Ethnic groups

Language

Religious non-leteracy in a literate culture

Folklore and folk music

Folk music and instruments

Settlement patterns

Life cycle

The inward looking society

THREE, and possibly four, major language families (IndoEuropean, Uralic-Altaic. Dravidian, and possibly Semitic) are spoken in Afghanistan. The literature, however, uses a modified Arabic script , and most of the 30,000 Hindus and Sikhs, mainly merchants in the cities and towns, write in the Arabic script of the Lahnda (Western Punjabi) dialects. Only a few Afghan Jews know how to write Hebrew; most of the people calling themselves "Arab" speak little Arabic and the majority are non-literate. Some Arabic-speaking groups have, however, been reported near Maimana, Kunduz, Aq Chah, and Balkh delineated the following groups of "Arabs" (who speak a Persianized Arabic): west of Daulatabad (Khushalabad), near Balkh (Yakhdan), Aq Chah (Sultan Aregh), and Shibarghan (Hassanabad). Farhadi. estimates the population of the areas to be approximately 5,000. Many religious leaders, often themselves non-literate, recite the Quran in Arabic without knowing what they say, and their listeners remain in great ignorance.

The two principal languages of Afghanistan are Indo-European: Persian (or Farsi) and Pashto. The 1964 Constitution names both Dari (or Afghan Farsi) and Pashto as official languages. Dari, an old term, literally means "language of the court." In reality, Dari (still the court language in Afghanistan as it was in Moghul India) serves as the lingua franca, although the Constitution designates Pashto as the "national language." A special committee, appointed in 1964, continues to study ways of promoting the growth and spread of Pashto.

An attempt to Pashto-ize all governmental inter-office memoranda came to disastcr during the 1953-63 prime ministry of Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan. Some non-Pashto-speaking high-ranking officials found it necessary to have clerks translate their Farsi communications into Pashto for transmission to another office. The recipient, often a non-Pashto-speaker as well, handed the report to an assistant for translation back into Farsi. The scheme collapsed in a welter of translation and retranslation.

Several regional Farsi dialects exist. The Hazara speak Hazaragi; the Aimaq speak Farsi with many Turkic loan words; the Tajik speak Tajiki, a Farsi dialect related to but not identical to the Tajiki spoken in the Tajikistan S.S.R. Afghans often refer to Tajiki by the name of the valley in which it is spoken; e.g., Panjsheri, Andarabi. Most rural Afghans still refer to the language as Farsi, not Dari. As the constitutional period develops and more and more people become literate, the name Dari will probably take hold.

The Farsiwan (or Parsiwan) farmers of western Afghanistan speak Iranian Farsi, and Heratis have an urban dialect all their own. So do the Kabulis (Farhadi, 1955, 1969), who speak the slurred Brooklynese of Dari dialects. In urban areas all over the world, and even internal wards or sections, words tend to develop distinctive dialectical qualities (Wilber, .1967).

Although vocabulary differences do occur in the above Dari dialects, all are mutually understandable; the Wakhi and Pamiri have more difficulty mutually understanding their respective archaic Dari (Avestan) dialects, however.

Pashto, also Indo-European, but not mutually intelligible with Dari, has nine phonemes unknown to, or slightly different from, Dari. The difference between Dari and Pashto is analogous to the range of difference between English and German, or French and Spanish. Farsi and Pashto generally use the same script as Arabic, and both are therefore written horizontally from right to left.

In Persian, the adjective follows the noun, and, as in German, the verb usually ends the sentence. In addition, time is indeterminate in many verb forms, and the Afghans apparently prefer the passive to the active in writing as well as speech. Interrogatives are generally tonal. Word-stress always occurs on the last syllable. According to Najib Ullah, modern Persian developed in Khurasan.

To most Westerners, Pashto proves much more formidable than Dari. Pashto nouns, for example, have gender and a complicated two-case, two-number declension system. Syllabic stress is more varied in Pashto than Farsi. Most linguists divide Pashto into two dialects, the soft, Pashto (Pushto) of the Qandahar area. and the harsher "Pukhtu" of Peshawar and the. North-West Frontier Province and most of the Tribal Agencies. of Pakistan. However, the eminent Soviet linguist, N. A. Dvoryankov (1963), differentiates a third dialect in Afghanistan with a phonemic structure intermediate between the Peshawari and Qandahari dialects in Paktya, particularly in the Khost area, and possibly over into Parachinar. He calls the dialects Qandahanian (western), Ningrahanian (eastern), and Paktyan (southern). D. Mackenzie (1959) summarizes four different dialects: Southwest (Qandahar); Southeast (Quetta); Northwest (Central Ghilzai); Northeast (Yousufzai).

Another Iranian language, Baluchi, is spoken in southwestern Afghanistan. The Brahui, Dravidian-speakers living among the Baluch, speak Baluchi as a second language, using the South Indian language almost exclusively in the home.

