Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History

NILE GREEN

Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, themain 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 ofAfghan identity. With the Afghans absorption into the Mughal Empire,earlier patterns of accommodation to the Indian environment were overturnedthrough the writing of history, whereby the Afghan past and present were care-fully mapped through the organizing principle of genealogy. While the Afghanreligious world was being reshaped by the impact of empire, in response, talesof expressly Afghan saints served to tribalize the ties of Islam. With thedecline of Mughal power, the collective Afghan identity of the diaspora wastransmitted to the new Afghan state, where the relationship of this tribal tem-plate of Afghan authenticity to the non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistanremains the defining controversy of national identity.

Da watan omd me nahd show khodaya dzha kr_am

Rahmat band kram toru zulfu pa kashmr ksheAll hope has gone of returning homeNow these black curls have bound me to Kashmir

Rahmat Allah Daw, fl. ca. 1770

LOCATING AFGHAN HISTORY

THE AFGHAN DIASPORA IN India has generally been treated as separate from thegreater narrative of Afghan history (Halim 1974; Qanungo 1965; Siddiqi1971, 1982). Rather than seeing migration as a central characteristic of theAfghan past, work on the Indo-Afghans has been regarded as more properlya part of Indian than Afghan studies.1 Yet until at least the eighteenth century,

Nile Green (green@history.ucla.edu) is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles.1However, for studies of modern Afghan diasporas, see Alessandro Monsutti (2004) and ChristineStevens (1989). For India-centered studies of the mobile social world with which the Afghans inter-acted, see Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2003) and AndrWink (1990).

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 1 (February) 2008: 171211. 2008 Association of Asian Studies Inc. doi: 10.1017/S0021911808000065

it was among the Afghan courts and prosperous tribal settlements of India thatthe fulcrum of Afghan history was to be found as Afghans migrated from thenorthwest toward the greater opportunities of Hindustan. The diasporic commu-nities they founded in India are central to any study of Afghan history, for it wasamong them that there emerged the earliest historical works expressly devoted tothe Afghans, in this period effectively denoting (and consolidating) member-ship of the disparate Pashtun tribes.2 Marginalizing to the periphery of Afghanhistory the writings produced in India between the sixteenth and eighteenth cen-turies is, therefore, to risk turning the historiography of the Afghans on its head.For it was in this diaspora that many features of the Afghans sense of their his-torical identity crystallized, in terms of a sense of the defining limits between selfand the world that was stamped on the present through the heavy imprint ofthe past.

Taking shape in writings that were to influence successive generations ofAfghans, these definitions wrought weighty and durable casts of identity. Inwritten terms at least, the historical consciousness of the Afghans took shapein connection with the experience of migration to India and the encounterthere with forms of social, religious, and political organization that differedfrom their own, including larger-scale formationscosmopolitan and imperialthat shook the social foundations of these diffuse bands of tribesmen. Thoughsuch pressures could be contained during the period of Afghan political supre-macy in northern India under the Afghan Lod and Sur rulers of the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries, the Afghans defeat and gradual incorporation into theMughal state after 962/1555 brought a new urgency to questions of Afghanself-definition (cf. Arlinghaus 1988; Nichols 2001). Stretching from independentAfghan rule to defeat, incorporation, and the postimperial realignment of anAfghan people and its others, the period surrounding the Afghans encounter

2A few words on terminology may be necessary here. In this essay, the term Afghan is used in itsoriginal sense of referring to the Pashtuns and not the Hazaras, Uzbeks, Farsiwan, Aymaq, Arabs,Kuchis, and sundry other ethnic groups living in the territories of modern Afghanistan. In using theterm Afghan in this way, I expressly do not suggest that this limited ethnic remit be applied to themodern Afghan nation-state, even if for their part contemporary Pashtun nationalists do considerthe Pashtuns to be the only true Afghans. Though coeval with the processes explored later, thetroubled grafting of the term Afghan onto the modern framework of nationality has its own,later history and, as such, falls beyond the scope of this essay. Although I am aware of the discomfortof many anthropologists with the notion of the tribe, I have adopted the term here in its broadestsense to designate a social unit held together by an ideology of genealogy and common descent,especially one composed of corporate descent groups. I have used the term blessed man herealongside the more common term of Sufi saint. As used here, the term saint (wal) refers toa figure whose status has been sanctified through processes of shrine building, hagiographicalwriting, and ritual veneration (Green 2006a). The term blessed man (Green 2006b), however,refers to a man set apart from other men by his possession of supernatural blessing-power(barakat), which is typically used in partisan fashion to aid those who seek to become his protgs.Though all Muslim saints are, by definition, blessed men, not all blessed men have (yet) achievedthe architectural, literary, or ritual recognition to be regarded as saints.

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with the Mughal Empire may for these reasons be seen as the formative period ofAfghan history, both as process and conscience.

In all its wealth and complexity, it was India that was the setting for thisprocess of ethnogenesis, of the gradual differentiation and discovery of a collec-tive Afghan self from amid a plethora of other forms of identity. In examiningthese processes, this essay hopes to demonstrate the historical contingency ofthe Pashtun Afghans self-identification with the tribal system as it emerged inthe particular circumstances of their diaspora in India.3

Given the commentary that has accompanied the semantic expansion of theterm diaspora to include much that might sensibly be described as processes ofmigration (Brubaker 2005; Cohen 2001), it is with some deliberation that I havechosen this term. Certainly, the Indo-Afghans do not mirror such classic dia-sporas as the Jews of the Roman Empire or the African slaves of the Atlanticworld. Yet in different forms, such criteria as coercion, boundary maintenance,and diasporic consciousness were important features of the movement ofAfghan hill-dwellers to the plains of India. Fearsome inter-Afghan competitionfor grazing land among rival clans formed an important backdrop to resettlement,only after which is there evidence for the emergence of a consciousness of com-monality and community with other tribesmen as fellow Afghans. Ecologicalfactors also contributed to the affiliation of Afghans with the overland horsetrade and itinerant soldiering. Although we cannot point toward an agency ofone-sided oppression behind the Afghans migration, their movements werenonetheless inextricably bound to the violence of competition for pasture,trade, and military employment.

If I have generally refrained from employing the expression diaspora con-sciousness, this essay makes clear the importance of such a mentality to theformation of an Afghan historical identity. As we will see in the followingpages, the early histories of the Afghans represented an attempt to articulatean identity among categories drawn from the encounter between theAfghans own forms of social organization and the cosmopolitan environmentof India. The emergence of an emphasis on tribal affiliation over and againstother forms of social alignment and organization formed the most enduring

3The main primary sources used in this essay are Nimat Allah ibn Habb Allah Haraw, Tarkh-e-Khan JahanwaMakhzan-e-Afghan; Hafiz Rahmat Khan, Khulasat al-ansab; Rizq Allah Mushtaq,Waqiat-e-Mushtaq; Abbas Khan Sarwan, Tarkh-e-Sher Shah; and Ahmad Yadgar, Tarkh-e-Shah(Tarkh-e-Salatn-e-Afaghna). Partial or complete translations of several of these texts are alsoavailable. Bernhard Dorns History of the Afghans (182936) is a translation of a single manuscript(Ms. Persian LX in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London) of the early abridgement of theTarkh-e-Khan Jahan known as theMakhzan-e-Afghan; Nirodbhusan Roys Niamatullahs Historyof the Afghans (1958) is a more complete translation. I. H. Siddiquis Waqiat-e-Mushtaqui ofShaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui: A Source of Information on the Life and Conditions in Pre-MughalIndia (1993) and B. P. Ambashthyas Tarkh-i-er ah by Abbas Khan Sarwan (1974) are alsocomplete translations. However, wherever possible, I have relied on and given references to theoriginal Persian versions.

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and effective of boundary markers, structured as it appeared to be in the irre-futable fact of birth. In reality, of course, the tribal system was more fluid andabsorbent, a fact that Afghan genealogists would often wrestle with over thecenturies. The specific temporalities underlying the formation of this tribal atti-tude are explored in the later sections of this essay, founded as they were in thechanging political conditions that underwrote the repeated shifting of boundarymarking between the Afghans and their Indian environment. Though I have notattempted to overinterpret the data to reflect that other taxonomic hallmark ofa diasporathat is, homeland orientationit is fair to say that the Afghans inIndia did maintain a sense of their original homeland (watan). Its value,though, was regularly recalculated against an index of the Afghans changingfortunes in their diaspora.

Although movement from the early Pashtun habitats in the Sulayman moun-tains to the west of Punjab into the fertile plains below is probably as old as Indianhistory itself, the establishment of Afghan political power in north India duringthe fifteenth century reflected a protracted period of migration in whichPashtun tribal groups were able to establish sustainable settlements throughoutnorthern India, and later in the Deccan (Digby n.d.). Partly as a result of thepatronage of migrant warriors and partly as a result of migration strategies thatare as yet unclear, under the aegis of the Afghan Lod (855/1451932/1526)and Sur (947/1540962/1555) rulers, there emerged a large number of Afghansettlements across northern India (in Punjab in particular) with economic tiesto the land (Husain 1969; 1994, 118; Shafii 1929).4 Though in many casesmigration was a result of the prospect of military service, as we have noted,the search for agricultural or pastoral land was of similar importance. Thesefactors notwithstanding, it was the hugely profitable arms trade in horses thatplayed the pivotal role in Afghan migration and subsequent state formation(Digby n.d.; Gommans 1999, 68135). For like other migrant groups in India,large sections of the early Afghan communities in India constituted a trading dia-spora whose activities brought them into close contact with other trading groupswho had little familiarity with either the religious idiom of Islam or the socialmodel of the tribe.5

As a consequence of the success of these ventures, there emerged acrossnorthern India a class of Afghan notables characterized by its headmanship ofa fractured series of different clans for whom economic distractions were oftenmore powerful than the ideological drive toward collective identity (Rahim1961, 3458; Siddiqui 1977). At the same time, by dint of its very success,

4For a convincing new analysis of the Muslim settling process in medieval north India more gen-erally, see Simon Digby (2004).5The terms used in the sources that I have translated here as tribe vary and include tayifa, qabla,and asbat.Despite the popularity of the term tayifa in the early Persian texts referring to the Pash-tuns, particularly the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, in modern Pashto usage, the term qawm is generallypreferred.

