The Greek kidnapped from Kafiristan Valley, Chitral

[Cheeta]

The Valley of Bashgal(now Nuristan) has been long known through history as the central part of the then Kafiristan. After 1895 A.D when the boundary between India and Afghanistan was demarcated this valley and the part of Kunar to the north of Asmar which was the part of the State of Chitral was annexed to Afghanistan. Then the Amir of Afghanistan Abdurrahman Khan did make a call to the Kafirs to convert to Islam having no other option left for them. Some Kafirs migrated to Chitral, to the territory of their Kalash brethren while others became Muslims. Now the Kafir population was only left in the valleys of Chitral namely Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur. These Kafirs live a unique life that attracts the interest of masses and tourists pour to the area throughout summer season. With the passage of time greater part of the population of these people did convert to Islam and only a small part of them is left now which is merely in hundreds.
Actually, if it be analysed carefully we come to the conclusion that these people are intentionally let to lead a life that is contrary to the life standards of a human being. A responsible authority and a big part of human population makes prevail a bulk of humans in such an in-human atmosphere that is intolerable in this modern age, just for rejoicing and the entertainment of people who come to watch them like one visits a zoo.
Some problems have appeared with time by the frequent visits of tourists and other people of the country to the valleys where these Kalash people live.
The population of Southern Chitral is comprised of mostly Aryan racial stock that was influenced by the culture, religion and language of the dominating society of the north which gradually influenced the whole area with the passage of time. This whole population got merged into a single Kho or Chitrali society with time and those who did remain apart are only that lived in the three narrow valleys. Seeking a signal in history that Alexander The Great had left a part of his injured and sick Greek soldiers somewhere in the north of Afghan plateau, Europeans have labelled these people as being offsprings of those soldiers. The other link to make them closer to these people is of being these people Aryans. Thus Europeans frequently visit these people as tourists. These visits did prevail for long smoothly until it was heard by the local people in the last decade of twentieth century that some secret preaching of Christianity had begun there by some so called tourists who with the excuse of further studying Kalash practices had decided to stay there for long. May be Kalash people themselves did also not like the foreign involvement in their customs that a Spanish man Jordi Magraner who was accused of carrying on secret preaching in the area was killed in 2002 by his own servants. It only provoked the foreign interest and soon some women and men were heard visiting and staying long in the area making expenses not for the development of the social status of the people but to make them by someway or other convinced that they are Aryans as Europeans and must be converted to the dominating religion of Europe. Some then even did more daring effort visiting the once old prominent villages of Kalash now converted Muslims with the theory of Aryans and the story of the sick soldiers of Alexander the Great. They stayed in the Muslim homes and made frequent visits making expenses and making them convinced of being from a great descent of Europeans. Recently in september 2009 a second European Athansis Lerounis has been abducted from the valley and taken to Bashgal across the boundary by the Talibans. These people never openly have been heard of preaching a religion but the Kalasha people have been heard of complaining about them saying that these people are interfering in their beliefs.
The only solution of the problem and to avoid possible rising troubles in future it is essential that the learned communities of the region should arrange a social body of locals to make these people merged to the society of the area.

 

[Reddy]

This article is insulting all the minority community people calling them kafirs and the place as kafirstan.
Why are people so desperate to convert other people to Islam by force ?

 

[Skywalker]

This article is insulting all the minority community people calling them kafirs and the place as kafirstan.
Why are people so desperate to convert other people to Islam by force ?

Why dont you just keep your rubbish within yourself, did you even ever bothered to find out what kafir means or what is the origin of this word.

If not then let me save some time for you , Kafir is the word used for non muslims, its neither a sware word nor abusive towards any non muslims. Kafir originated from arabic which means anyone who does not accept Muhammed (PBUH) and his teachings will be recognized or called as kafir.

And mind you Kafristan was named about 3/4 hundred years back when unfortunately Pakistan was part of the India.

And what is this thing of enforcing people to convert Islam....nobody ever converted them into Islam..they still practicing there own religion willingly and happily. Now come up with with some concrete info otherwise buzz off like many other Indians in this forum.

 

[Coolyo]

This article is insulting all the minority community people calling them kafirs and the place as kafirstan.
Why are people so desperate to convert other people to Islam by force ?

Trolls like yourself should leave... Unlike Hinduism/Sikhism, Islam is a religion of peace, love, and tolerance!

