Place · mountain valley region · Afghanistan
Nuristan (Kāfiristān)
The valleys east of the Panjshir were called Kāfiristān — the land of unbelievers — because their people kept a polytheistic religion with wooden effigies, ancestor shrines, goat sacrifice and a wine culture, long after everything around them had become Muslim. Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān conquered and converted them by force in 1895 and 1896 and renamed the province Nuristan, the land of light. The carved wooden funerary figures that survived are now the main evidence of what was there.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.250, 70.750
Worth knowing
The conversion stopped at the Durand Line, agreed two years earlier: the related Kalash, in the Chitral valleys on the British side, were left alone and are the surviving unconverted branch of the same religious world.
Connections (2)
- Mythic displacement toTorkham & the Durand Line
The line saved a religion by accident. The Durand agreement was signed in November 1893; within two years Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān conquered Kāfiristān and converted it by force, renaming it Nuristan, the land of light. The valleys that the 1893 line had placed on the British side — the Kalash valleys in Chitral — were outside his reach, and their people were taxed but not converted. A boundary drawn for imperial convenience is the whole reason a pre-Islamic religion of the Hindu Kush still exists.
- AnalogueThe Kalash valleys
The Kalash of Chitral and the pre-Islamic Nuristanis were one religious world: related languages of the Nuristani and Dardic groups, wooden ancestor effigies, goat sacrifice, altars to a high god and a set of lesser deities, wine, and an elaborate purity code separating high ground from low. Nuristan was converted by force in 1895–96 and its carved funerary figures survive mainly in museums. The Kalash, on the other side of a two-year-old border, were not, which makes them the only living branch of the tradition.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Nuristan” and “Kafiristan”. George Scott Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush (1896); Max Klimburg, The Arts and Culture of Parun, Kafiristan's Sacred Valley.
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