The separate Kafiri and Dardic dialects (Morgenstierne 1929ab, 1932, 1934, 1944, 1949, 1956) exist primarily in and surrounding Nuristan and include several disparate groups. Often each village or valley tends to attach a specific name to its dialect: Ormuni, Pashai,

Deghani, Wamai, Waigali, Kami, Kati (Bashgali or Kamdeshi), Prasun (Vermin), Ashuni.

Often, in two valleys less than a day’s walk apart in Nuristan, the groups have different terms for such important kin designations as father, mother, brother, and sister, remarkable cases of linguistic resistance to acculturation in order to perpetuate a society’s cultural ethos. Peripheral Nuristani groups have had sustained contact with the outside world which, however, seldom comes to Nuristan. Many individual Nuristani leave their mountain homes to visit the plains and urban centers or to serve in the army.

The second most important language family, Uralic-Altaic, is represented by Altaic (Turkic dialects), and concentrated north of the Hindu Kush among the Uzbak, Turkoman, and Kirghiz. Dialects vary from group to group, but most are mutually intelligible. Many Persian words exist in the Uzbaki of Afghanistan; the closer the relations between the groups the more Persianized the Uzbaki becomes. As do the Indo-European languages. the Turkic languages of Afghanistan use the Arabic script. However, just across the border (payi-darya; immigrants from north called pay-yi-daryai) in the U.S.S.R., both Indo-European and Turkic languages have been transposed into the Cyrillic alphabet during the Soviet period.

First mentioned by Leech (1838) and later studied briefly by Fernier (1857), von der Gabelentz (1866), Ramstedt (1906). Ligcti (1955), and A. Franklin Mackenzie (personal communication, 1955), the Moghol were rediscovered by H. F, Scliurmann and Shinobu Iwamura in 1954. Schurmann later (1962) did an extensive ethnography of the Moghol and their neighbors. In addition to Schurmann and Ferdinand’s review of Schurmann (1964), several other short works on the Moghol exist: Mariq (D.A.F;A. xvi. 77—78, 1959), Heissig (1969), and Weiers (1969). Mogbol villages have been reported scattered through Ghor, the Hazarajat, and as far- east as Badakhshan, almost to the entrance of the Wakhan. Several villages exist near Herat. Few people, except the older men, remember much of the old language. I recorded on tape several old men at Turkabad in 1961. They deplored the fact that younger men became more Persianized with each generation, and most Moghol (although many proudly identified themselves with this tribal designation) speak Farsi, even at home. According to Schurmann, the breakdown of Mongolian as a language and the Moghol as an integrated ethnic group in Ghor probably began in the middle of the nineteenth century A.D. (1962, 16). Mongolian is also Uralic-Altaic.

At the Twenty-fourth International Congress of Orientalists held in 1957, a committee (G. Redard and C. N. Kieffer to supervise in Afghanistan) on Iranian languages was formed to undertake the systematic study of languages in Iran, Afghanistan, and Soviet Central Asia. An Institute of Linguistics, headed by Nur Ahmad Shaker, is now recording languages all over Afghanistan.

In discussing the peoples and culture of Afghanistan, society must be divided into literate and non-literate segments and these implications -considered. Afghanistan, like most Muslim (and other developing) nations, has a literate culture, but a non-literate- society. Culture, for the purposes of this book, may be defined as the way a people live; the totality of their tool-kit, material and non-material. Society is the action component, people who live in a certain way, using part but seldom all, of the available tool-kit. Most individuals in a non4iterate society do not, however, have access to the great literature of their culture. And some of the world’s finest literature (philosophical and scientific, as well as poetry) has been written in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Pashto has a limited, though important, literature in the area. Many non-literates in Afghan society, however, can recite Persian poetry by the hour (Mohammad Au, 1958b, 1965). Most have at least passing acquaintance with the greater classical Persian poets: Rumi, Jami, Firdausi. (who lived in Ghazni during the heyday of the Ghaznavid Empire). Some Afghans even remember some verses of the minor Muslim poet, Omar Khayyam.

Most literate or non-literate Afghans, be they Persian, Pashto, or Turkic-speakers, consider themselves poets. Poetry, essentially a spoken, not a written, art, gives non-literates the same genetal opportunities for expression as the literates in a society. Afghanistan, therefore, is fundamentally a nation of poets.

To savor the flavor of Persian, Turkish, and Pashto poetry, we must examine some translations, roughly in chronological order.

The following short poem by Hanzala of Badghis, who lived in Nishapur during the first half of the ninth century. A.D. in the court of a Tahirid ruler, expresses a central theme in Afghan culture:

If leadership rests inside the lion’s jaw,

So be it. Go, snatch it from his jaws.

Your ‘lot shall be greatness, prestige, honor and glory.

If all fails, face death like a man.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

Another poet of the same general period, Mahmud Warraq, wrote a love quatrain, probably dedicated to a slave girl. This sad poem deals with unrequited love, and the quatrain may possibly be one of the first of its kind.

My beauty, I cannot exchange you for the cash of my life.

You are priceless. I will not sell you so cheap.

