7 Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands

In 1914, Husayn Ahmad Madani (1879–1957) and ‘Ubaydullah Sindhi (1872–1944), two members of the Dar al-‘Ulum madrasa, at Deoband, in northern India, proposed that the Pashtun tribe represented the ideal of a Muslim society and could steer the fate of the Indian Muslim nation. They called for a jihad in the Indian northwest supported both by nationalist Indians and members of the Afghan court. Although it received a great deal of attention from the colonial authorities, this short-lived movement failed to accomplish anything. Moreover, through attention to treatment of the principle of tribalism in other vernacular Urdu and Persian texts, this chapter argues that the view of the tribe as a model for the Muslim nation as proposed in Jama‘at-i Mujahidin politics and in historiography was completely incompatible both with the participatory nationalist political discourses in the North-West Frontier Province of colonial India and with the Afghan nationalist project of knowledge production. This fact would be unexceptional were it not for that fact that the idea of Pashtun Islamic tribal valor was resuscitated subsequently during the 1978–85 mobilization of anti-Soviet resistance. Because of this aftermath of the Jama‘at-i Mujahidin movement, it is useful to consider the inadequacies of the movement and the counternarratives to the idea of Islamic religiosity and valor as foundational principles of tribal order in the Pashtun highlands, both in the Jama‘at-i Mujahidin’s own time and in the later twentieth century. A growing body of scholarly work identifies multiple coexistent patterns of Pashtun social and political organization in the Indo-Afghan borderlands, meaningfully complicating binary views of tribe and the state in eastern Afghanistan, and the role of religion in shaping a social order. I have argued in an early work 7