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this elite class interacted with a cosmopolitan Persian-based (or Persianate)culture in India centered on the older model of the court, or darbar, and its plur-ality of participants.6 With the Indian conquests of the ethically Mughal (moghol,Mongolian) followers of Babur and Humayun, these cosmopolitan diversions ofAfghan culture were brought to an abrupt end by the business of politics. Despitea short-lived revival of Afghan power under the Sur dynasty, in 962/1555 theAfghans were finally displaced by the Mughals as the dominant ethnic groupin north India, and the Mughals subsequently developed an ethnically and reli-giously plural state structure in relation to which the Afghan tribal elite wasforced to redefine itself through accommodation or rebellion. Begrudgingly atfirst, increasing numbers of Afghan headsmen became servants of the new dis-pensation. However, their success was to vary considerably under differentMughal rulers as the Afghans vied for influence with the Persian (Iran),Central Asian (Turan), and Rajput factions of the imperial body politic (Joshi1985, 120).

THE COSMOPOLITANISM CONTRADICTIONS OF ISLAM IN INDIA

An inescapable feature of premodern Muslim societies was the presence ofthe Sufi blessed men whose embodiment of affection and knowledge hadthe potential to bring them the following of any number of individuals fromtheir surrounding societies, which ranged from sophisticated urban settings toclosed worlds of the mountain or lowland village (Green, forthcoming). Theirfunctions and significance were manifold, but central to their near universalitywas the way in which they served to embody local readings of an Islamic moralorder in the daily facts of life within their constituencies. Through their miracles,wrathful or benevolent, divine justice was seen to enter the social world, while asmediators and preceptors they frequently served to mortar the fissures in individ-ual and group relations (Dupree 1979; Green 2006b). The capacity of theseblessed men to create networks of affiliation transcending and in some cases con-testing the bonds and barriers of kin-based formulations of community served asone of the principal means by which the Afghans were able to connect andembed themselves in the Indian world. Their structures of affiliation deliberatelytranscending ties of kinship and ethnicity, Sufi networks formed an effectivemeans of social mediation and, indeed, reconfiguration; Sufi affiliations thus rep-resented an important register of the formation of social relations with the worldbeyond kin. Many of these functions were shared by both living and dead saintswho, through various institutional, theological, and commemorative mechanisms,provided one another with mutual support.

6Matsuo Ara (1982) has argued that the great proliferation of funerary architecture under thepatronage of the Indo-Afghans reflected the horizontal distribution of power among an acephaloustribal elite.

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We see these processes at work during the period of Afghan preeminence innorth India of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. For the impression thatemerges from the histories of the Lod and Sur period is one of the extensiveintegration of the Afghans into the Indian social and religious world. Althoughall written after the events they describe, such histories as the Waqiat ofRizq Allah Mushtaq (d. 981/1581) and the Tarkh-e-shah of Ahmad Yadgar(fl. 157276) present the Afghans as having ties to numerous Sufi saints, livingand dead, who were similarly revered by the non-Afghan groups around themin India. Surviving documentation of wajh-e-maash and wajh-e-amlak landgrants similarly presents the Afghan notables as keen patrons of non-AfghanSufis and their shrines during the heyday of Lod and Sur rule (Siddiqi 1972).In many cases, this amounted to the patronage of a preexisting sacred geography,particularly shrines of members of the Chisht Sufi order, which was earlierassociated with the Afghans political predecessors in Hindustan.7 Inevitably,most of the evidence concerns the Afghan elite, but we can probably assumethat with the vast plethora of saints and preceptors who were conceptually,if not necessarily practically, affiliated with the Sufi orders (turuq) in north India,there was even greater accommodation to the Indian environment furtherdown the social scale. Such supraethnic affiliations with non-Afghan saintsshow how the idiom and networks of the Sufis were able to transcend differencesbetween Muslim groups and create new kinds of social and intellectual ties.Because such extended ties were also politically expedient, north Indias invaderswere repeatedly keen to show their devotion to the tombs of the saints. When theLods were routed by Babur in 932/1526, his first act on entering Delhi was tocircumambulate (tawaf) the tomb of the Chisht saint Nizam al-dn Awliya(d. 725/1325) before going on to visit the shrine of Qutb al-dn Bakhtiyar(d. 633/1235) that had earlier been favored by the Afghans (Zain Khan 1982,92). For the same reason, during the quarter-century Afghan interregnumafter the ousting of Humayun in 963/1554, Shah Sher made a pilgrimage tothe shrine of Mun al-dn Chisht at Ajmer; his Mughal successors later followedhis example assiduously.

It would be an exaggeration of political expediency to see the numerous landgrants bestowed on non-Afghan Sufis by the Afghan rulers and their notablessolely in this way. The universalizing idiom of the Sufis was clearly attractive inits own right, not least to the learned and cultivated likes of Masnad-e-AlKhawwas Khan (d. 958/1551), the chief courtier of the Afghan ruler SikandarLod (r. 894/1489923/1517).8 Sikandar himself was also a patron of numerous

7The founder of the Lod dynasty, Buhlul Lod, was possibly buried at the tomb of the early Chishtsaint Nasir al-dn Chiragh-e-Dihl (d. 757/1356). On the debate over the identification of this tomb,see Ara (1982) and Digby (1975b).8Appropriately, in the centuries after his assassination, Khawwas Khans tomb in Delhi came to beregarded as a saintly shrine in its own right.

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Sufis, including the immigrant Syrian Qadir Sufi, Muhammad Ghaws, whosettled in Uchch before dying there in 1517 (Trimingham 1971, 97).9 Amongthe numerous non-Afghan Sufis associated with the courts of the Lods andSurs, perhaps the most important was Abd al-Quddus Gangoh (d. 944/1537).Abd al-Quddus drew numerous disciples from the Afghans of the Sur court,and it seems likely that although some of these associations were primarily ofa devotional nature, others were of a more political kind (Digby 1975a). Animportant power broker in the Jawnpur region, Abd al-Quddus addressedseveral letters to well-placed Afghan notables of the Sarwan clan, as well as aletter to Sikandar Lod.10 Though of a moralizing nature, and written by a Sufiwho was frequently critical of those in state service, the correspondence none-theless reflects the two-way traffic of patronage and piety, for in 1491, Abdal-Quddus received a land-grant from the Afghan notable Umar Khan Sarwan,and similar grants were later accepted by members of his family (Khan 1977, 80).We also know of other Afghan notables becoming disciples of non-Afghan saints;such was the Afghan soldier and follower of Abd al-Quddus, Dattu Sarwan(fl. 95354/154647), who left an autobiographical record of his associationswith a range of Sufis (Digby 1964). Shaykh Al BatnMizyan, the paternal grand-father of the Afghan historian Shaykh Kabr Hayza, was another Afghan warriorin Sur service who exchanged the field of battle for the life of the dervish wayfarerby handing his sword over to Sher Shah (Shaykh Kabr, f. 10811). Shaykh AlBatn was a devotee of Shaykh Maruf, a Sufi in the lineage of Raj HamidShah Manikpur, while the historians maternal grandfather Khall Allah Batnwas a follower of Mr Sayyid Manjhan Rajgr, the author of the hybrid Sufipoem in the Hindw language, Madhumalat, that brought a Sanskritic cycle oftales of romance into an interpretive framework of Sufi theology (ShaykhKabr, f. 197v).

The blessed men pictured as affiliated with the Afghans in the Waqiat ofMushtaq and the other historians of the Lods and Surs belonged to a muchwider Indian world than that delimited by formations of kinship, presentingthe Afghans as multiply connected to the cultural and ethnic mosaic of northIndia.11 Mushtaq recorded an aetiological legend of the kind associated withmany other Indo-Muslim rulers in which the emergence of Afghan rule under

9This figure is not to be confused with the more celebrated Muhammad Ghaws of Gwalior, who inany case pitched his fortunes in with the Mughals by praying for the downfall of the last AfghanLod ruler, Ibrahm Lod. With Baburs conquest of Delhi shortly afterward, Muhammad Ghawsof Gwalior was given a handsome reward for his supernatural wager. See Scott Kugle (2007, 163).10With the end of Afghan rule, Abd al-Quddus cultivated links with the Mughals, writing letters toboth Babur and Humayun. On Abd al-Qudduss relationship with contemporary politics, see Digby(2003) and I. A. Khan (1977). Despite the saints connections with the Afghans, it seems to havebeen Humayun who constructed his tomb shortly after his death in 944/1537.11Although Mushtaq was not an Afghan himself, he bore close family connections with the Lodrulers, and in his earlier career as an imam, he seems to have been patronized by notables of theAfghan Lod rulers (see Mushtaq, f. 37rf. 37v).

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the Lods was linked with the power of the Chisht saints. He described BuhlulLod (r. 855/1451894/1489) visiting the grave of Qutb al-dn Bakhtiyar Kak(d. 633/1235) in Delhi and spending an entire night on the eve of battle standingbare-headed in prayer beside the saints grave. When morning came, a myster-ious figure appeared from the world of the unseen (mard az ghayb, presumablythe saint himself), handed Buhlul a wooden stick (chub), and commanded him toset off. After the ensuing battle, Buhlul returned for more help in his campaign togain control over northern India, and the saint reassured him that he would lookafter his prayers (dua-ye-tu bar mast) (Mushtaq, f. 6vf. 7r).