I hold your skirt with both my hands.

I may loosen my hold on my life, but not my hold on your skirt.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

A tenth-centur A.D. poet, Abu Shukur of Balkh, wrote the following during the Samanid period.

A tree with a bitter seed

Fed with butter and sugar

Will still bear a bitter fruit.

From it, you will taste no sweetness.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

One of the greatest poets of the early Islamic period, Rodaki of Samarkand was like many poets’ blind. The following poem illustrates only a minute segment of his wide-ranging interests:

Ode (Qasida) to the Mother of Wine (Grapes)

The mother of wine must be sacrificed,

And her son caught and thrown in jail.

But who would dare take the son away

Unless the mother be crushed and her soul extracted?

Even then it is not fair to snatch the baby

From his mother’s milk and breast.

He should be starved for seven whole months,

From the first of Odibehest until the end of Aban.

Only then, out of fairness and piety, should

The child be put in prison and his mother put to death.

For the first seven days he will sit stunned and bewildered

in his- narrow cell.

Then he will revive, and, writhing, burst into tears.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

(Odibehest and Aban are persian terms for saur (April/May) and aqrab (October/November).

Following this, Rodaki describes the complicated process of wine making, and the ceremonial aspects of serving wine, particularly in the court of the Amir of Bokhara. Actually, the whole poem evolves into praises of the Amir.

Daqiqi of Balkh began the first Shah-Namah, eventually incorporated in the great work of Firdausi. Like the other Persian poets of the tenth century, Daqiqi wrote many allegorical poems about love.

O my idol! A cloud from Paradise

Has bestowed an emerald gown on the earth.

Deserts are like blood-stained silk

And the sky has the fragrance of musk..

With a mixture of musk and red wine

An artist has drawn an image of my love on the deserts.

The world has become peaceful

For both the tiger and the deer,

For such occasions, we need a sun-faced idol,

And a moon, leaning on a cushion of sun,

We must have an idol with cheeks like rubies,

And red wine to match the cheeks.

The world has become a peacock,

With roughness here and smoothness there,

Mud smells of roses,

As though kneaded with rose water.

From among all the good and bad things of the world,

Daqiqi has chosen four:

Ruby-red lips, the wail of the flute,

Blood-colored wine, and the Zoroastrian religion.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

Possibly the greatest culture climax in the Afghan area occurred during the Ghaznavid period. In the court of Mahmud of Ghazni lived 400 poets and a total of 900 scholars. Probably the greatest of these was Abdul-Qasim Firdausi. The classic Shah-Namah, Book of the Kings of Persia, had 60,000 couplets (Levy, 1967). Anticipating - a sizeable gift, Firdausi dedicated the work to Mahmud with a very flowery ode (Najib Ullah, 1963, 242). For his trouble, however, Firdausi received only a pittance of what he thought he deserved. He changed the introduction to one of great satire, and had to flee from Ghazni. He died about 1025 at Tus in Khurasan.

The first woman known to compose poetry in both Arabic and Persian was Rabi’a Balkhi, whose brother ruled Balkh during the tenth century. She fell in love with a Turkish slave, and he gave her a -rose. Her brother discovered several poems Rabi’a had written to her lover. Angry, he threw her into a haniani (steam bath), and had her veins slashed. Before she bled to death, legend says, Rabi’a wrote the following poem in Persian on the wall of the hamam, with her own blood:

I am caught in Love’s web so deceitful

None of my endeavors turned fruitful.

I knew not when I rode the high-blooded steed

The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed.

Love is an ocean with such a vast space

No wise man can swim it in any place.

A true lover should be faithful till the end

And face life’s reprobated trend.

When you see things hideous, fancy them neat,

Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet.

(K. Habibi, 1967)

Once a religion approaches ritual stagnation and an internal logical or rationalistic phiosophy evolves, mysticism inevitably arises. Laymen, whether intellectuals or non-literate, often find the monotonous regularity of the ritual and the maddeningly simple one-two-three-four of the logic fail to yield spiritual satisfaction. Men wish to know the Supreme Being as a personal, not an impersonal, god, but orthodoxy usually tends to be abstract and impersonal. In Islam a number of mystical orders arose to satisfy this need: the Sufi, or Tasawwuf.

The term Sufi probably-derives from the Arabic suf (wool) and refers to the wearing of woolen robes (iabs-ai-suf) by early (and often later) Sufi ascetics.

The Sufi orders usually did not pretend to replace orthodoxy, but offered a way to seek the Supreme Being through personal experience (ma’rifat) and to achieve momentary union with God, thus, in general, rejecting knowledge (‘jim), rational and theoretical. Sufi seekers often sound superficially like agnostics, or, with their emphasis on personal experience, like existentialists. They are different, however, in that they not only seek, but they find God. Actually, Sufism embodies only a few ideas (the unity of mankind; predestination; the possibility of momentary union of man with God), but the personal experience of Sufis suggests multitudinous varieties of poetic expressions to describe and define their experiences. ‘The continual efforts to coin new poetic phrasings at least partly account for the many philosophical contradictions found in Sufi literature.

