INTRODUCTION

As was seen in chapter 6, Rowshan people value the experience of emotion as a rational, educated, intellectual and articulated endowment of a person. Strong feelings are conceptualised by Rowshan people as dangerous: they have the potential to narrow minds and preclude rational thought and decision-making. And this is particularly significant for Chitral people, and for the broader arguments of this book, because decision-making in fraught and emotionally charged social contexts is such an important element of Muslim life in Chitral. This chapter too is concerned with emotions, but here I explore the ways in which strong feelings feature as a dimension of faith and spiritual experience for Rowshan people. I also ask where Rowshan people at times of heightened emotional experience conceptualise strong feelings as having their source. The ethnographic focus for this chapter are the multifaceted relations between Sunnis and Ismaiʾlis in the village.

As we have already seen, there are underlying tensions between Rowshan's Sunnis and Ismaiʾlis that manifest themselves especially in their conceptions of women and purdah, as well as in their thinking about religious education and the status and role of the Sunni dashmanan. Yet Ismaiʾlis and Sunnis also join together in the shared experience of the play of the mind and creative musical and intellectual performance, and the village is widely conceptualised by Rowshan people as a single moral unit.