The story is striking in placing the earliest Afghan ruler in India in a relation-ship with a saintly figure whose cult and charisma was by no means limited to theAfghans but extended to each of north Indias successive rulers. An interestingparallel can be found in the Humayun-nama of the first Mughal emperorBaburs daughter, Gulbadan Begam (d. 1011/1603), which recounted a dreamthat the second emperor Humayun experienced after an unsettling encounterwith an envoy sent by his Afghan rival, Sher Shah. In the dream, a green-clad(sabz pushda) holy man appeared to encourage Humayun in his travails andto intimate victory by handing Humayun his staff (asa) (Gulbadan Begam1902, Persian text 4849, trans. 14446). The man then predicted the birth ofa son and heir, who should be named Akbar, who would, of course, becomethe most celebrated of all Mughal emperors, quite literally al-akbar, the great-est.Despite the similarity to Buhluls nocturnal encounter, what is striking aboutthis dream is its intimation of the ties between sainthood and kinship that Mush-taqs account lacks. For when Humayun politely asked the saint who he was, themysterious figure revealed himself as none other than Humayuns own Sufiancestor, Shaykh Ahmad (d. 536/1141) of Jam, the caravan town to the west ofthe old Timurid capital of Herat.12

Whether in life or in death, the operations of such blessed men were of a par-tisan nature, and Mushtaq also recalled the non-Afghan Sufi Shaykh Sama al-dn(d. 901/1495) blessing Buhluls son and heir, the Afghan ruler Sikandar Lod.Here again, a saint was seen to obliquely predict a youthful rulers rise topower, doing so in accordance with a commonplace topos that would havebeen instantly recognizable to all those familiar with the ways of the saints,whether Afghan or not. Mushtaqs account is worth citing in full:

When Buhlul died, all of the notables of Delhi wanted Miyan Nizam[i.e., Sikandar] to become king, so he set off from Delhi and went tosay farewell to Shaykh Sama al-dn. Miyan Nizam carried with him

12The renowned Khurasani Terrible Elephant (zhinda pl), Ahmad-e-Jam, was an ancestor ofHumayun on the side of his mother, Maham. In the dream, the saint also informed the emperorthat his heir, Akbar, would pointedly be of the saints lineage (az nasl-e-man khwahad shod)instead, presumably, of his paternal Tmur line. For more on Ahmad-e-Jam, see W. Ivanow (1917).

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a commentary on theQuran and took it with him to the shaykh. But he didnot reveal his political claims (dawa) to the shaykh, and simply made hissalaams, sat politely and asked the shaykh to teach him. The shaykh thenread the blessed fatiha and began teaching . When he finished, he said,Know that God will bring good fortune (nkbakht) in both worlds(sara). Miyan Nizam asked the shaykh to repeat these words, andhe said them again three times. Then Miyan Nizam hugged the book tohis side and asked to be dismissed. (Mushtaq, f. 13v)13

Clearly, saintly affiliations were capable of reifying or transcending preexistingsocial networks. For seen in this story is the sultans close connection with a saintfrom beyond the bounds of kinship.14 A similar story was told in the Tarkh-e-shah of Ahmad Yadgar, in which we read of Sikandar Lod enthusiasticallymeeting the famous Indian Sufi Jamal Dihlaw (d. 942/1536) upon the lattersreturn from his travels and of the Afghan ruler sending him an obsequiouslydevotional poem (Yadgar 1939, 4748; see also Nimat Allah 196062, 22427).Such relationships of emotional and soteriological fealty could also be tied inwith kinship and, as such, could be passed on through the generations, tying inperpetuity the big men of the Afghan tribes to the service of the softly spokensons of the saints. We have already seen how Jamals own master and father-in-law, Shaykh Sama al-dn, was closely connected with Sikandars father and pre-decessor as ruler of Hindustan, Buhlul Lod (Yadgar 1939, 34). According toJamal himself, Buhlul had visited Sama al-dn at his lodge, placing his head atthe Sufis feet and sitting formally before him (sar dar qadam-e-hazrat-e-ishannahad wa mutaqabil nashast) (Jamal 1311/1893, 178).

These narratives envisioned the Afghan rulers through the same historicalimagination that shaped the annals of other Indo-Muslim rulers belonging toother ethnic groups. For historians such as Yadgar and Mushtaq by nomeans presented the Afghans as a unique tribal community separated fromwider Indo-Muslim society by allegiances to their own exclusive saints, but asactive and enthusiastic participants in the cosmopolitan milieux of the shrineand court, which both appropriately shared the same nomenclature. LikeSikandar, we are also told by Mushtaq that the sultans brother Miyan Zabaral-dn counted many Sufis among his retinue, as well as the praise-singers andmusicians (qawwalan wa sazandagan) necessary for any goodly gathering ofSufi enthusiasts. Wrapped in the urbane customs of Delhi, on Thursday nights

13On the life of Sama al-dn, see the account of his son-in-law Jamal (1311/1893, 17184).14As a historical motif, the blessing of a king by a saint was nevertheless incredibly persistent. Twocenturies later, it was revived in Afghan circles when it was associated with the famous account ofAhmad Shah Abdal being crowned by a Sufi as ruler of all the Afghans (Ali 1963). Given the genea-logical links described earlier, it is perhaps also worth mentioning that Ahmad Shah Abdal tracedhis clan descent from one Abdal, who derived his name from that of the famous Sufi, Abu AhmadAbdal (d. 355/966).

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Zabar al-dn regularly hosted musical gatherings (mahfils) at the shrine of the pri-mordial saint of Muslim Delhi, Nizam al-dn Awliya (Mushtaq, f. 31vf. 32r).

These ties of the Afghan sultans to saints outside the networks of kinshipwere mediated by access to a Persian literary sphere that the Afghan eliteshared with other inhabitants of Hindustan. The court of Sikandar Lod was amajor center of literary production in Persian, encompassing works of poetry,musical theory, and medicine, as well as writings of a religious character (Husaini1988). Many among the latter were of an expressly Sufi kind, with the mostnotable among the literary-inclined Sufis attached to the court of SikandarLod being the aforementioned Jamal Dihlaw (Jamali-yi Dihlawi 2002; Latif1977). Like Amr Khusraw two centuries before him, Jamal straddled theroles of dervish and court poet, and among such writings as his hagiographicalSiyar al-arifn, he also composed a series of qasdas in praise of the successiverulers of north India.15 Like Abd al-Quddus, Jamal was circumspect (if alsorather more deferential) in this literary cultivation of friends in high places,and he addressed no fewer than seven qasdas to Sikandar before subsequentoccasion demanded that he compose a further dozen in deference to Baburand Humayun.16 As we have seen, Sikandar, in turn, expressed his devotion toJamal through the poetic medium of Persian.

Persian literary culture formed a common discursive ground that Sufi aco-lytes and enthusiasts could share, a cosmopolitan sphere promoting an ethic offraternity and worldly transcendence that should be carefully distinguishedfrom the embodied politics of the living Sufi and his partisan miracles and bles-sings. It is notable in this respect that the Lod period was one of the great ages ofPersian dictionary compilation, testament to the expansion of the Persian writtenworld among new groups of nonnative speakers. Several years after Sikandarsmeetings with Jamal, a notable of the Sur clan, Abd al-Rahm ibn Ahmad Sur(fl. 929/1519), abandoned the world to become a Sufi master in his own rightand gathered a considerable circle of followers. Showing the symbiotic relation-ship of the Sufi idiom to its Persian medium, the result of Abd al-Rahms spiri-tual endeavors was the compilation for his followers of a lexicon of Persianmystical terminology titled Kashf al-lughat (The Unveiling of Language). TheKashf al-lughat also reflects the literary efforts of the later Afghan saintly mem-orialist and follower of the Chisht Sufis, Abd Allah Khweshg (d. 1106/1694),who, after a sojourn in the Deccan in Mughal service, returned to his hometown of Qasur and spent his last years writing his Asrar-e-masnaw (Secrets ofthe Masnawi) to explain the meanings of the Persian poetry of Rum to theAfghan chiefs of the Khweshg clan. Whether through dictionaries or otherworks, with the flourishing of literary Persian under the Lods of the sixteenth

15Several of these poems have been published in the Oriental College Magazine (January1935, pp. 3637).16This flattery paid off, and Jamals son Shaykh Gada was later granted the office of sadr by Akbar.

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century, the devotional ties of Afghan tribesmen to nontribal Sufis were in manyways dependent on the mediation of the Persian written word. Shared writtenlanguages, and the shared moral and intellectual worlds to which they gaveaccess, were an important way of forging ties beyond those of kinship.

Boundary markers of either a religious or an ethnic kind do not seem to havebeen prominent in this courtly setting, in which linguistic and literary exchangeboth mapped and forged the cosmopolitan social networks of the court. As oneof Indias richest ages of literary cosmopolitanism, the period of Afghan rulewas not uniquely associated with Persian, and the Lod court also patronizedworks in Sanskrit. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, members of theruling Lod clan commissioned such Sanskrit texts as the Sulaimanccarita onthe lives of the Judeo-Muslim prophets Soloman/Sulayman and David/Daud,which with its courtly audience highlighted the story of Davids seduction (Min-kowski 2006). Of similarly broad appeal to men of taste and leisure was another ofthe Sanskrit works to appear under Lod patronage, Kalyana Mallas well-knownAnangaranga (Theater of Love), which would later attract the attention of thegreat Victorian cosmopolitan and erstwhile Sufi, Sir Richard Burton.