Almost all the founders of the Sufi orders and philosophies turned to Sufism after reaching the limits of rational knowledge and finding their search for the Truth still unfulfilled.

Abti Ismail ‘Abd Allah ibn Mohammad-al Ansari, - known commonly as Sheikh-ul-Islam-Khwajah (religious titles) Abdullah Ansari, or the Pir of Herat, was born in Quhandiz, a quarter of old Herat, in about A.D. 1005 and died in the same city about A.D. 1088. Ansari poetically expresses his pilgrimage from orthodox theology to mysticism, and this excerpt demonstrates the odyssey from the unknown to the known, then a new reliance on the mystical:

From the unmanifest I came,

And pitched my tent, in the Forest of Material existence.

I passed through

Mineral and vegetable kingdoms,

Then my mental equipment

Carried me into the animal kingdom;

Having reached there I crossed beyond it;

Then in the crystal clear shell of human heart

I nursed the drop of self into a Pearl,

And in association with good men

Wandered round the Prayer House,

And having experienced that, crossed beyond it;

Then I took the road that leads to Him,

And became a slave at His, gate;

Then the duality disappeared

And I became absorbed in Him.

(J. Singh, 1939, 19—20)

In common with mystics in most religions, Sufis believe in the oneness of man with God. or. as succinctly put by G. M. Wickens (1953, 159—60) the souls exile from its maker and its inborn longing, nourished or surpressed in the face of other attractions, to return and lose itself in Him." Because of this, orthodox Muslim religious leaders initially declared Sufi thinking heretical. Sufis were persecuted and sometimes executed, but the piety, austerity, passion, and personal participation inherent in Sufi ritual kept the orders alive. Eventually orthodoxy tolerated Sufism so long as its followers accepted orthodoxy in matters of religious law, and Sufism became grafted on to the religious body of Islam. Today few Muslims escape its impact and ideas.

To achieve this momentary union with God, the Sufi must create the proper atmosphere. Some achieve this with repeated prayers and chants; some with artificial stimulants, including drugs; some by meditation. The Mawlawiya order of. Rumi (the so-called "Whirling Dervishes") produce ecstasy with their whirling dances. Thus, the Sufi can seek God in individual or group ecstasy. But all Sufis resort to poetry during their trips.

Persian, the court language of the Moghul Empire, found its Indian master in Mirza Abdul Qadir Beidel, born in Patna (A.D. 1644) and died in Delhi (A.D. 1720). His family had come from Turkestan, and he maintained lifetime contacts with Sufis in the Afghan—Persian world.

The following is an example of his poetry, and is the first Ghazal from his Diva,i, or compiled works.

Only humility can bring you to the high seat of God.

Bow down just a hair, and before Him wear proudly your hat.

The solemn palace of love cannot permit joking gestures.

The eyes, like dew, should receive the seal of a dab of tears.

Non-existence has an image and a world of its own.

Realities are sometimes created in the footprints of passersby.

No One could help rid me of my dual self.

I lowered my head and took refuge in my solitary, inner self.

Vain was my search for Joseph in lust’s land of Canaan.

Perhaps I, too, should go into myself and dig a well inside.

If, within your heart flows the never-ending blessing of morning light,

Your days will never know darkness, though all existence turns into night.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

The sixteenth, seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries produced many Afghan poets, as literacy increased in the upper classes, but the political situation militated against great poetry being written during most of the time, particularly in Persian. Among the more famous Afghan poets writing in Persian were Kahi (born in Kabul, studied in Herat, died in India in A.D. 1577); Abul-Faizi Hazr.~t (a seventeenth-century poet from Badakhshan); Sa’aduddin Ansari of ‘Kabul, a seventeenth-century Sufi poet.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century A.D. tribal leaders in the Afghan area wrote extensive poetry, just as did many European monarchs of the same period. The first great Durrani emperor, Ahmad Shah Durrani (A.D. 1747—73: period of rule) wrote great Pashto and occasional passable Persian poetry. He wrote:

By blood, we are immersed in love of you.

The youth lose their heads for your sake.

I come to you and my heart finds rest.

Away from you, grief clings to my heart like a snake.

I forget the throne of Delhi

When I remember the mountain tops of my Pushtun land.

If I must choose between the world and you,

I shall not hesitate to claim your barren deserts as my own.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

Shah Shuja, grandson of Ahmad Shah Durrani, left behind a collection of poetry, as did his father, Timur Shah.

Several nineteenth-century Afghan poets writing in Persian deserve mention. Mehrdel Khan Mashriqi, brother of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan, patterned his poetry after the ancient classics. For example:

My perpetual pain is the source of my bliss.

My miseries are my Id festivals.

My love, have a few more rounds of wine.

It will quench your last night’s thirst.

All the cups of the world are filled, the roofs of nine skies sag

How long will the clouds of my eyes keep pouring?