Translated verse:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things.
( سورة البقرة , Al-Baqara, Chapter #2, Verse #256)

 

[Reddy]

Ethnic Cleansing of the Kafirs in Pakistan
By Abbas Zaidi


In all the languages spoken in Pakistan, Kafir means "Infidel" and Kafiristan means "Land of the Infi-
dels." (Kafir also means "infidel" in Arabic.) Yet, ironically Kafiristan in Pakistan is believed to be a paradise located in the northwest part of the country: lakes, waterfalls, green forests teeming with wildlife, snow and a mellow sun.
But it is not just the place itself that fascinates; it is the women of Kafiristan, part-fairy and part-
human whose beauty, as the story goes, can make a man lose his religion. "When a Kafir woman drinks water, you can see it streaming down her throat. One can count the veins on her body," is the standard text regarding the Kafir woman's delicateness. They are believed to be whiter than white.
But who are these Kafirs?
The advent of the Kafirs in Northwest of Pakistan
--what is known now as the Kalash Valley consisting of the Birir, Bumboret and Rumbor sub-valleys--and southern Afghanistan, predates the birth of Islam by several centuries. As of now, the Kalash Valley is a part of Chitral, a very large administrative region in Northwest of Pakistan. The Kafirs are believed to be descendants of the warriors who arrived with Alexander the Great and decided to stay on. His-
torically, the Kafirs have remained an isolated ethnic group who were left undisturbed by both the Muslim rulers of India and by the British Raj. Many Western historians during the Raj were surprised to find the Kafirs' physical resemblance to be so similar to their own that they proudly declared that they and the Kafirs were of the same stock. As such, the Kafirs were allowed to freely practice their ancient customs, including ritual alcohol consump-
tion, promiscuous dancing and ritual free sex.
The tragic watershed in Kafiri history came towards the end of the 19th century when in South Afghan- istan their population was decimated in the name of Islam. The Afghan ruler at that time declared that either the Kafirs would be converted to Islam or be wiped off the face of the earth. The Afghan campaign was a total success, and the dawn of the 20th cen-
tury did not see a single Kafir living in Afghan-
istan as a Kafir. Even the names of their villages were Islamised.
The Kafirs on the other side of the border were spared genocide due, one might suppose, to the Raj. In 1947 the Raj ended and Pakistan came into being, but the Kafirs continued to lead their lives as they had lived them for centuries. The legends about the beauty of the Kafir women and the landscape contin- ued in a quasi-Orientalist mode. Every so often one heard about someone marrying a Kafir woman and bringing her home, though no one ever actually saw one. (In the legends and tales about Kafiristan the Kafir men are significant by their absence.)
It was only in the early 1970s that the people of Pakistan began to hear about the Kafirs in the national media, when Kafiristan was facing famine. Thanks to then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a tragedy was averted and he became the Kafirs' hero.
But then came the CIA-sponsored Afghanistan jihad and Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini challenged, inter alia, the US, the Arab monarchies and Pakistan's military dictatorship. Pakistan's progressive religious groups also became inspired by the Iranian Revolution and started planning in terms of a revolution for Pakistan too. They were a curious mix of Islam and Marxism. Some of them were extremely anti-American and anti-
Soviet; some of them preferred the atheistic Soviet Union to the anti-Islamic United States and had their socialist friends in Afghanistan; and some of them pro-Khomeini, and Khomeini had challenged the US as no one had ever done before. Hence, the Iranian Revolution unfied them into an anti-American front. They called the Afghan refugees of those days "the absconders" and the jihad-wagers "the CIA agents."
General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan's longest-reigning dictator to date, was the enfant gate of the Saudi Royal Family, with a proven track record of loyalty to his masters in Jordan as well. The US needed a strongman in Islamabad to offset pro-Iranian and anti-American sentiments and to oppose the Soviets on its behalf. Hence it became vital to divide Pakistan along sectarian lines. Only the Deobandi-
Wahabi (see end note #2) version of Islam could produce the desired results. So, in order to out-
Khomeini Khomeini, the General introduced his own brand of Islamisation. That same year Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was hange, with the full blessing of the US government. 1979, that annus mirabilis, marked the beginning of the end for the Kafirs.
In 1981 Ronald Reagan provided a multi-billion-
dollar "aid" package in order to help Pakistan intensify the Afghanistan jihad. General Zia called upon the nation to go one step further than the Government in bringing Islam to every nook and corner of Pakistan. As a result, countless Tablighi (proselytizing) parties confronted every Muslim and non-Muslim Pakistani preaching the Deobandi-Wahabi version of Islam. Coincidentally, that year saw klashnikovs and heroin begin to penetrate every nook and cranny of Pakistan. The Kafirs got the first taste of things to come when some Tablighi zealots illegally occupied a large cultivated piece of their land in Bumboret and built a mosque.
What happened after that is not hard to discover. The Afghan refugees and the Pathan Tablighi parties (now known as the Taliban) seized nearly 70 percent of Kafir land during the period 1981 to 1995. They built mosques and seminaries where, in addition to learning the Koran by rote only, students learn the arts of war, techniques that are used against India in Kashmir and against Muslim and non-Muslim relig-
ious minorities within Pakistan as well as against "infidels" elsewhere. The first fruit of the Afghan-
istan jihad for the Kafirs was the decimation of the Kalash forests and wildlife by the Afghan refugees. As the vegetation grew sparse, the Kafirs' cattle met the same fate as their forests, and the tra-
ditional Kafir means of livelihood was irreparably destroyed.
Once the Afghan refugees and the Tablighis became entrenched in Chitral, the forced conversion of the Kafirs began. Gun-toting Tablighis made it clear that in order to go on living in Pakistan (Pakistan means "Land of the Pure") the Kafirs must convert to Islam. For the Kafirs any place beyond the Kalash Valley is as alien as Mars. The kidnapping and forced marriage--and hence forced conversion--of the Kafir women to the Muslims, mostly Tablighi Pathans, continues to this day. These women are not allowed to see their relatives unless the relatives also convert. It is no secret that many of these women are sold at auction. Men are circumcised against their will. The Tablighis carry klashnikovs as a matter of routine and have killed many Kafirs who resisted conversion to the Tablighi Islam. No Kafir is allowed to carry a gun.