During the revival of Afghan rule under the Surs, the court contained notonly Sanskrit writers but also a number of important Hindwi poets, witnessingimportant literary test cases in the rise of the new vernacular. One such poetwas Shah Muhammad Farmul, who upon being asked why he would not writein Persian replied that because his beloved was Indian (hind) and could notunderstand Persian (pars), it was only proper that he should express his lovefor her in Hind (Shaykh Kabr, f. 146v; also cited in Siddiqi 1966, 74). It wasat the court of Islam Shah Sur (r. 952/1545961/1554) a few years later thatMr Sayyid Manjhan composed in Hindwi his hybrid Sufi romanceMadhumalat,with its heady concoction of Sufi symbols and Indic narrative (Manjhan 2000).Manjhans Awadhi dialect became closely connected with the Sur court, withMadhumalat only one of several Hindwi works patronized by its notables;it has recently been suggested that the Mughals subsequent patronage of Brajb-hasha literature reflected a deliberate rejection of the Awadhi style that theyregarded as too closely associated with the Afghans (Behl, forthcoming).17 TheSufi and historian of the Indo-Afghans, Rizq Allah Mushtaq, was himself agifted poet in Hindwi and used numerous Hindwi terms in his PersianWaqiat. An account in the early seventeenth-century Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan(The Khan Jahans History) about the Afghan saint Shaykh Isa Maswanlocated this Sufi linguistic cosmopolitanism still closer to the Afghans. Accordingto the text, Shaykh Isa composed poems on the subject of divine unity (tawhd-e-haqq-e-taala) in Persian, Pashto, and Hindwi; short extracts from his writings ineach of these languages were included in the text (Nimat Allah 196062,

17I am grateful to Allison Busch for drawing my attention to this.

Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History 181

82225). Another Afghan Sufi, Shaykh Bustan Baraich, was noted in the text as apoet in Pashto, besides his skills in Arabic (Nimat Allah 196062, 744). Butdespite the early blossoming of Hindwi, apart from a few isolated examples,a formal literature in Pashto had yet to emerge. When it did, it would appearamid the conflict with the Mughals for control of the Pashtun homelandsrather than in the courtly settings of the diaspora.18 What is clear is the Lodand Sur rulers affiliation with the cosmopolitan languages of the Indian courtPersian, Sanskrit, and incrementally also Hindwrather than the Pashto dialectsof their forefathers, which had in all probability already been abandoned by manyof the Afghans in India.

In the same way that after Baburs arrival in India, theMughals gradually neg-lected Chaghatai (Turk) in favor of Persian, the rootless and cosmopolitan char-acter of Persian lent the language great importance among its Afghan patrons.Persian defied all rights of tenure; it subsisted in a circulating realm of booksand conversations that enabled exchange and the new connections it brought;it had no owners. Like the Sufi conceptual world it helped sustain, Persian trans-cended narrower formations of kin and linguistic community (Green, forthcom-ing). Like the ties of Afghan disciples to non-Afghan Sufis in India, the Persianworld of writing formed an important means of connecting Afghans to othersocial groups. In this way, the diasporic character of the Afghan communitiesin Hindustan and the Deccan was intimately connected to the decision of theirelites to patronize Persian rather than Pashto as a signal of engagement withthe wider world of India and its microcosm at court. The cosmopolitanism ofPersian would sustain it among the Pashtuns for centuries after the fall ofAfghan rule in India. Even with the consolidation of Pashto literature duringthe great age of Pashto letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,many Pashto writers remained bilingual figures closely affiliated with thePersian tradition. Just as in the twentieth century, many ethnically Pashtunwriters based in and around Kabul wrote in Persian rather than Pashto, in thediaspora in India, the use of Persian was similarly recognized as grantingaccess to a wider written world.

There were nonetheless limits to the linguistic and religious mediationbetween the Afghans and their Indian environment. The formal boundaries ofIslam still needed to be affirmed, and the histories tell us that certain popularpractices connected to the tombs of the saintspractices that joined Muslimsand Hindus into common religious practicewere regarded with official suspi-cion. If we can believe the moralizing tendencies of the religious scholar Mush-taq, Sikandar Lod prohibited fertility rituals at the shrine of the martyredbridegroom Salar Masud Ghaz involving the parading of a spear (nza) amida great procession (Mushtaq, f. 9r). While it is unclear whether Afghans

18For selections of this early Pashto literature, much of it Sufi in character, see H. G. Raverty(1860).

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themselves were involved in the cult of Salar Masud, we have seen that Afghansin the diaspora did affiliate themselves with Sufis belonging to Indias differentcommunities. At the level of the court at least, these ties were cemented bythe affiliation of Afghan tribal notables with the written world of Persian, asthe connection of the Afghans to other groups in India was at its strongestwhen the transcendental ties of the Sufis were mediated through what was insome senses a Persian public sphere. A fitting example of this is seen in theAfsana-ye-shahan (Stories of Shahs) of Shaykh Kabr, who, like other writers ofPersian with pretensions to style and learning, decorated his text with numerousverses culled from such classical poets as Hafiz, Nizam, and Rum.

In the complex social spheres that emerged in India between the fifteenthand seventeenth centuries, the clan was no longer the sole frame of referencefor the Afghans. Though alternative bonds of loyalty and self-definition wereoffered by the plural traditions of the court and the city more generally, devotionto non-Afghan saints engendered patterns of affiliation beyond the tribe or clan.Of course, saintly ties were not the only means of transgressing kinship, only themeans that most preoccupied our learned informants. Other allegiances, includ-ing those between friends and lovers, were similarly capable of crossing socialboundaries. It is perhaps in this sense that we should understand the series ofstories found in the Afghan histories of Mushtaq and Yadgar devoted to trans-gressive love or marriage between members of different ethnic groups (Mush-taq, f. 20rf. 21r; Yadgar 1939, 99108). Although these love stories all endedbadly, their sheer narrative power attests no less than their evident popularityto their resonance for their audience. This was a period in which the emergenceof cosmopolitanismhowever vicarious its access through shared worlds ofwriting and speechcould test the limits of social cohesion among Afghans noless than other north Indian groups.

TRIBALIZING SAINTHOOD, TRIBALIZING HISTORY

A prominent characteristic of the historiography patronized by the Afghans oftheMughal and post-Mughal periods was an obsession with the question of Afghanethnogenesis (cf. Vogelsang 2002). The earliest major example of this was theTarkh-e-Khan Jahan, which subsequently proved to be the most influential ofall the accounts of the Afghans historical identity.19 In the Tarkh-e-KhanJahan, we possess an important and subsequently extremely influentialethnohistory of the Afghans whose composition was patronized by the preeminentIndo-Afghan notable, Khan Jahan Lod (d. 1040/1631). Its principal author, NimatAllah, was a professional news writer (waqia-naws) in Mughal service who seemsto have been from an urban Iran (rather than a Pashtun) family of Herat with

19On the history and codicology of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, see S. M. Imamuddin (1948, 1960).

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long-standing connections to the Mughals, although the work may have beencowritten by Haybat Khan Kakar, a Pashtun attendant of the Khan Jahan fromthe Afghan settlement of Samana in Punjab (Imamuddin 1948). Like other histori-cal works of its period, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan was also a collaborative work inother ways, having been based on information collected by a series of assistants andinformants. Though its sections of dynastic history drew largely on earlier writtenworks, the chief source for its accounts of the tribal past seems to have been oraltraditions current among the Afghan diaspora at the turn of the seventeenthcentury. While reflecting more widespread oral ethnohistories, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan nonetheless connected, codified, and perfected these traditions inwriting. As the common ancestor of a lineage of later historical texts written onand by the Afghans, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan provides important insight intothe social and mental world in which the historical identity of the Afghans wasfirst articulated into a systematic whole, projecting the specific temporality ofthe texts formation at the Mughal court onto both the past and future ofAfghan history.

It is in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, for example, that we read the first fullaccount of the Afghans ethnogenesis as descendants of the Jewish patriarchYaqub (Jacob), who migrated eastward to Afghanistan, and of the subsequentconversion to Islam of Qays Abd al-Rashd Pathan, the primogenitor of theAfghan tribes and clans. Qays was said to have been converted to Islam by theProphet himself and to have fought alongside him during the conquest ofMecca before traveling to the territories of modern Afghanistan and dying atthe age of eighty-seven in the year 40/659 (Nimat Allah 196062, 10713).20

It is important to note that this was by no means a novel or invented history atthe time of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahans writing. Around the same time as thecomposition of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, a concise version of the Afghan ethno-genesis appeared in the Afsana-ye-shahan of Shaykh Kabr (fl. 1035/1626), andthe story of Qays had also been briefly sketched a few decades earlier in theAn-e-Akbar of the distinguished Mughal courtier, Abul Fazl (d. 1011/1602)(Abul Fazl 1875, 1:591).21 The story was also recounted under Mughal patron-age by the Iranian historian Muhammad Sharf Wuqu (d. 1002/1595). Thenarratives in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan therefore had precedents not only inthe oral historical tradition of the Pashtuns themselves but also, in some cases,in the Persian historiographical tradition patronized by the Mughals. It wasthus in the shadows of the grandiose historiographical projects of the Mughalsthat the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan made the first attempt to provide a systematic

20The author noted that although these events were not recorded in the Hadth, they wererecounted by such reliable authors as Nasir al-dn Tus in his Asnaf al-makhluqat. The accountwas also later recounted in the Khulasat al-ansab (Rahmat Khan, f. 20v21v, 27r).21In common with other versions of the legend, the Afghans progenitor was here said to have beengiven the name of Afghan rather than Pathan.