A jug of wine on my shoulder, a cup in my hand,

Can the wise man forgive the repeated folly of youth?

o morning breeze, tell my love, whose Christ-like lips give life,

That, although I live, 1 am away from her, and thus foolhardy am I.

Mehrdel has a breast tatooed with arrow wounds.

His red tears are witnesses to his love.

(Translated by S. Shpoon)

A political exile, Ghulam Mohammad Tarzi, a noted poet and epigrapher, excelled in shekast (literary, shekastah), or broken-line poetry, written in his own beautiful script on specially treated paper. In a period when family names were almost unheard of in Afghanistan, he chose "Tarn" (meaning "stylist") as his pen name. Actually, some collateral members claim that his father, Rahmdel Tarzi, used the term first Ghulam Mohammad Tarn was a nephew of Mashriqi.

Oral epic poetry has long existed in Afghanistan, but few examples haye been written down. In the mid-nineteenth century Hamid of Kashmir (then a part of Afghanistan), wrote a long narrative concerning the first Anglo-Afghan War (which he entitled the A kbar-Namah), a highly imaginative and, on the whole, relatively accurate poem.

The body of the nineteenth-century Muslim modernist, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) lies buried on Kabul University grounds under a magnificent shrine. His role as Islamic reformer has recently been challenged by several specialists (S. G. Haim, 1962; Keddie, 1962, 1965, 1968; Kedourie, 1966), Keddie, in her latest work, takes a much more balanced view than Kedourie, however. He used his religion for political purposes (a legitimate exercise in any non-literate, tradition-ridden society); he may have considered all organized religions to be bad, and at times revealed a tendency toward agnosticism. But effective, non-violent change can occur only when the innovators work within cultural patterns. Therefore, al-Afghani, Mohammad Abduh (his chief disciple), and their modernist successors should not be considered "subverters" (Kedourie, 1966, 63) of the essence of Islam, but rather antagonists to the perpetuators of a traditionalist. orthodox, derived from a manmade, not divinely inspired. Shari’at. For an excellent balanced short discussion, see Kenny (1966) and A. Ahmad (1969), both of whom agree that al-Afghani used religion "as an instrument for the achievement, of pre-eminently political goals" (Kenny, 1966, 20).

Pashto as a literature tends to get short shrift even in Afghanistan. In his excellent survey of Islamic Literature, (1963), Najib Ullah (Afghan scholar and diplomat, whose last name was Toraviana) almost completely neglected Pashto: However, two recent volumes deal exclusively with the Divan (collected poetry) of Khushal Khan Khattak (Howell and Caroe 1963: D. Mackenzie. 1965).

The authenticity of the Puteh-Khazaneh, published in Qandahar in 1749 and claiming to contain several eighth- and ninth-century poems, has been recently questioned (Wilber, 1967, 412). No matter, for Pashto literature does not come into its own until the seventeenth century, but then seems to move along at a relatively uninspired pace until the twentieth century.

The two great seventeenth-century Pushtun poets were Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba.

Khushal (1613-90) epitomizes the Pushtun warrior-poet, the ideal personality type in Afghan culture. Although constantly at war with other Pushtun or the Moghuls, the Khattak chieftain constantly found beauty in nature and man. English translations of his poetry tend to vary with time periods and individual translators. Here, for example, are three translations of one of Khushal’s great poems: Adam Kheleh Afridei ("The Maidens of the Adam Khel Afridi").

C. Biddulph (1890, 98) gave the verses a Victorian touch:

The Adamkheyl Afridee maidens are red and white;

Many and varied are the charms that are theirs,

Great large eyes, long eyelashes, broad eyebrows,

Sugar-lipped, rosy-cheeked, moon-like foreheads,

Tiny mouths like a Rose-bud, even teeth;

Their heads girt with dark tresses, fragrant as Amber,

Their skins as smooth as ivory, bare of hair;

Straight their figures, like Alif; fair their complexions.

Like the Hawk has been my flight along the mountains,

Many a partridge there has been my prey;

The Hawk, whether young or old, seeks its quarry,

But the swoop of the old Hawk is the most unerring.

0! of Lundi’s streams the water and of Ban,

Is sweeter to my mouth than any Sherbet.

The Peaks of the Matari Pass rise straight up to the heavens,

In climbing, climbing upward, one’s body is all melted.

I came to the Adamkheyls in Tirah,

Then I parted with them at Khwarrah with sad heart.

Love’s troubles are like fire, Khush-hal,

What though the flame be hidden, its smoke is seen.

One of the world’s great contemporary Pashto scholars, D. Mackenzie, rendered the poem (1965, 91):

The Adam Khel Afridi maids

Are both rosy and fair;

Among them there are many beauties

With every kind of charm.

With great bright eyes, long curling lashes

And eyebrows arched and wide,

With honey lips and rosy cheeks

And foreheads like the moon;

With tiny mouths like budding roses

And teeth even and white,

Their heads all clad in blackest tresses

Fragrant as ambergris;

Their bodies smooth as any egg,

Without a trace of hair,

Their feet petite, with rounded heels,

Their haunches plump and wide;

Their stomachs slim, their bosoms broad,

Their waists perfectly narrow,

Their figures straight as letter "I"

And shining silver-white.

