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Seeking Protection and Reconciliation: A Pashtun Legal Custom in Recorded Tribal Histories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2023
Abstract
Available essays on Pashtunwali describe this system of customary laws and ethics for the most part as a static model of ideal conduct, without a diachronic perspective. Offering a historical approach to Pashtunwali, this article introduces and analyzes fragmentary data on the nənawāte custom from early modern Pashto sources—historiographical narratives of the Khatak chieftains in the Tarikh-i Murassaʿ (finished 1724) and the romantic poem Adam Khan aw Durkhaney (1706/7). Recorded cases of resorting to nənawāte, considered among the main pillars of Pashtunwali but still variously interpreted, prove that this is a complex legal custom based on the right to appeal for protection, mediation, and reconciliation. As a common means of dispute settlement, nənawāte originates with a binding request for help and favor in a conflict situation. The discussion of nənawāte is preceded by a brief overview of the existing scholarly definitions of Pashtunwali, underscoring its emic perception as an ethnic identity marker.
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References
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29 Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and Its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary, and India: Comprising a View of the Afghaun Nation, and a History of the Dooraunee Monarchy, vols. 1–2, revised ed. (London: Richard Bentley, 1839), vol. 1, 220.
30 Amin Tarzi and Robert D. Lamb, Measuring Perceptions about the Pashtun People: A Report of the CSIS Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation and Middle East Studies at Marine Corps University (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2011), 13.
31 Khadim, Pashtunwali, 40–41; ʿAtayi, Qamus, 278–80.
32 Adamec, Historical Dictionary, 231.
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34 Elphinstone, Account, vol. 1, 295–96.
35 Lindholm, Generosity, 234–35.
36 ʿAtayi, Qamus, 44–45, 262–63.
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38 Olaf Caroe, The Pathans: 550 B.C.–A.D. 1957 (London: Macmillan, 1958), 351.
39 Benson and Siddiqui, “Pashtunwali,” 116.
40 David B. Edwards, Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 67–68.
41 Ibid., 39–40.
42 Spain, Way of the Pathans, 130–31.
43 Strickland, “Way of the Pashtun,” 44.
44 Chiovenda, “Crafting Masculine Selves,” 305–6.
45 Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy, 152–53, 352–53.
46 Haqiqat, Das Pashtunwali, 56.
47 Elphinstone, Account, vol. 1, 244–46.
48 Darmesteter, Chants populaires, 117–24.
49 Sadr Khan Khatak, Adam Durkhanəy, 3rd ed., with preface and notes by Muhammad Nawaz Taʾir (Peshawar: Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar, 1989), 143–44.
50 This story describes gender relations, women's freedoms, and the everyday private life of tribal Pashtuns in early modern times rather differently from what have come to be regarded as “original” Pashtunwali ordinances in these matters. For some valuable comments on these issues, see M. N. Taʾir's analysis of the poem in the preface; ibid., 23–27).
51 Ibid., 190, 209.
52 Ibid., 222.
53 Earlier in the poem it is said that Durkhaney's father gave his daughter an excellent education and once even acknowledged her right to act at her own discretion, “We do not have power (wāk) over her, it is Durkhaney's heart that has it”; ibid., 152.
54 Ibid., 231.
55 Ibid., 255.
56 Ibid., 256.
57 Darmesteter, Chants populaires, 123.
58 ʿAtayi, Qamus, 278.
59 Sadr, Adam Durkhanəy, 152.
60 Ibid., 189.
61 Afzal, Tarikh-i Murassaʿ, 310, 467, 500.
62 Ibid., 490.
63 Ibid., 491.
64 Ibid., 367.
65 See the discussion of this conflict in Pelevin, Mikhail, “Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict (1724),” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 495–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Afzal, Tarikh-i Murassaʿ, 467.
67 Ibid., 473–74.
68 Ibid., 285.
69 Ibid., 496.
70 Ibid., 382.
71 Ibid., 385.
72 This expression is used in “The Khataks’ Chronicle” several times, evidently as an emphatic equivalent of nənawāte; see, for example, Afzal, Tarikh-i Murassaʿ, 491. It is likewise employed in modern commentaries on nənawāte in Ambreen and Mohyuddin, “Power Structure,” 67.
73 Afzal, Tarikh-i Murassaʿ, 408.
74 Ibid., 407.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid., 390.
77 Ibid., 467–68.
78 Ibid., 265.
79 A similar case is recounted in the Siraj al-Tawarikh, an early 20th-century historiographical work in Persian. The Afghan monarch Shah Zaman Durrani (r. 1793–1801) pardons and awards with gifts the rebellious chieftain Muhammad ʿAzim Khan Alkozay when the latter comes to him “with a sword in one hand and a winding sheet draped over his shoulders” and says, “My just deserts are for you to cut off my head with this sword and wind my body in this shroud”; The History of Afghanistan: Fayż Muḥammad Kātib Hazārah's Sirāj al-Tawārīkh, vols. 1–3, with translation, introduction, notes, and index by Robert D. McChesney and Mohammad M. Khorrami (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 81. A difference between the two cases is that Muhammad ʿAzim Khan was accompanied by an intercessor, Mulla Jan Muhammad, a member of an esteemed spiritual lineage. This case as well as other accounts from the Siraj al-Tawarikh that describe the institution of intercession (shafāʿat), which sometimes is equal to the mediation of the nənawāte custom, are discussed in Jandosova, Zarine A, “Obychai zastupnichestva v Afganistane na rubezhe XVIII–XIX vv.,” Pis'mennyie pamiatniki Vostoka 2/3 (2005): 125–33Google Scholar.
80 Khadim, Pashtunwali, 40; Steul, Paschtunwali, 163; Rzehak, “Doing Pashto,” 18.
81 The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur), 2 vols., tr. Annette S. Beveridge (London: Luzac, 1922), 232.