Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  Education was the problem, Mousa agreed. He had served in the army, three decades earlier or so, alongside a man from northern Egypt. Muslims and Christians mostly go to school together, in state-run schools (there are Christian-run schools that were set up by Western missionaries in the nineteenth century, but they are too expensive for poorer Copts to afford; they cater to upper-middle-class Copts and Muslims). Because Christians had historically lived mostly in the south, this northern man had never met one before. When he saw the cross that Mousa was wearing, he shrank away. “What is this cross?” he asked Mousa, and added, “I was taught that it was a demonic symbol.” In a Pew poll in 2011–12, only 22 percent of Egyptian Muslims said they knew anything about Christian beliefs or practices—the schools’ syllabus does not provide an adequate understanding of religions other than Islam—and 96 percent thought that Christians would go to hell.

  Despite their stories, this group of Copts still had great affection for their country. Mousa’s nine-year-old daughter was sitting in a corner of the room, writing on a piece of paper; when I looked at what she had written it was in English, in pens of different colors: “Egypt is my mother. Egypt is my blood. I love you Egypt.” But Copts were leaving Egypt, I said to George as he drove me back to Minya one last time. “Everyone would go if they had the chance,” George said. “Muslims are a bit better off than Christians because they can work in Saudi Arabia. And security is a special problem for Christians, but it’s bad for everyone. I have a good place and a nice job, but I’d give it up tomorrow to go to America and work in a restaurant, if it would provide my son with a good safe future.” Emigration to the West is the Copts’ preferred way out. In the United States there are more than two hundred Coptic churches and an estimated three-quarters of a million Copts.

  The next day I took the slow train back to Cairo. There was one more thing for me to do before leaving Egypt. I got on the city’s Metro and returned to the church of St. Thérèse, fourteen years after my last visit. I arrived about halfway through a service. There was Father Paul saying Mass, and two men I knew, Ashraf and Magdi, were acting as deacons—clashing cymbals at the holiest moments, just as their forebears had done for thousands of years. I caught up with the three of them after the service as they walked across to the presbytery. Father Paul had a slight stoop, and Ashraf’s hair was white, but they remembered me. Where was Samih? I asked. He had gone to America, they said; he went to study and ended up staying. What had happened to Maggie? She had married a French man and gone to Paris. Where was Wael? He had followed his dream of becoming a fashion model in Beirut. It was not the Copts who would lose from all this outflow of talent, I thought: it was Egypt.

  I went back to the church. A woman in a black Islamic niqab, with only her eyes showing, had waited for the Mass to end before coming forward from her seat at the back. She lit one of the thin wax candles that stood in a tray of sand by a pillar, then slowly descended the steps that led down to the crypt chapel. I followed, to say goodbye to the saint whose effigy lay down there. As we stood in front of it, the Muslim woman leaned down and touched St. Thérèse’s side.

  7: Kalasha

  In summer 2007 I was on a flight to Kabul from Islamabad, which had meant several hours of sitting on my bags in Islamabad’s departure terminal. It was easy to tell when foreigners were heading for Kabul: they were mostly burly, muscular characters with North Face backpacks. I was an exception—a very unmuscular diplomat headed for a year’s assignment running the political team at the British embassy. The landscape I saw out the plane’s window looked as if it had been unchanged for centuries. “Mountains brown like snuff,” one British traveler had called them, “ten-thousand-foot mounds with the track snaking its way through for mile on heavy mile.” Looking closely, I could spot thin green threads between the hills, which were the valleys. Human habitation was not visible at all.

  Gazing eastward, I saw high peaks rising sheer above the green valleys and the brown mountains, up to a height of twenty-four thousand feet. These were the Hindu Kush, a great mountain range that runs along the eastern borders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and separates those countries from China. They are really part of the Himalayas. Though they are called the “Roof of the World,” it is more apt to think of them as a wall or a rampart: many times over, they have been the furthest point eastward that any people has reached. These mountains are to human cultures what coral reefs are to marine life: rich and diverse. In the Afghan section of the Hindu Kush, for example, in an area the size of New Jersey twenty indigenous and mutually unintelligible languages are spoken.

  Alexander the Great reached these mountains but made no effort to cross them—thinking, perhaps, that they formed the very easternmost edge of the world. Their inhabitants taunted him, undaunted by the fact that he was the conqueror of Persia and ruler of the greatest empire the world had yet seen: to capture their inaccessible hideaways, they said, he would need “soldiers with wings.” In one of these battles, Alexander was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow. The great commander had never lost a battle in the eight years since he had left his homeland in northern Greece. But these opponents, one of Alexander’s chroniclers recorded, were the toughest fighters that he encountered in his entire Indian campaign. Alexander was so impressed that he married a local girl, Roxane (“the loveliest woman they had seen in Asia,” his soldiers thought, with the exception only of the Persian empress).

  Alexander was not the only conqueror to be withstood by the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush. The Arab armies that brought Islam to Afghanistan and northern India from the seventh century onward seem to have satisfied themselves with governing the rich lowland cities, and left the mountain people well alone. In the fourteenth century the brutal central Asian conqueror Tamerlane came close to conquering them: he fought his way up to the mountains’ highest citadel. He could not maintain his control, however, and the local people never converted to Islam. Long after Tamerlane, the people of this place still offered sacrifices to their gods Imra and Gish, drank wine, and danced—women and men together—on wooden platforms they precariously rigged up in villages clinging limpet-like to the steep mountainsides. Their frightened Muslim neighbors called them kafirs (unbelievers), a label they appear to have accepted with relish at the time. The region where they lived was called Kafiristan.