Although I wander. like a hawk,

About the barren hills

Many a pretty little partridge

Has fallen prey to me.

Young and unskilled, or old and sly,

A hawk always seeks prey,

And an old hawk’s stoop is surer

Than that of a young bird.

Either the waters of Landdai

Or the Bara stream

Taste sweeter, more refreshing both,

Than sherbet in my mouth.

The peaks that flank Matari pass

Rise straight up to the sky;

In climbing, ever climbing them

One’s angles soon gain strength.

I came into Tirah country.

Among the Adam Khels;

Now, sad at heart, I’ve taken leave

Of all these gentle souls.

All love’s affairs are well portrayed

By fire, 0 Khushal:

Although you cover up its flames

The smoke will still be seen.

The final, shortened, version is by Bowen (1966, 79), an army officer who served along the frontier in the waning days of empire

The Lasses of the Adam Khel,

As every lover knows,

Are delicately coloured-like

The petals of a rose;

My Love a snowy partridge is,

Who chooses winter time

To seek among the stony fells

A cloak of silver rime.

My Love, my Bird. remember that

A hawk, when he grows old,

Becomes more subtle in the chase,

His stoop becomes more bold:

Surrender then to me, for though

I seem no longer young,

The fervour of my love will taste

Like honey on your tongue.

I think the contrasting translations are instructive from both the points of view of English and Afghan personality types and values.

Khushal could never be accused of modesty (certainly not a modern Pushtun personality trait either) when he wrote:

When Khushal first began to write

Poetry in his mother tongue

He gave the Pashto language much

Of beauty that it lacked before

(D. Mackenzie 1965, 59)

Khushal Khan Khattak was a political as well as a poetic animal. The following poem shows his feelings toward his chief Moghul antagonist, Aurangzeb:

Ra ma’lum shu da Aurang ‘adl u insaf

I know all that I want to know

Of Aurangzeb’s justice and right,

The orthodoxy of his faith

And his devotional retreats;

His brothers german, one by one,

All put to death at his command,

His father overcome in battle

And flung into a prison cell.

Although a man prostrate himself

With face to earth a thousand times,

Or bring his navel to his spine

By dint of fasting endlessly,

As long as he does not intend

To act justly and righteously

His adorations and devotions will be of no avail to him.

May he whose tongue travels a road

Quite different from that of his heart

Suffer the torments of the damned,

His vitals be ripped by the knife.

The serpent outwardly appears

Handsome in body, sleek and lithe,

But inside it harbors all kinds

Of venom and impurity.

A brave man’s he whose deeds are many

And whose words modest and few;

From cowards one seldom sees deeds

But boasts enough for twenty men.

Although Khushal is powerless

To reach the tyrant here and now,

On the Day of Resurrection

May God not grant him His grace!

(D. Mackenzie, 1965, 66)

Khushal subtly thrusts at narrow religious leaders and beliefs:

‘Arif sarhai haghe dai...

The knowing, the perceptive man

Is he who knows about himself,

For in self-knowledge and insight

Lies knowledge of the Holiest.

If in his heart there is no fear,

His deeds are not those of the good,

Pay no heed to the one who’s skilled

In quoting the Koran by heart.

The wrongful actions of the self

Are a misfortune in your home:

If you’re not Satan to yourself

Noother Satan need you fear.

Abandon greed and leave desire,

Covet no thing or person more,

Then you will need no other name-

You’ll name yourself the king of men.

Unless God set him on the way

Talking alone will not suffice,

Even if He should resurrect

The Sage Luqman to be his guide.

Jesus, by means of miracles,

Gave blind men power to see again,

But in this life no single fool

Was made a wise man by his prayers.

Although he has nothing but this,

Let him not grieve if he be wise:

Khushal Khattak will swear to it,

The wise man need have no regret.

(D. Mackenzie, 1965, 98—99)

 Of Pushtun character, Khushal Khan Khattak was very perceptive. He recognized the destructiveness of the tribal schisms on potential Pushtun (Pathan) unity:

Of the Pathan that are famed in the land of Roh,

Now a days are the Mohmunds, the Bangash, and the Warrakzais, and the Afridis.

The dogs of the Mohmunds are better than the Bangash,

Though the Mohmunds themselves are a thousand times worse than the dogs.

The Warrakzais are the scavengers of the Afridis,

Though the Afridis, one and all, are but scavengers themselves.

This is the truth of the best of the dwellers in the land of the Pathans,

Of those worse than these who would say that they were men?

No good qualities are there in the Pathans that are now living:

All that were of any worth are imprisoned in the grave.

This indeed is apparent to all who know them.

He of whom the Moghuls say, "He is loyal to us,"

God forbid the shame of such should be concealed!

