Volume 3, Issue 2
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Volume 3, Issue 2 |
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Current Article The Land of Billy Fish published: March 6, 2005 "Time is the fire in which we burn" -- Soran, Star Trek VI If time is the fire in which we burn, then it is through the ashes we must sift to discover the past. But great care must be taken with the pattern uncovered as it will always be imperfect. One can have better luck with the reading of tea leaves. And those who interpret the tea leaves for an eager audience can casually or deliberately bend or omit the evidence as it suits them. I speak in the wider sense of the issues surrounding national or religious ideologies that cannot allow competition. The classic example was Stalinist Russia, where history could (and would) be rewritten with each publication of official doctrine. Josephus bridles against Herodotus during the Roman era. Origins and Rumors: In the case of the Kafirs of Afghanistan, the more intolerant proponents of both the Muslim and Hindu world have conspired to erase their very existence. It is only through the diligent efforts of the British explorers in the 19th century that we know of their existence. At the beginning of the 2nd millenium BC those equestrian tribesmen of Kurgan fame moved south over the Caucasus and into the Iranian plateau. Driven south and east by climactic change these tribes that by 1800 BC can be comfortably labelled the Indo-Aryans moved into present day Afghanistan and then drove south into the plains of India. The Aryan invasions are as controversial an historical issue as any other. The Hindutva movement in India has challenged the orthodox and western view that the so-called Aryans (or Kurgans or PIE) swept down from Afghanistan into the Indian subcontinent, bringing with them the basis for the present Hindu civilization. But one can hardly argue with the evidence, though considerable effort has been put into destroying what little remains. Because not all of the Indo-Aryans went south. Archaeologists have been unable to continue work on this research as Afghanistan became too dangerous a place to do archaeological digs after the 1979 Soviet incursion. Sixty years of research had barely scratched the surface, indicating that numerous civilizations had existed. The ancient Buddhist realm of Gandhara had flourished here, the possible source for Tibetan culture. The first possible notice of the Kafirs as a people might be in Herodotus' Histories.
Alexander and his marauding Macedonians stumble upon the Kafirs in 327 BC when in their brief foray into the mountainous region below Chitral they accidentally set afire one of the cemeteries of the Kafirs. This bizarre incident is best described in Peter Green's biography of Alexander.
Alexander promptly beseiged their city called Nysa - whose association with the Greek god Dionysius has been the cause of great excitement throughout the ages. Alexander and his men were so impressed with this possibility of a common origin between the Kafirs and the Greeks that for ten days the army went on a Bacchic spree, feasting and drinking till "the mountain heights and valleys rang with the shouts of so many thousands."2 Alexander and his men were excited by the discovery of a common Indo-European god so far from home, the later British explorers and writers would be as equally enthralled by the Alexander connection. Close to 1500 years pass before the next Westerner mentions the Kafirs, and it is not a favorable one. Marco Polo on his way east to China grants them only a secondhand and disparaging mention, obviously heard from his Muslim guides:
The Coming of Islam The history of Afghanistan is defined by the rule of Islam. The Pashtun tribes swept into the lowlands of Afghanistan in the tenth century AD driving the Indo-Aryan tribes into the highlands. Now for the first time the Kafirs are mentioned as a separate and distinct people. Refusing to accept the Muslim rule, these mountain tribes now define themselves by their steadfast hatred and opposition to the religion of Mohammed:
The next European traveller to the region, Benedict Goes, hears of rumors of a land called Capperstam, where no Mahommedan might enter on pain of death. The chronicles of Timur the Lame and Babur mention the Kafirs and their depredations upon the Muslims. It is from the Memoirs of Babur that the widespread story originates that the Kafirs were the descendants of the Greeks, instead of having a prior common ancestry. In 1839 the Kafirs attract the attention of the British. The Kafirs send a delegation to Sir William Macnaghten, assuming that the British are indeed their long lost kindred. Indeed, the Pashtun Afghans are reputed to have said "Here are your relations coming!" But the Afghans grow hostile and drive the Kafirs away, and the British foray into Afghanistan comes to a disastrous conclusion. Several enterprising British agents seek to keep contact with the Kafirs open throughout the next few decades, and the British fascination with the Kafirs inspires Rudyard Kipling to write the famous story of "The Man Who Would be King." And in the end it is the British who doom the Kafirs. In 1895, the whole of Kafir territory was ceded to the ruler of Afghanistan who moved ruthlessly to end Kafir independence. Tales of wholesale slaughter and deportation follow - children abducted and forced into Islamic madrassahs for re-education, an ancient culture razed and destroyed. Almost all trace of the Kafirs culture was obliterated even up to the current day. The Taliban during their misrule looted the National Museum in Kabul, and it was believed that the few remaining relics of the Kafirs had been lost. But recently, in its first exhibition in 13 years, the National Museum of Afghanistan proudly displayed what they had preserved The museum staff, at great personal risk had kept secret the national collection! The best source of information about present day Kafiristan, (Nuristan) is Richard F. Stand's comprehensive website. The following is an article about the mythology of the Kafirs from the now out of print Asiatic Mythology, published 1932. As I believe this is in the public domain, (see notice on the Berne Convention at the bottom) here is the article in it's entirety.
The Mythology of the Kafirs, by Jay Hackin Kafiristan (the country of the unbelievers, the pagans) is that little known part of Afghanistan which is bounded on the north by the Badakshan, on the south by the valley of Laghman (the ancient Lampaka) the Bajaur, on the east by the country of Dir, on the west by Kohistan. The inhabitants of Kafiristan, whom certain writers regard as the descendants of the Greek settlers established in the country by Darius Hystaspes, belong racially and linguistically to the Indo-European family. Thanks to its geographical position, Kafiristan has long remained isolated from the rest of the world; only at the end of the nineteenth century did a few travllers, mostly english, penetrate to the interior of the country and explore it. According to them, the Kafirs, about 200,000 in number, are divided into three great tribes living in the most perfect harmony with one another. Commerce and industry are unknown in this region. The chief, and in a manner of speaking the only, occupation of the natives is cattle-breeding. They own enormous flocks of goats, eating the flesh and drinking the milk. The same animals' skins serves them for garments.m the dark color of which has caused them to be called by the Muslims around the the Simposh, which means "clad in black." Down to recent years the Kafirs practiced a religion with mysterious rites that the Muslim conquest (1898) caused to disapear almost completely.
- Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone General Court, in his unpublished papers, confirms the particulars given by Ephinstone:
Sir George Scott Robertson, the Political Agent at Gilgit, penetrated into Kafiristan in 1890; he saw a great number of idols. All those images, he tells us, "are carved on conventional models, and are made solely with axes and with knives. The more ponderous kinds are roughly fashioned in the forest and then brought into the village to be finished."
We have no precise information about the images of the divinities properly so called - Imra, Boruk, Dirkhel. The Kafiristan idols now in the Kabul Museum represent deified ancestors, and may be linked up with Iranian archetypes. The clothes are very coarsely and crudely indicated; no attempt at individualism is to be observed in those flat, round or rectangular faces (fig 4), which remind us in a surprising fashion of those of the colossal statues on Waihu (Easter Island). An equestrian statue of slightly more careful execution belongs to the same type (fig 2)... Sir George Scott Robertson saw a great number of these, of the same type, in the valleys of Bashgul and Dungul.
After the country of the heathen became Nuristan (the country of light) the representations of the old gods almost completely disappeared. The idols in the Kabul Museum represent all that survives of the ancient pantheon of the Kafirs.
2 ibid.
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