Academic literature on the topic 'Pashtun tribalism'

The Rawshani movement is the first well-documented example of supra-tribal unification and subsequent successful integration of the movement’s leaders into the alien state structures. But by no means is it an isolated phenomenon in Pashtun history. Similar pattern of religion-motivated supra-tribal unification, which should be considered as a product of historical relationships of power, remerged inter alia during more recent crises in the Afghan history. Due to the volatile nature of the Afghan state fluctuating between tribalism and ethnic pluralistic participation, military and Islamic dimensions have always been of paramount importance for state-community relations where religion, tribalism and ethnicity were often the means of state’s control of social resistance and its vehicles. In the time of crises, religion-inspired militia-type independent military formations were able to challenge the might of the state and occasionally even initiate the incipient state formation opposed to the communal institutions and those of the old regime. When this community-based military activity went beyond the scope of traditional annual cycle of violence it often acquired a supra-tribal or ethnic and regional dimension, which was legitimised by the Islamic ideology and institutions. This article offers some directions towards making a calibration tool or even identifying a pattern that may be used as an epistemological paradigm that may provide a sense of orientation and bearing in the intricacies of a complex historical interaction between Pashtun Islam, tribes and state.

Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, the main centers of political and cultural gravity for the Pashtuns lay in India, where numerous Pashtuns migrated in pursuit of commerce and soldiery. Amid the cosmopolitan pressures of India and its alternative models of self-knowledge and affiliation, Pashtun elites elaborated a distinct idiom of “Afghan” identity. With the Afghans' absorption into the Mughal Empire, earlier patterns of accommodation to the Indian environment were overturned through the writing of history, whereby the Afghan past and present were carefully mapped through the organizing principle of genealogy. While the Afghan religious world was being reshaped by the impact of empire, in response, tales of expressly Afghan saints served to tribalize the ties of Islam. With the decline of Mughal power, the collective “Afghan” identity of the diaspora was transmitted to the new Afghan state, where the relationship of this tribal template of Afghan authenticity to the non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan remains the defining controversy of national identity.

L'Autore tratta di un'area di confine, che č insieme divisione statale e unione etnica e culturale. L'area di confine considerata č quella delle Aree tribali amministrate federalmente ("Federally Administered Tribal Areas - Fata"), che appartengono al Pakistan e sono a ridosso del confine con l'Afghanistan. Vengono descritte le specificitŕ politico-giudiziarie, economiche e produttive e commerciali, ma soprattutto la continuitŕ etnica con la parte afgana dell'oltreconfine. Le Fata hanno giocato sempre un ruolo notevole, ma soprattutto dall'invasione sovietica, con una notevole fuga di afgani, e quindi con la costituzione di campi di profughi nella parte pakistana. Ma soprattutto questa area, con capoluogo Peshawar, č stata il punto di riferimento di nuovi gruppi religiosi/ integralisti islamici formati intorno alle, appoggiati da potenze come Stati Uniti, Arabia Saudita, Pakistan. Questi sono i talebani che poi sconfiggono i sovietici e in seguito assumono le connotazioni Al Qaediste e terroristiche. La dinamica dei relativi rapporti tra profughi e pashtun delle aree tribali viene svolta dall'Autore, mettendo in risalto i tentativi di spingere i tre milioni di profughi al rientro in Afghanistan. In questa logica ruolo fondamentale hanno gli Stati Uniti, il cambio politico del Pakistan, le Ong, l'Unhcr. Vengono altresě messi in risalto i caratteri organizzativi di queste tribů, con la sovrapposizione di tante(da quelle familiari a quella regionale), e i caratteri sociali della popolazione. Si conclude con un riferimento al futuro.

The main objective of this thesis is to analyse the relationship between tribalism and modernity in Afghanistan. Focusing on Pashtuns, who constitute the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, the thesis traces their transformation from a tribal confederacy into a central state that introduced modernity to Afghanistan. In this regard, the thesis is, basically, a discussion of the struggle for power between two institutions in Afghanistan: the tribe and the state. In an effort to reveal the relationship between the two, the thesis looks at the modern strategies and ideologies used by the Afghan state to beat the power of tribalism. Nationalism and Socialism, in this regard, come up as two modern ideologies that are discussed in relation to Pashtun Tribalism. Questioning the concepts of Afghan Nationalism and Pashtun Nationalism as well as their relation to Pashtun Tribalism, the thesis discusses the concept of a tribe within the frame of modern border demarcation, nation-building efforts and modernist reform programmes. Passing on to the discussion on Socialism, the thesis then addresses the question of tribe in relation to the idea of class struggle, a communist party, a modern coup d&rsquo
é
tat and a communist revolution. Contrasting the concept of tribe with such modern notions, the thesis finally reveals how tribalism managed to survive within these modern ideologies by articulating into them in various ways.

This chapter explores descriptions of Pashtun tribes and their religious predisposition in 20th century Urdu literature associated with strategic mobilization of the Pashtun regions, and highlights the inconsistency of this discourse with other twentieth-century nationalist projects in colonial India and Afghanistan. In the first instance, the 1914-36 writings of a group called the Jama‘at-i Mujahidin were at variance with the Pashtun and Muslim nationalist positions of the Khuda’i Khidmatgars and the Jamʻiyyat al-‘Ulama-yi Hind, and with the officially sanctioned geographies of the Afghan state. In the second instance, writings published in Pakistan during the period of the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad contradicted USAID- and Kabul-funded demographic and cartographic studies of the 1970s. Such descriptions of Pashtun religious predisposition, tribal valor, resistance and autonomy must be understood as intentional and disruptive interventions in knowledge production about, and political organization in, the Pashtun regions.