Let the Pathans drive all thought of honor from their hearts:

For these are ensnared by the baits the Moghuls have put before them.

(C. Biddulph, 1890, 119)

A consummate warrior, Khushal nevertheless did not neglect his sex-life:

Leka badzen die halwa khwri

As a greedy man eats sweetmeats

The lover takes his queen’s fair mouth.

Let none take him to task for it,

For he consumes only his own.

I’d. always taste her sugary lips

Though other men eat quails and manna.

Both her breasts are round as pears

Fit only for kings to taste.

There is no bravery in him

Who’ll let the sword fall on his neck.

The lover dies thus at your hand

And still swears by his love for you!

When does a hungry man pay heed

To whether what he eats is lawful?

Take her mouth, Khushal, in secret;

The falcon steals flesh from the game.

(D. Mackenzie, 1965, 199)

But, politically or sexually, Khushal Khan Khattak was indeed, as he put it:

My sword I girt upon my thigh

To guard our nation’s ancient fame;

Its champion in this age am I,

The Khatak Khan, Khushhal my name!

(Howell and Caroe, 1963)

Raliman Baba, a contemporary of Khushal Khan Khattak, was more mystic than warrior. But his mysticism, born, of Sufism, also touches the Pushtun cultural essence. Not so proud and fiercely militant as

Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba continually warned the ambitious and proud of their base earthly origin:

Live not with thy head showing in the clouds,

Thou art by birth the offspring of this earth.

The stream that passed the sluice cannot again flow back,

Nor can again return the misspent time that sped.

Consider well the deeds of the good and bad,

Whether in this thy profit lieth or in that.

(Translated by Qazi Sarwar)

A major three-volume work on modern Pashto literature, written by a noted Pushtun poet, Abdul Rauf Benawa (1961-62, 1967-68), covers Pushtun writers on both sides of the Durand Line, and includes such well-known poets as Sayyid Mian Rasul Rasa (a Pakistani diplomat with long service in Kabul, now Director, Pashto Academy, Peshawar University) and Ghani Khan (son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi). Some of the younger poets deal with modern social and political themes, breaking’ the traditional rhyming and rhythmical rules, but many still follow the old forms.

An interesting non-rhyming form, landay, exists in the Pushtun areas of Afghanistan and West Pakistan. Both men and women compose and sing Ianday, as well as knowing hundreds of traditional couplets, passed on from generation to generation (Shpoon, 1968). The first. line of the Ianday must have nine syllables, the second thirteen. Below are a few examples.

Your face is a rose and your eyes are candles;

Faith! I am lost. Should I become a butterfly or a moth?

(Benawa, 1958)

My beloved returned unsuccessful from battle;

I regret the kiss I gave him last night.

(Benawa, 1958, 42)

In addition to the landay, three other types of Pashto folk songs are popular: kakarri gharri (also called do bun zhaghuna and da chin khalo taki), couplets with eight syllables on each line, sung by both men and women; atann (varied styles), three lines with 11-7-l1 syllabic scheme, sung only by women; sharora (also called babulala and khorsadi), three lines with 8-8-8 syllabic scheme, sung only by women. Many traditional songs exist; others are composed spontaneously.

If you don’t wield a sword, what else will you do?

You, who have suckled at the breast of an Afghan mother!

(Benawa, 1958, 36)

Shame on you, old man.

Don’t wink at me.

Are you drunk With hashish?

(Sphoon, personal communication, 1970)

Give me two things.

Then let the British come.

A gun to fight with that won’t jam.

A girl to fight next to who will love.

(Sphoon, personal communication, 1970)

Call it romance, call it love,

You did it.

I’m tired now, pull up the blanket.

I want to sleep.

(Sphoon, personal communication, 1970)

An anonymous poem quoted by Bowen (1968, 98) serves as a fitting end to this rapid survey of themes in Pashto poetry:

A Pat han Warrior’s Farewell

Beloved, on a parchment white

With my heart’s blood to thee .1 write;

My pen a dagger, sharp and clean,

Inlaid with golden damascene,

Which I have used, and not in vain,

To keep my honor free from stain.

Now, when our house its mourning wears,

Do not thyself give way to tears:

Instruct our eldest son that I

Was ever anxious thus to die,

For when Death comes the brave are free-

So in thy dreams remember me.

Turkic-speakers in Afghanistan have mainly oral traditions, but during the fifteenth century, a great Chagatai and Uzbaki Turkic literature grew up in Turkestan. The greatest writer, Au Sher Nawai, was born in Herat (A.D. 1440), but traveled widely throughout the area. Nawai died in A.D. 1501 and lies buried in Herat in a plain, unadorned tomb. A large statue of him exists in Tashkent, capital of Uzbakistan S.S.R. The Turkish writing of the period modeled itself after the Persian, and All Sher Nawai wrote fluently in both Persian and Chagatai Turkic, but constantly championed Turkic over Persian.