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account of the Afghan past. As throughout the early modern history of theAfghans, the presence of the Mughals was in this way printed on the very exist-ence of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan and its tutelary exposition of the Afghan way oflife. For all its rhetoric of presenting the ancient and authentic history of thePashtun tribes, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan was in this way a quintessentially dia-sporic text, formulating the historical memory of the Afghans in a genre, style,and language that belonged more truly to the cosmopolitan courtly world ofMughal India. Nonetheless, the text achieved its aims in what it presented as adistinctly Afghan way by recounting the genealogical history of each of the mul-titude of Afghan tribes and clans, for in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, the tribe(tayifa) was presented as the acme of Afghan identity. Here was an attempt tostamp order onto the Afghan world by weaving a weft of uneven patterns ofsocial organization into a faultless kilim of historical narrativea series ofheroic yarns whose underlying warp was a perfected model of tribal genealogy.22

No longer the fragmented, discrete, and often antagonistic social units of thehomeland, here in the diaspora these distinct groups were reimagined as partsof a coherent whole through the organizing principle of genealogy.23

While the general context that surrounded the composition of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan is clearly to be located in Jahangrs court, with all its rival incentivestoward the demonstration of status, whether nam or nang, in his Mirat-e-aftabnuma (The Sun-Showing Mirror), the later Mughal prosopographer ShahNawaz Khan (d. 1171/1758) spoke of a more private cause behind the KhanJahans project. According to this account, the Khan Jahan was incensed by anIranian envoy claiming in Jahangrs presence that the Afghans were descendedfrom the jinn; so the Khan Jahan patronized his eponymous history to proveotherwise (cited in ud-Din 1962, 46). Such forms of Iranian hauteur were farfrom uncommon with regard to the mountain dwellers of the Indo-Iranian hin-terlands; the Kurds, for their part, were also long regarded by urban Iranians asthe descendants of genies.24

22On the Pashtun tribes, see Bernt Glatzer (2002). Though anthropologists have often regardedtribes as organized social units, the reading presented in this essay of the tribe as ideal socialmodel is also briefly reflected in Dale F. Eickelman (1981, 104).23Of course, the formulation of history in other regions of the Muslim world was also chartedthrough such maps of the genealogical past in which living social formations were traced backinto connection with the prophets, heroes and sometimes villains of the Quran (cf. Varisco1995). Though this pattern was widespread in Islamic historiography in general, it took on a particu-lar importance in tribal milieux. An interesting point of comparison with the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahanand the later genealogical histories that it inspired is the Kitab al-ansab of the Saharan scholar Walidwuld Khaluna al-Dayman (d. 1212/1797), dedicated to the ancestry (nasab) of the Znaga-speakingfamilies of the Trarza region, whose demonstrative ancestry similarly underwrote claims to politicalstatus. Like the authors of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, Walid wuld Khaluna also composed anaccount of the miracles of the saints of the Tashumsha tribal confederation (Norris 1968, 153;see also Hall 2005).24This tradition was also recorded by Sharaf Khan Bitls in the Persian history of the Kurds that hewrote under Ottoman rule in the late sixteenth century, a work that in many respects may be

Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History 185

In order to extrapolate the wider processes at work here, it is perhaps worthcomparing the Khan Jahans genealogical response to the Afghans ethnic deni-gration with another diasporic history, The Interesting Narrative of the Life ofOlaudah Equiano. In his narrative, Equiano (d. 1797), a former slave and promo-ter of the repatriation of slaves to Freetown, responded to the scripturalist gen-ealogy that Europeans used to justify the exploitation of Africans by identifyingthem with the cursed descendents of the biblical Ham (Gilroy 1997; Sanders1969). Equianos counterclaim was to argue that it was instead the patriarchAbraham who was the primogenitor of the Africans (Equiano 1797, 3844).Like the Afghans in India, the Africans of the Atlantic world were here reconfi-gured by writing into a vast community of kinsmen.

In both polemical encounters, we see the hegemonic requirement to definethe self through what were (originally) the categories of the other. The very termAfghanwith its possible etymology in the Persian term for a raucous or lament-ing cry ( fughan)hints at this appropriation of the language of insult. And likeEquianos Christian Africans, for all their asserted independence, the KhanJahans Afghans cannot be fully separate from the scriptural models of genealogythat defined the parameters of their interlocutors Islamic worldnor by thispoint in their history would they have wished to be.25

In the competitive encounter between different ethnic groups at the Mughalcourt, such histories and counter-histories were inextricably bound to the identitypolitics of appraisal of the self and denigration of the other (Green and Searle-Chatterjee, forthcoming). What we see at court are forms of ethnic factionalismand their literary iteration. Yet as well as a self-aggrandizing response to such riv-alries, genealogy also formed a means of understanding the contexts of ethnicplurality from which they arose. In the early modernity of Asia as of Europe,the wider world was sifted and assimilated through the filter of genealogieswoven from the firm facts of scripture. In its hard form as revelation, it waswriting that rendered the world knowable.

In the previous sections, we have examined the capacity of Sufi affiliationsto transcend the boundaries of kinship, along with the role of Persian as the lin-guistic and discursive amplifier of these supraethnic loyalties. This was by nomeans the only social capacity toward which the Sufi idiom and its social mech-anisms could be directed. For as well as transcending kinship in the creation ofalternative and sometimes self-consciously Islamic models of community,with their powerful social and semantic resonance, the Sufi saints could alsobe attached to the very ethnic and kin-based formations that in other

considered the twin text of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan. See Sharaf al-Dn Bitls (1597, book 1,Persian text 33, trans. 32).25As Neil McHugh has written with regard to ethnic formation in the Nilotic Sudan, Identificationwith an Arab lineage was not a choiceit was the only choice (1994, 10).

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circumstances their networks served to transcend or contest. For with all theirconsequence and fame, saints and the legends associated with them also actedas badges of urban, regional, or ethnic pride in a manner not altogether dissim-ilar to the patron saints of medieval Europe (Webb 1996). Sufi saints were tiedto early modern formations of collective identity, forming means of articulatingdifference between the distinct peoples and social groups identifying them-selves as Muslims. Their central place in these cultural matrices is seen inthe ubiquity of narratives of sainthood in a whole range of literary genres inPersian, from historiographical and geographic works to belle-letters, poeticanthologies, and, of course, hagiographies and works of Sufi doctrine proper.In both his physical and narrative presence, the saint and blessed man servedto embody formulations of belonging and memory (Green 2006b).

Working at a time when Afghan fortunes had already been eclipsed by therising star of the Mughals, the authors of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan sought topresent a reading of history in which the past was to be seen at every pointthrough the prism of tribal genealogy. Pouring glory upon the founders ofthe primary tribes formed a key part of the texts strategy of upholding the soli-darity fostered by a tribal ethos in a period in which Afghan group identity hadcome under the combined threat of affiliation to the multiethnic Mughal stateand the experience of diaspora life at large. Yet the saints of the Afghans alsoformed an important part of its overall purpose, with their deeds taking upthe entirety of the texts extended final section (khatima). In this section, thesaints were all classified according to their affiliation with the Sarban, Batn,or Ghurghusht tribes (tayifa), with tribal genealogy given exclusive precedenceover the religiously based meta-genealogy of the Sufi order (tayifa). Scholarsof premodern Muslim societies are accustomed to thinking of Sufi orders(tayifas) in terms of the spiritualized transcendental genealogies describedearlier, which tied initiates and devotees in a religious community with bondsof loyalty beyond those defined by kinship.26 Such Sufi genealogies linkedthe initiate or devotee (murd, mukhlis) into a relationship with both deadsaints and their living representatives and did so in such a way as to demandunflinching loyalty to the living Sufi master. Not surprisingly, Sufi ordersfor this reason sometimes laid the foundation for successful politicalmovements and social factions (Evans-Pritchard 1949; Mazzaoui 1972; Paul1991). But in contrast to such religious visions of the collective social identityof a Sufi tribe or people (tayifa), the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan presentedthe Afghan saints solely in terms of their affiliation to a Pashtun tribe

26The potentially competitive relationship between ties of Sufi (or more broadly Islamic) allegianceand identity and the bonds of the tribe have been the subject of considerable discussion by anthro-pologists and historians in the study of Islam among the Pashtuns and other tribal societies. SeeAkbar S. Ahmed (1976), Ernest Gellner (1969), I. M. Lewis (1998), and Nile Green (2006b, forth-coming). More generally, see the essays in Akbar S. Ahmed and David M. Hart (1984).

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(tayifa).27 Here we see a vision of the Afghan past that, from its vantage pointunder Mughal rule, fiercely contradicts the picture we have seen of Afghanaffiliation to a whole series of non-Afghan Sufis.

What we see in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan is a coalescing of Sufi and tribalterminology, exploiting the semantic range of the term tayifa to blur the bound-aries between Islam and kinship as defined by a saints tribe and Sufi order.According to this model, allegiance to a saint could offer no meta-genealogicalties capable of challenging those of a saintly devotee to his tribe or clan. Forthe many Afghan saints of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan were not identified withsuch famous Sufi tayifas as the Chishtiyya, Naqshbandiyya, or the Qadiriyya;their tayifa was instead identical to their tribe or clan. The saints were thus classi-fied primarily as belonging to the tribal tayifas of the Sarbans, Batns and, Ghur-ghusht and, within them, to given clans. Even such well-known saints as Qutbal-dn Bakhtiyar Kak of Delhi (d. 633/1235)usually regarded as one of thefounding saints of the Chisht orderwere presented as members of tribaltayifas, in this case the Sarban tribe (Bakhtiyar Kak az jumla-ye-n tayifabudand) (Nimat Allah 196062, 711).28 This is not to suggest that the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan contains no stories of Afghans associating themselves with non-Afghan saints, for Sikandar Lod is at one point described as visiting the well-known Sufi, Yahya Maner (d. 782/1380) (Nimat Allah 196062, 18485). Butsuch dispersed episodes do not affect the presentation of the saints of theAfghans in the long khatima devoted to them and seem in any case to havebeen taken wholesale from the earlier histories.

