the epilogue, which would be of prime interest, but the author has not really fleshed out this thesis. The historical narrative ends at 1950, after an account of the Pakhtoon clansmen’s role in the first Indo-Pak war

centered in Kashmir; Haroon touches only briefly upon the relationship of the Pakistani state with centres of authority in the tribal areas. She describes how successive Pakistani governments have chosen to uphold the theory of the ‘intractability’ and ‘cultural distinctness’ of the tribal Pakhtoons, and have assisted in the projection of the tribal area as a region

‘uncompromised by modernity, westernisation and urbanisation,’ but does not comment on why this arrangement has persisted in spite of the fact that voices have been raised in the Pakhtoon political arena for the repeal of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) Act and the merging of FATA with the rest of the NWFP. The significance of the events described in the epilogue thus remains somewhat unclear, and the reader is left bemused as to how and why any sovereign government would allow a part of its territory to remain outside the realm of regular administration.

Nevertheless, the writer is a historian and not a current affairs specialist. Her account of the structure and practice of religious authority in the tribal areas is indeed fascinating, and possibly one of the most painstakingly documented accounts of the region. The discerning reader and amateur historian will be able to infer how the institutional and social framework she describes translates into the social organisation of the region today. One hopes that her scholarship of the region will continue, or be taken up by scholars of contemporary history, to trace the dynamics of the relationship between the Pakistani state and FATA.
 

Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan borderland
By Sana Haroon
C. Hurst and Co.
Available with Vanguard Books, Karachi
ISBN 1850658544
256pp. £25.00