The novel as found in the West is rare in flue Middle East and virtually unknown in Afghanistan. One well-known leftist journalist, Nur Mohammad Taraki, is considered to be a budding Persian-language novelist, however. Prose-writing usually concerns history, social problems, culture, religion, and, increasingly, current politics. However, much of this prose tends to use poetic imagery, even in letters to editors in local newspapers.

Among the better-known modern historians, essayists, and journalists (usually also poets and unless indicated otherwise, mainly Persian writers),

one must include

Mahmud Beg Tarzi,

Ghulam Muhayuddin Afghan,

Maulawi Saleh Mohammad,

Abdul Hadi Dawi,

Ahmad Au Kohzad and his younger brother, Mohammad Nabi Kohzad,

Said Qassim Rishtya,

Abdul Rahman Pazhwak,

Salauddin Seljuki,

Fikri Seljuki,

Osman Sidqi (Ambassador to China),

Abdul Hal Habibi (President of the Afghan Historical Society),

Professor Mohammad Ali,

Mohatnmad Din Zhwak (mainly Pashto),

Habibullah Tegai (mainly Pashto),

Mohammed Hassan Sapai (mainly Pashto),

Sayyid Ihsanullah Hir (mainly Pashto),

Mohammad Qadir Taraki.

Among the more important twentieth-century Afghan poets are

(D = Dari; P = Pashto)

Akbar Nadim (D; died in 1916);

Abdul Mi Mustaghni (PD; died in 1934);

Abdul Kader Bedel (D; very influential on younger poets);

Abdullah Qari (D; poet laureate; died in 1944);

Abdul Haq Beitab (D; became poet laureate in 1942; died in 1969);

Khalilullah Khalili (D; currently Ambassador to Iraq);

A. R. Pazhwak (DP; former President of the U.N. General Assembly, 1966-67);

Abdul Rauf Benawa (P);

Gul Pacha Ulfat (P);

Sayyid Shamsuddin Majruh (P);

Ghulam Ghana Khaibari (P);

Mohammad Ghulam Ningrahari (P);

Najiba Nazhand (D; woman);

Abdullali Bakhtanai (P);

Zia Qarizada (D; a leading experimenter);

Mohammad Thrahim Khalil (D; writes memorial verses for tombs);

Mohammad Asef Suhail (D);

Aziz Rabman Mamnoon (P);

Mahjuba Herawi (D; woman);

Qasim Wajid (D);

Mahmud Farani (PD; the major expenimenter);

Wasif Bakhtari (D);

Mohammad Rahim El-Ham (PD);

Saduddin Shpoon

(P for poetry; D for prose).

Other important critics and poets include

Abdul Hamid Makhmoor (D; died in 1964);

Goya Etsinadi (D; died in 1968);

Shayeq Jamal (D);

Karim Nazihi (D);

Haider Zhobal (D);

Sulaiman Layeq (PD; a well-known leftist journalist).

It must, however, be remembered that most Afghans still do not have access to their literate culture. The 5 to 10 percent literate Afghans are generally a remarkable group. Most speak not only their mother tongue, but one or more other Afghan languages, and more often than not at least one Western or non-Afghan Eastern language. Comnonly, one meets Afghan officials speaking five languages: Dari, Pashto, English, French or German, and Urdu. A small numbex trained in Japan before World War II speak Japanese. Some now speak Russian. A few speak Chinese, having been to the People’s Republic of China as exchange students. Afghans usually speak non-Afghan languages with little trace of an accent.

French was the non-Afghan lingua franca among the intelligentsia before World War II, but now English dominates. Russian slowly increases in importance, and some signs (barber shops, general stores, tailors, etc.) announce their services in both English and Russian, as well as Farsi or Pashto or both.

Afghans with advanced education obtained outside their homeland often complain of the inadequacy of Farsi and Pashto for modern technology. Foreign technical terms are sometimes introduced into everyday conversation, but not to the extent one finds in Pakistan and India, where a welter of linguistic diversity makes Afghanistan seem a sea of simplicity and forces the elite to use English as a medium of communication.

National ethnic pride often encourages attempts to modernize a language, and the Afghans have a Pashto Academy (Pashto Tolaney), directed by Sadiqullah Rishtin, which systematically purges foreign words and replaces them with Pashto, often inventing new compound Pashto words as replacements. The simple term "rocket," for example, becomes torghunday, "a black mound which flies up in the sky."

In spite of efforts by the several innovators previously mentioned, the general state of modern Afghan literature can only be described as sterile and unimaginative. Probably the main reason relates to the mutual antagonism between Dari and Pashto writers, with growing discontent among the few Turkic authors. The groups salter from combined superiority-inferiority complexes, and blame each other for the current, malaise. The flood of quality and pulp Iranian Farsi literature further inhibits potential innovators. So Dari and Pashto writers suspiciously eye each other and the government eyes both groups, and modern Afghan writers sit in a cultural limbo, pens silent, as social, political, and economic reforms push ahead. The rise of the free press since 1966, however, could act as a catalytic impetus, and move Afghan authors, regardless of linguistic bias, toward the creativity of which they are capable.