The Tarkh-e-Khan Jahans tribal presentation of the Afghan saints may havebeen connected to the conflict between the different models of identity andloyalty offered by tribal and Sufi models of genealogy, as illustrated by thehistory of the Sufi Rawshaniyya movement among the Pashtuns of the sixteenthcentury (Andreyev 1997; Arlinghaus 1988). Like more recent charismatic andmillennial movements among the Pashtuns, the Rawshaniyya tried to subsumetribal identities and the allegiances that came with them into alternative socialbonds based on transcendental ties to a religious leader. Seen as presenting athreat to tribal solidarity, the Rawshans were swiftly and effectively persecutedby the Yusufzay tribesmen. It is difficult to say to what extent the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahans nativized Sufi genealogies were a reaction to the rise and fall

27Perhaps this should no longer surprise us, given the perspective emerging from the study of Islamin other tribal societies. It has recently been argued by Irne Mlikoff (2003) that the title of thesemilegendary founder of the great Anatolian Bektash order, Haj Bektash, reflected less an orga-nized Sufi order of the kind that was named after him than his membership in the Bektash clan,whereas Central Asian Studies has recently paid a great deal of attention to the relationshipbetween tribe and saint (Demidov 1988; DeWeese 1994).28Nonetheless, much of the biographical data provided on Qutb al-dn in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahandoes conform to that provided in the famous Siyar al-awliya of Mr Khwurd (d. 770/1369) and theSiyar alarifn of Jamal Dihlaw (d. 942/1536).

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of the Rawshaniyya. At least as important was the wider political context that thepatron and readership of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan shared with the Pashtun fol-lowers of the Rawshaniyya, in which tribal loyalties were being tested by theemergence of the supraethnic Mughal imperium. Despite the close connectionof the Khan Jahan to the emperor Jahangr, the history that he patronized con-tained accounts of the tribal genealogies of numerous Sufis that served to conso-lidate loyalty to the tribe rather than contest it. For this was not a rebellious textbut a faction-forming one, concerned with fostering tribal solidarity within theparticular context of Afghan competition for influence within the wider Mughalimperium. Its effect, however, was to project this tribal vision of social connec-tivity into every corner of the Afghan past. The narratives achieved this by bring-ing an Islamic (that is, Sufi) affiliation within the folds of the Pashtun tribe or clanby ensuring that each tribe (tayifa) dealt with in the text possessed its own bandof saints. Tribal and religious identity could here be presented as one, such thathonoring the saint was identical with honoring the tribe. With the saint placed inthe service of the tribe, what we see in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan is not so muchthe role of sainthood in the localizing of Muslim practice as its co-option for thetribalization of Islam.

Amid the Afghan diaspora, tales of the saints played important roles in pre-serving traditions of cultural memory as groups of Afghans migrated from oldhabitats to new ones. The saint often acted as a narrative reference pointaround which the memory of other episodes or persons could cluster. Giventhe scale of Afghan migration into India, tales of the saints came to play a heigh-tened role in preserving the collective tribal past as the Afghans traveled furtherand further from their ancestral habitats. In this way, a collective Afghan pastcould be created in the heart of the diaspora affirming a sense of Afghan com-monality among members of different clans as Afghans sharing an interwovenpast and a common genealogy. It is in this sense of tying the memory of the saintsto collective tribal history that we should understand the accounts in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan and later Afghan histories of specifically Afghan saints acting asdiscoverers of wells, initiators of tribal customs, or instigators of migrations. Innumerous cases, saintly legends were used in this way to link tribes to theirplaces of residence. Given the large number of Afghan settlements establishedin India, making sense of their origins and their connections to earlier Pashtunhabitats was clearly important, and as time passed, the saints and the institutio-nalized commemorative forms of their shrines and texts forged a firm anchor forthe tribal past.

These saints were also associated with aetiological legends concerning thefounding of villages or water sources.29 Origin stories connected with specificallytribal Afghan saints stood at the forefront of historical memory, helping to lend

29Such traditions echoed a wider narrative tradition that associated Sufis with a plethora of aetio-logical legends throughout the Muslim world (DeWeese 2000; Green 2004a; Khan 2004; Lewis

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an autochthonous character to a human landscape whose Afghan associationscould in this way be presented as in some sense sui generis. For if an Afghansaint was responsible for creating the local Indian landscapeits wells, springs,and settlementsthen that landscape inexorably belonged to the Afghans, andthe Afghans, in turn, to it. In the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, saints were thus attimes presented as the original settlers of new tribal habitats. Shaykh AlSarwar Lod Shahu Khayl was thus described as having settled at the qasba ofKhalwar in Punjab, where his descendants made up the tribes (isbat) whowere subsequently influential in the area (Nimat Allah 196062, 79596).30

Such stories clearly belonged to an older repertoire that had developed frominterclan competition for lands now lying within the borders of present-dayAfghanistan, for we should bear in mind that the Pashtuns were probablymigrating westward as well as eastward throughout this period. It is in thissense that we should understand the story of Shaykh Sabit Baraich as instrumen-tal in allotting the Baraich tribe (qawm) their lands at Shorawak to the west of theSulayman range. Having established a new home for his clansmen, the shaykhthen miraculously ensured their protection from the poison of Shorawakssnakes and the hands of the neighboring Baluch. His final miraculous act wasto bring forth a spring for the Baraich and their herds (Nimat Allah 196062,75455). In similar vein, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan described how ShaykhMut Khall was appointed the head (sar-e-halqa) of twelve families of theSarban clan (Nimat Allah 196062, 759),31 while Shaykh Bahdn Bakhtiyarlived on a mountain with two thousand Bakhtiyar families settled under his pro-tection (Nimat Allah 196062, 764). Like Shaykh Sabit, Shaykh Bahdn alsomade a water source appear for his tribal protgs by striking (in a rareexample of a Quranic metaphor among these stories) his Mosaic rod (asa-ye-musaw) down onto a rock, which split to reveal a spring. The social functionof these narrative associations of water sources with saints was manifold, rangingfrom establishing rights of access in the example we have just seen to maintainingthe neutral ownership of springs through identifying them as the property ofneighboring saintly shrines.32 In the description of Kabul found in the great

195556). On this theme in the context of Ottoman migration, see S. Yerasimos (1992). On theAfghans perceptions of the pre-Islamic foundation of their cities, see A. A. Kohzad (1951).30On this narrative theme more generally, see M. A. Khan (2004). It is perhaps worth noting thatShahu Khayl was also the clan of the Lod sultans.31In some manuscripts of the text, as well as the Akhbar al-awliya, this figure is given the tribalname of Shaykh Mut Khayl. Its (accidental?) replacement with Khall in some manuscripts mayreflect the non-Afghan identity of later copyists.32We might compare such miracles to the formal prayers for rain offered to the shrines of suchsaints as Sd Muhammad al-Kunt (fl. ca. 855/1450) by the Hassaniyya-speaking tribesmen ofShinqt in Mauretania (Norris 1968, 99100). More generally, the legends recorded of the tribalsaints of such confederations as the Tashumsha of Western Sahara (Norris 1968, 12352) bearmany similarities to those recorded in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan.

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Mughal catalogue of empire An-e-Akbar, we thus read that the mountainsprings that ran down into the city were located beside the shrines of KhwajaHamu, Khwaja Abd al-Samad, and the footprint shrine (qadamgah) of KhwajaKhizr (Abul Fazl 1875, 1:572.). These customs were also present in the diaspora,and in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, there is a description of the tomb in Lucknow ofMalik Adam Kakar, an Afghan notable who came to be regarded as a great saint,as lying beside an important sacred well (Nimat Allah 196062, 818).33

These patterns are also seen in the Akhbar al-awliya (Reports of the Saints),which was written in the Deccan by Abd Allah Khweshg in 1077/1666 (Shafii1929; Storey 192771, 1:ii: 100912). Composed by an Afghan author far fromhome and dispatched to the Deccan in Mughal service, the Akhbar al-awliyacommemorated the saints of Qasur in Punjab, where its author was born andwhich had been an important Afghan settlement for several centuries by thetime the Akhbar al-awliya was written. Of course, during this period of imperialrelocations, this literature of displacement was by no means uniquely Afghan.A comparable example is the Maasir al-kiram that Azad Bilgram (d. 1200/1786) wrote on the divines of his north Indian home of Bilgram from the sameMughal outpost of Aurangabad in which Abd Allah Khweshg had written hisAkhbar al-awliya (Bilgram 1328/1910); other Sufi works from the Deccan man-ifested similar ties to remembered northern homelands (Green 2004b). None-theless, Abd Allah Khweshgs literary activities do exemplify the connectionsbetween an Afghan Sufi commemorative literature and the sense of displacementexperienced by Afghans moving round India in imperial service.

Later, other Afghan texts also emerged in the diaspora devoted to the his-tories of specific tribal or clan groups that had settled in India, and accounts ofpatron or ancestral saints often occupied an important part of them. To theeast of Abd Allah Khweshgs hometown in Punjab, in 1118/1710 Al Muham-mad Ansar composed his Tazkirat al-ansar (Commemorations of the Forerun-ners). In this account of the history of the Afghan settlement of Jullundur, theremembered past of the Afghan clans once again shared its pages with storiesof the saints (Hussan Zia n.d.).34 The Tazkirat al-ansar recounted the historyof the Sufi Ibrahm Danishmand, his marriage to one of the daughters of thePashtun clan of the Barakzay, and his subsequent fathering of his own clan.The Danishmand clan that descended from this saint had migrated to Jullundur

33Malik Adams mausoleum was later maintained by his descendants, who acted as the institutionalheirs (sajjada nashns) of his charisma.34Sections of the unpublished Tazkirat al-ansar are translated in K. Hussan Zia (n.d., 13346).During the late 1870s, the oral tradition of Jullunders Afghan saints, as transmitted by the citysfaqrs, was collected by Richard Carnac Temple. Recounting the saintly foundation of the settle-ment and the competition for jurisdiction over the region of the Afghan saint Nasir al-dnShran with a Yogi named Jalandhar, the narratives demonstrate the absorption of the rememberedsaints into the wider narrative imagination of the Indian world. See Captain R. C. Temple (18841900, 3:15995, 3:32326).