The poverty of the Kafirs has also been a big factor in their conversion to Tablighi Islam. Within the Chitral society they are completely ostracized for being "Kafirs", a term that illiterate people (and illiteracy in Chitral is the norm) understand to mean "infidels." The government does not give loans to Kafirs; the police and the judiciary have never taken any action against the appropriation of Kafir land by the Tablighis. The only source of income for the Kafirs are the Tablighis who lend them money at high interest. Since the Kafirs cannot pay off these loans, the only course left for them is either to convert or surrender their properties to the Tablighis.
While electricity, available through gasoline generators, and tap water are available to every Muslim in the Kalash Valley, and loudspeakers relay azzan and Koranic recitations throughout the day, there is not a single Kafir house that has electri-
city or a water tap. Their living conditions are indescribable. The Chitral winter is Siberian. The mosques and seminaries have heaters and warm water. The Kafirs' houses remain dark all winter, and they have to melt snow for drinking water. They cut wood to make fire. Their houses are actually large single rooms that remain shut for the six months of winter. Humans and animals live in them together. One can only imagine the stink and the lack of sanitation. There are no toilets. In summer, people use the open fields to relieve themselves; in winter they relieve themselves inside their houses, the same as their animals. One finds human and animal waste every-
where.
There is not a single hospital nor even a minor dispensary in the whole of Kafiristan. The Tablighis have 4x4 jeeps, but few Kafirs have any kind of vehicles. Many Kafirs have died, when basic emer-
gency aid could have saved them, such as during childbirth. The Kafiri diet is basic and monotonous, and one rarely sees either a male or female Kafir who looks physically strong. The women's veins show plainly because of their malnourished state. Their characteristic long necks are dirty, and you only have to come close to one to know that they seldom get to take a bath.
Needless to say, Kafir culture is now nonexistent, thanks to the Tablighis. In the 1980s it was thought that the Kafirs as a distinct cultural group would become extinct by the end of the century. But they still linger on, though their number now is no more than two thousand. The government of Pakistan takes great pride in having established the Kalash Founda-
tion "to preserve and propagate Kafir culture." But the facts speak otherwise. It is true that the Kalash Foundation has somewhat slowed the steam-
roller of the Tablighi Islam. But it has not done anything positive for the Kafirs. No effort has been made to give their language written documentation, and there does not exist even a single standard text devoted to Kafiri culture.
Visitors to the Kalash Valley have to pay a toll to enter. The toll ticket given to the visitor is jokingly called "the zoo ticket." The Kafirs and what is left of their culture have been preserved merely to cater to the tastes for the exotic of generals, bureaucrats, politicians and foreign dignitaries. Thanks to the Kalash Foundation, the Kafirs have become little more than anthropological artifacts. The World Wildlife Federation has been crying blue murder over the fact that only five thousand tigers remain in their natural habitat. Who cares that only two thousand Kafirs remain, despite a captivity-cum-protection program supposedly accorded them by the Pakistani government?
Meanwhile, the Tablighi are pushing to convert these few remaining pagans, and it is unlikely that the Kafirs will last very long into the 21st century. Kafir culture will end up--like so many indigenous cultures elsewhere--in the "cultural centers" of the big cities under the oversight of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. One may surmise that in future the converted Kafirs and their progeny will be engaged in fighting Indians, the religious minorities of Pakistan and "infidels" elsewhere. Meanwhile, in order to edify and entertain their audiences, Muslims employed by the Ministry of Cultural Affairs will stage exhibitions of Kafiri culture, dressing up and posing as the Kafirs whom the government and the Tablighis have systematically eliminated.
Notes
1. I felt forced to write this piece after reading "The Islamization of the Kalash Kafirs" by Akbar S. Ahmed in his book Pakistan Society (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1986). I was appalled to read that the author, "the Margaret Mead of Islam" did not even once touch upon the destruction of the Kafirs. He does mention the "formidable social, and psychological pressures resulting from being viewed as 'dirty' non-
believers by aggressive and powerful neighbors," but ends his chapter with a high note of opti-
mism that everything for the Kafirs will be all right in the course of time. Maybe he could not appreciate the true nature of the situation because at the time of his writing he was an important member of General Zia's bureaucracy.
2. A word about the Tablighis and their version of Islam. Within the Sunni sect in Pakistan and India there are two major sub-sects: the Brelvis and the Deobandis. The Deobandis are very close to the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia in their liter-
alist interpretation of Islam. That is why the Deobandis and the Wahabis work side by side, from politics to jihad. The ubiquitous pro-
selytizing groups in Pakistan and elsewhere are overwhelmingly Deobandi. The Deobandis believe that except for themselves and the Wahabis all other sects of Islam are heretical and must be exterminated. In the 1970s in Pakistan it was chiefly the Wahabis and the Deobandis who succeeded in having the Ahmedis declared non-
Muslims, a declaration later constitutionalised by General Zia, himself a Deobandi. The Sipa-e-Sihaba of Pakistan and the Taliban of Afghanistan are Deobandi who are financially supported by the Saudi Royal Family. It's interesting to note that within Sunni Islam the Deobandis and the Brelvis are not found anywhere outside India and Pakistan. The creation of these two sects was one of the masterstrokes of the Raj in its divide-and-rule policy.
3. The Kafirs have become the victim of Tablighis Islam. Islam, however, is a religion whose God--Allah--by His own claim is, inter alia, the Beneficent, the Benevolent and the Merciful. Allah strictly forbids Muslims to carry out forced conversion.