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during the reign of Sikandar Lod in the fifteenth century.35 A later migration ofAfghans to Jullunder was said to have been led by another Sufi figure, ShaykhMuhammad Darwesh (d. 1082/1671), whose descendants became the spiritualand political leaders of the Jullundur Pashtuns. Recounting tales of numerousother Danishmand holy men, the text validated the history of the entire Danish-mand clan through the deeds of the saints who belonged to their lineage, tyingtogether saintly and tribal memory for their mutual preservation.

Yet in its comprehensive scope, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan remains the mostimportant of these histories. Presented in the text as the miracle-working cham-pions of Afghan pride, the saints of the tribesmen reflected a stubborn sense ofAfghan honorthe famous pashtunwal perhapsmaintained in the face of theAfghans defeat by the Mughals. One story in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan thus con-cerned the modest dutifulness of the Afghan Sufi Shaykh Wato ShuriyanKhweshg in serving for thirty years in the kitchen of the famous saint KhwajaMawdud Chisht (d. 533/1139) at Chisht in the mountains east of Herat.36

Though none of the sons or deputies (khulafa) of Khwaja Mawdud recognizedthe qualities of the humble Afghan, before the master died, it was uponShaykh Wato that he chose to bestow his cloak ( jaba) and appoint him as his suc-cessor (Nimat Allah 196062, 74142). Another story demonstrated the import-ance of wondrous signs of the miraculous in establishing the caliber of Afghansainthood through an account of a group of villagers of the Kakar clan demandinga miracle from nine Sufis of their own clan. In response, the saints ordered thevillagers to fill nine cauldrons with beef and water and set them over nine fires tocook overnight. When the cauldrons were ready, the Kakar saints climbed insidethem and passed the whole night with the boiling stew. But in the morning, whilethe beef had disintegrated, the holy men climbed cheerfully out of their caul-drons unharmed. Convinced by this fearsome display of Gods favor, their clans-man promptly became their most assiduous disciples (halqa begush) (NimatAllah 196062, 81821).37 Such extraordinary featsthe khariq-e-adat so fre-quently summoned in the textwere perhaps a deliberate stratagem aimed atreinforcing the pride of the struggling Afghans of the early seventeenthcentury through enhancing the reputation of their patron saints.

If many of the stories in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan summoned the memory ofthe tribal settlements of a largely pastoral society, as we have seen, it would be amistake to regard the Afghan diaspora as being composed solely of wanderingherdsmen and warriors. As we have noted, trade was an important factor

35Another Danishmand shaykh, Ladun Danishmand, appears in connection with Sikandar Lod inMushtaqs Waqiat-e-Mushtaq (Mushtaq, f. 24v). Several other Danishmand shaykhs are men-tioned in Nimat Allah (196062, 330, 382, 724).36Khwaja Mawdud also features in one of the most famous of all Persian hagiographies, theNafahatal-uns of the great Naqshband Sufi of Herat, Jam (d. 898/1492). See Jam (1375/1955, 32630).37Among the Wazr tribesmen, a similar story connected the power of a local saint with the abilityof his followers to place their hands in boiling water (Shah 1906, 121).

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in bringing the Afghans wealth, and we even know of several Afghan saints whowere said to have been involved in trading activities themselves. Shaykh BustanBaraich (d. 1002/1593), who migrated from Roh to settle at Samana in Punjab,was one such saintly merchant; he was once accompanied on a seabornetrading mission to Goa by Nimat Allah, the author of the Tarkh-e-KhanJahan (Nimat Allah 196062, 74344). Because the Baraich tribe was amongthe most important trading communities among the Afghans, it is tempting tospeculate that the Shaykh Bustan served in some way to sacralize their collectiveactivities. His ability to save his ship from being wrecked at sea reflects legendsassociated with the saints of many other Muslim trading communities. Given thewealth in trade and land of the leaders of the Afghan tribes and clans, it is import-ant to recognize that the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan was the product of a highly pros-perous tribal elite. Reflecting the importance of their blessed men, this affluencealso found expression through the lavish patronage of shrines to the Afghan Sufis.Located in Punjab, the shrine of Shaykh Muth Kans reflected the prosperity ofthe dominant clans while also echoing the imperial style of the Mughals. Thedescription of Shaykh Muths shrine in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan is worthquoting in full as an example of this opulence:

[Shaykh Muths] guest-house [mehmankhana] was so elegant that eventhe gatherings of the worldly are never prepared with such grace anddelicacy. The ceiling, walls and columns each matched one another indcor, and were fitted out with velvet, gold brocade and clotheshangers; and then there were also the costly Afghan [wilayat] carpetsand kilims. There were the finest water-vessels and royal awnings;elegant cushions, silver bedsteads and superior bed-sheets were alsospread out; marquetry chairs with coverlets were placed opposite. Itwas such a place that neither the eyes of the sky had seen such athing, nor the ears of the heavens heard of it. It was always kept cleanand tidy. And as for incense [khushbu], every day such a greatamount was spent on it that even the mathematicians of conjectureand imagination are unable to comprehend its quantity and quality.(Nimat Allah 196062, 747)

The description serves as a fitting reminder of the strange contradictions of a textproduced amid a circle of Afghan notables enjoying the richest spoils of empireand yet dedicated in large part to the memory of a marginal group of tribal shep-herds and soldiers devoid of connections to any state system.

Given the broader undercurrent in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan on Afghan(religious, political, tribal) integrity, it is significant that several saints werealso presented as the progenitors of whole tribes or clans. Here it is importantto recognize the role of prominent Sufis (often by the same token sayyids) asgenealogical brokers between the autonomous genealogy of the tribe on theone hand and, on the other hand, the scripturalist genealogies of prophetic

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ancestry we have seen tying all of the tribes or peoples (aqwam) of the worldinto a common human ancestry traceable to the first man, Adam. Whetherthrough an explicit bloodline in the case of sayyids, or else through thedivine blessing (baraka) that all Sufi saints possessed, the figure of the saintmarked a point of interface between local and pan-Islamic models of ancestry,forming the conceptual threads that tied different modes of social organizationinto a unified model of the world and its multiplicity.38 In literate contexts atleast, by the seventeenth century, we find that almost all models of ancestryin the lands touched by Islam had already undergone this process of conceptualfusion, in which genealogy and sainthood played so central a part. Among theAfghans, the most important case of a saintly progenitor was Shaykh Bayt,the son of the first Afghan and companion of the Prophet, Qays Abd al-Rashid. Shaykh Bayt was regarded as the founder of the prominent Batntribe, from which numerous other tribes and clans subsequently emerged, asdetailed in a long section of the text devoted to cataloguing the tribal descen-dants (awlad) of the most important Afghan saints (Nimat Allah 196062,84370). In a further reflection of the interweaving of ethnogenesis and saint-hood, Shaykh Bayt gave their name to the Lod clan by handing bread to theirancestor Ibrahm and announcing the Pashto words Ibrahm is the eldest(Ibrahm lo d) (Nimat Allah 196062, 77072, 6013). Interestingly, thesesaintly traditions were not always used to glorify ancestors. An account of achild born of an illicit liaison between the daughter of Shaykh Bayt and ShahHusayn, a non-Pashtun ancestor of the sultans of Ghur, was recounted toexplain the aetiology of the Ghilzay ethnonym as those born of a thief(Pashto ghil zay) in memory of the saints stolen daughter (Nimat Allah196062, 699701).39

Such genealogical connections between saints and tribesmen were notunique to the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan and can also be found in other Indo-Afghan texts. In the Tarkh-e-Sher Shah (Sher Shahs History), completed in980/1572 during the reign of Akbar, Sarwan drew attention to the place ofSufis within the folds of tribal genealogies, as seen in his description of the ances-try of the heads of the Sarwans of Roh (sardar-e-sarwaniyan-e-Roh) (Sarwan,

38With regard to premodern Sudan, McHugh has drawn attention to related processes by whichSufi holy men acted as mediators between social institutions that were inherently conflicting,here the moral and political economy of the Funj Empire and the Arabo-Islamic norms of theirinfluential and powerful neighbors. The Sufi blessed men personified the convergence andmutual accommodation of opposing forces and were often able to manipulate symbols totheir own advantage as well as that of the larger community. [T]hey became brokers of poweras well as of culture (McNeil 1994, 189). On such mediatory roles in an Indo-Afghan context,see Green (2006b).39However, in some manuscripts, the Pashto phrase reads ghil zu (thief son). A similar version of thestory was earlier recounted by theMughal courtier Abul Fazl (1875, 1:591). C. E. Bosworth (n.d.) hasalso argued for a non-Pashtun origin for the Ghilzay, seeing them as descendants of the Turkish tribeof the Khalaj, who later entered a confederation with neighboring Pashtun tribes.

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f. 69rf. 69v).40 In the later Khulasat al-ansab, principally concerned with theorigins of the Kuta Khayl, the eponymous ancestor of the clan was said to havebeen the saintly Shaykh Kuta Shihab al-dn, whose deeds (ahwal) were recountedin some detail in the text (Rahmat Khan, f. 14rf. 20r). As we have alreadyseen, the eighteenth-century Tazkirat al-ansar ascribed similar saintly originsto the Danishmand clan (Hussan Zia n.d., 13346). Other saintly aetiologieswere recorded in later ethnographic sources. In Pashtun areas of the Derajatof western Punjab, the saint Sakh Sarwar (d. ca. 690/1291?) was held tohave taken three wives from a royal, tribal, and sayyid family (Raverty 1855,33841), whereas from another early ethnographic source, we hear a similarstory describing how the saint Musa Nikka was seen as the ancestor of theWazrs (Shah 1906, 124).