(Abbas Zaidi <manoo@brunet.bn> was editor of
The Ravi (1985), Pakistan's premier and oldest academic magazine published by Government College, Lahore. He also edited Interface (1990-91) for the Program in Literary Lin-
guistics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Zaidi has taught English Literature in Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, and worked as assistant editor for The Nation, Lahore.)

 

[Reddy]

CHITRAL: A young Kalashi boy who converted to Islam on Friday said that he was &#8220;feeling good after the conversion&#8221;. ...District Khateeb Maulana Khaleequz Zaman told the Hindukush Journalist Forum that a Karachi-based trust was supporting the conversion of indigenous Kalash people to Islam. &#8220;We motivate the Kalash people to embrace Islam,&#8221; the khateeb said. &#8220;It is our religious duty to make Kalash people Muslim.&#8221; Maulana Zaman appealed to all Muslims to help and support newly converted Muslim people. Experts warn that the indigenous Kalash culture will become extinct in the next 20 years as 15 per cent of the Kalash people convert to Islam every year.

Obviously as I am not a Muslim and I love Kallash culture this worries me.

Source: Mulung-TV

 

[Enigma SIG]

This article is insulting all the minority community people calling them kafirs and the place as kafirstan.
Why are people so desperate to convert other people to Islam by force ?

Kafir is not a derogatory word. I dont know why Indians see it that way. It simply means "Unbeliever". In a sense I am a Kafir to Hindu beliefs; that is i do not believe what you believe.

 

[Cheeta]

And mind you Kafristan was named about 3/4 hundred years back when unfortunately Pakistan was part of the India.

Of course Sir; Zaheeruddin Mohammad Babur has written in his Tuzuk that There is a place in the north east of Lamghanat(Ningarhar and Jalalabad of today) where people live in mountains and beyond that is Kafiristan these people are not aware of social manners and are almost idiots. It was written five hundred years ago and more than six hundred years ago Amir Taimur writes about Kafiristan when he did conquer its capital(which is the village of Birgamatal in Nuristan valley now) and left there a thousand Islamic priests to teach Islam to them and convert them as a whole to Islam. Those thousand religious men were put to death after the return of Taimur and then he did not have a chance to go back again and avenge the massacre.