The most important point of comparison for the Afghan narratives is the roleof saintly legends among tribal groups in Central Asia. Such historical traditionsoften associated a Sufi with the conversion of a tribe or its founder, as with theconversion of the Golden Horde by the semilegendary Baba Tkles (DeWeese1994). Numerous Turkoman tribes also maintain ethnohistorical traditions relat-ing their ancestry back to a Sufi saint, a shaykh, or a pr whose shrine often formsa primary pilgrimage site for the tribe or clan in question (Basilov 1984,22527). In an Indian context, it is once again the Mughals who provided a setof rival narratives, having brought with them similar ethnohistorical traditionsfrom Central Asia that were steadily punctuated by the deeds of their ownsaints. This self-conscious hauling of history into the diaspora is seen to besteffect in the famous Tarkh-e-rashd of Mrza Muhammad Haydar Dughlat (d.958/1551), reflecting the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan in its account of the conversionto Islam of the Mughal ancestor and ruler of eastern Turkestan, TughluqTmur Khan (r. 760/1359764/1363), at the hands of the Sufi Shaykh Jamal al-dn (Dughlat 1996, Persian text 1013, trans. 811).41 Such saintly conversionnarratives were also related to certain Afghan clans, and in the Tarkh-e-KhanJahan, we read that it was through Shaykh Muhammad Sulayman that theFarmal clan was converted to Islam (ba-sharaf-e-bayat-e-islam musharrafshoda-and) (Nimat Allah 196062, 649). But by promoting the legend of theirancestor being converted to Islam by the Prophet himself, the Afghans wereable to produce the trump card.

In common with its presentation of the saints as the founders of Pashtuntribes, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan also described saints whose descendants were

40These origin stories were also reflected in the traditional account of the origins of the Tmurbranch of the Chahar Aymaq of northwestern Afghanistan and Khorasan, as recorded in the med-ieval Persian hagiography Maqamat-e-Amr Kulal. Here the origins of the Tmur section weredated back to the marriage of the Sufi saint Amr Kulal (d. 772/1370?) to a daughter of the greatconqueror Tmur (Singer 1982, 6576; cf. Muminov and Babadzhanov 2001).41Like other Indo-Muslim historians, Dughlat was also a devotee of the Sufis, being particularlyassociated with one Mawlana Ahmad.

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the subject of continued devotion by their fellow tribesmen (Nimat Allah196062, 8078).42 One example is Abu Ishaq Daw, whose case is particularlyinteresting in view of the modern anthropological literature on Pashtun Islam.For although Abu Ishaqs ancestors were sayyids (that is, descendants of Muham-mad) rather than Pashtuns, both he and his heirs were said to be consideredAfghans, as the saints maternal line came via the Pashtun clan of the Daw(Nimat Allah 196062, 807).43 The question of the status of such Sufis assayyids has long been problematic for the Pashtun tribal system, showing theinconsistencies that social expediency brought to the abstract model of thetribal network. We read in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan the story of Sayyid Muham-mad, who traveled from Turkestan to settle among the Karan, Kakar, andShran clans (tuman). The headsmen of these clans later gave the sayyid awife from each of their sections, and from his union with these women, four dis-tinct new clans emerged (Nimat Allah 196062, 64445).44 The difficulties ofwhere to fit the sayyids within the tribal structure were often glossed over inthe Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, with sayyid groups said to be acceptable by passingthemselves off as Pashtuns. It was against this background that the text recountedthe story of the marriage of a young sayyid called Ishaq to a woman of the Shranclan and the attempts of their offspring to be accepted by the rest of the clan(Nimat Allah 196062, 64243). Such was the prestige lent to tribal affiliationthat the status of particular saints as sayyids could be effectively disregarded infavor of a tribal lineage. Given the fact that claims to the bloodline of Muhammadwere often an indispensable part of Muslim sainthood, this omission is all themore striking as a sign of the prestige of affiliation to a Pashtun clan.

A written exercise in ordering the social world that abandoned the transregio-nal models of spiritualized transcendental genealogy offered by Sufi theorists andtheir own genre of history (the tazkirat or tabaqat), the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahaninstead championed the narrower genealogical ties of the Afghan tribes. In con-trast to the way the term tayifa was usually used in connection with the Sufis, thetext gave no sense of the loyalties acquired through the voluntary pledge of alle-giance (bayat) to a Sufi tayifa or order. In the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, the termtayifa was used only to signify the tribe into which the saints and their followerswere born, or in a few cases adopted. There was no place in this idealized tribalsystem for the voluntary Sufi pledge of allegiance, for a tribesmans religiousloyalties were presented as predetermined by his membership of a tribe orclan. Though making use of the same collective terminology of the tayifa

42The affiliation through different generations of Pashtun clans to particular Sufi families remains afeature of Afghan Islam to the present day, not entirely helpfully being termed maraboutic Sufismby Olivier Roy (1990a, 3844). Links between Pashtun tribesmen and local saintly families are alsoseen in Raverty (1862, 55) and Shah (1906, 120, 124).43The question of the relationship of sayyids to the Afghans was also raised in the Khulasat al-ansab(Rahmat Khan, f. 58v).44The story was later repeated in the Khulasat al-ansab (Rahmat Khan, f. 58vf. 61r).

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as the writers of expressly Sufi works, the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan envisaged a quitedistinct social model that was not a Sufi organization at all but a tribal socialmodel to which Sufis were attached.45

THE NAQSHBANDI ASCENDANCY: THE COMPETITION OF BLESSED MEN

This desire to affiliate Sufis with particular social or ethnic groups was by nomeans unique to the Afghans. In the context of the loss of Afghan political powerin India in which the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan was composed, the crucial point ofcomparison is again the saints of the Mughals. The sixteenth-century Mughalcourt text An-e-Akbar had enumerated the great saints of the Mughal realmalongside the other peoples and possessions of the emperor of Hindustan, con-necting the Mughal rulers to their subjects through fellow association with thesaints (Abul Fazl 1875, 2:20725). But in addition to these cosmopolitan affilia-tions, the Mughals also aligned themselves with more partisan supernatural guar-dians devoted solely to the protection of the Mughals group interests. Thesefigures effectively comprised the many Naqshband Sufis who followed theMughals into India and affiliated themselves with Central Asians (turan,moghol) in Mughal service (Digby 1990; Foltz 1996; Green 2004b). Seen fromthis angle, legends of the saints provide great insight into the inter-Muslim rival-ries of premodern ethnic politics. A convincing example of such ethnic affiliationis seen in an account in the Malfuzat-e-Naqshbandiyya (Naqshband Memoirs)concerning the Bukharan Naqshband migrant Shah Palangposh (d. 1110/1699). In this account, which concerned events that took place only a fewdecades after the writing of the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, Shah Palangposh wassaid to have employed his powers to help one of the commanders of Awrangzebsarmy of Islam (lashkar-e-islam) to defeat an Afghan tribal rebellion near HasanAbdal (Awrangabad 1358/1939, 1516). In the text, the Afghans were describedin no uncertain terms as the enemy (ghanm). Despite the later prominenceamong the Pashtuns of Naqshband Sufi families (particularly of the Mujaddidline), it is notable that there is no mention in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan of anyof the saints of the Afghans being affiliated with the Naqshbandiyya.46 Giventhe partisanship of immigrant Naqshband holy men with the Mughals, theTarkh-e-Khan Jahans concern for a similar band of Afghan patron saints

45The social utility of such Sufi imagery by no means fell into neglect when the Afghans regainedtheir independence from the Mughals. The later Indo-Afghan ruler Muhammad Khan Bangash(r. 1125/17131156/1743) formulated a persona that blended the imagery of the Sufi master(pr) and the holy warrior (ghaz), with his courtiers encouraged to think of themselves as his dis-ciples (chelas). Reflecting the role of the saints in the Tarkh-e-Khan Jahan, here was an attempt toco-opt the same Sufi categories by the leader of a fragile tribal coalition (see Gommans 1999,13132). For Mughal courtly versions of this coalescence of symbols, see Richards (1988).46On Naqshband influence in modern Afghanistan, see D. B. Edwards (1993) and Roy (1990b).

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is perhaps unsurprising. For in this imperial context, Indo-Muslim histories oftenspoke in terms of saintly armies of prayer (lashkar-e-dua) (Bilgram 1416/1996,78). In stark contrast to this stately trope of the saintly army, the Tarkh-e-KhanJahan preferred what was clearly regarded as the more indigenous ideal of thetribe.

It is worth taking a small detour at this point to examine the process by whichthe Afghans became affiliated with the Naqshbandiyya, as this development isillustrative of the wider processes through which Afghan identity evolved in nego-tiation with the cosmopolitan pressures of diaspora and empire. For the Naqsh-bandiyya to which the Afghans connected themselves from the middle of theseventeenth century was not the Naqshbandiyya in its Central Asian form, butthe suborder founded in India by the great Islamic renewer, or mujaddid,Ahmad Sirhind (d. 1034/1624). In a reflection of their connection to Baburand his Timurid ancestors, Central Asian (turan) Naqshbands began tomigrate to India in the decades after Baburs conquest of Hindustan in 932/1526.Waqf endowment documents from Kabul demonstrate the fiscal and insti-tutional processes by which this imperial Sufi expansion was made, with Mughalnotables endowing a Naqshband madrasa in Kabul soon after the city becameBaburs capital (Dale and Payind 1999). It was from their stage post in Kabulthat, like the Mughal vanguard before them, the Naqshbandiyya began toexpand into India, training new members in Kabul to attend to the Mughalnotables moving southward in increasing numbers. We should not make themistake, however, of seeing the madrasas Kabul setting as unproblematicallyAfghan; on the contrary, this was a Mughal establishment in what was brieflythe first Mughal capital. The most important Naqshband figure in this move-ment down from the highlands to Hindustan was Baq Billah Brang (d. 1012/1603), a shaykh belonging to the family of the Central Asian sa