  Marco Polo did not care for them when he passed by in the thirteenth century. “They are idolaters and utter savages, living entirely by the chase and dressed in the skins of beasts,” he wrote. “They are out and out bad.” That was not wholly inaccurate—the Kafirs did indeed wear animal skins, and did not practice agriculture—but it is doubtful that Polo ever went near them. A long time passed after Alexander’s visit before any Westerner looked on the Hindu Kush again.

  —————

  Two Catholic missionaries are believed to have entered Kafiristan at the end of the eighteenth century (based on stories told by its inhabitants to later visitors). One was killed by the Kafirs after being mistaken for an evil spirit; neither left any record of what they saw. In the 1820s, an Illinois-born, part-Hispanic, Irish-accented, Jesuit-educated Unitarian named Alexander Gardner traveled to central Asia in search of adventurous employment (he would become, for a time, a highwayman). In the words of his admiring biographer, his time in the region was marked by “ambuscades, fierce reprisals, hairbreadth escapes, episodes sometimes of brutality and cruelty wellnigh inconceivable, at other times of hearty charity and fidelity unto death.” He took the local name Gordana Khan.

  Gardner claimed to have entered Kafiristan twice, but his original record of the visit was lost when Sir Alexander Burnes, the British envoy to Kabul, who had the only copy, was killed by a mob at the start of the Afghan war (some at the time said that the mob were urged on by Afghan men whom the flamboyant Burnes had cuckolded). Burnes, cousin to the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, was a fluent Persian-speaker and did leave a record of testimony that he had receiv
ed from Kafirs in Kabul, testimony that reveals their practices of burying their dead in coffins in the open air, selling off their girl children at a price determined by their size, and men reconciling blood feuds by sucking each other’s nipples.

  After Burnes’s death many years passed in which Kafiristan went unvisited. It came to be called the “dark spot on the map of Asia”—a place that even the British imperial government of India, which sent spies to map out the most inaccessible and forbidden places on its borders, could not penetrate. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British planned to produce a gazetteer about Kafiristan, as they had for every other area that bordered India, but in this case—uniquely—they gave up.

  Yet the British authorities had a strong interest in learning more about places such as Kafiristan, which abutted the northern edge of their British possessions: the biggest outside threat to their empire in India in the late nineteenth century was Russia, which was swallowing up central Asia and progressing south at a rapid pace. Scouting out the areas like Kafiristan that lay between the British and the Russians, with the goal of either winning them as allies or taking them as possessions, became a decades-long endeavor known as the Great Game. This was how a certain Lieutenant McNair, veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan War, found himself at the border of Kafiristan in 1883 during his official leave, darkening his skin with walnut juice and packing measuring instruments into a disguised medicine bag. He was transforming himself into “Sahib Gul McNair Hussain Shah” and hoping to enter Kafiristan in the company of two friends from a local Pashtun tribe. It must have given McNair pause to climb down a path lined with cairns of rocks that imperfectly covered the corpses of previous travelers murdered by the Kafirs, who were brutal in protecting their separateness. “Of all notable deeds,” McNair recorded, “among Kafirs that of slaying a [Muslim] is reckoned first.” The head of the victim would be put in a tall tree. Luckily, the two men who were with McNair belonged to a tribe that was regarded by the Kafirs with superstitious dread and whose members were therefore generally allowed to pass without harm.

  McNair’s visit to the Kafirs was very brief, and he discovered little. He estimated their number at two hundred thousand. He added that “their idols are legion, each valley, glen and dale has some that are unknown except in that particular locality: these are supposed to represent heroes who lived among them in days of old and who now as spirits intercede with Amra in their behalf.” Their wine was weak, he thought, and they were amazed by the whisky he had thoughtfully brought with him. Most significant, he noted that they were “exceedingly well disposed towards the British . . . they would not hesitate to place their services, should occasion require, at our disposal.” He recorded all of this in a pamphlet stamped “Secret” that he lodged with the intelligence division of the British War Office. As an appendix to it, he wrote a vocabulary list showing what he thought a future visitor might need to say, such as “It is steep and I may fall” and “I will offer a goat to Amra.”

  McNair’s insights were shallow, and Kafiristan remained an enigma until the arrival of George Scott Robertson. Robertson, originally an army doctor, was from the wild and remote Orkney Islands. He perhaps found some echo of home in the “veritable faery country” that he spotted from a mountaintop during a posting as an administrator in the very northwestern tip of British India. “Stretching far into the nothingness beyond” was how he described this view of Kafiristan. From that moment, as he tells us in a book that he later wrote about his expedition, he was hooked. While resident as the British political officer in nearby Gilgit he kept an eye out for any Kafirs that he might find there, and eventually some visited the region and were introduced to him. At first he found their appearance off-putting, but then he saw that “the vile brown robe, trailing at the heels, conceals active and athletic forms: that the bland insinuating faces are keen and well-formed, and can give at times the bold fixed stare, or the wild, quick glance of the hawk; and that the men playing the part of cringing beggars . . . are capable at any moment of throwing off the mask of humility and assuming their proper characteristics.” He discovered just how true that was when he managed to get permission not just to visit the Kafirs but to live among them for what turned out to be an entire year.

  He discovered that the people called the Kafirs were divided into many tribes, whose languages and practices differed. The Kafirs’ religion, moreover, had once been shared by other neighboring peoples who now lived under Muslim rule. One of these peoples was called the Kalasha. Unlike those Kafirs in the high mountains who had remained free, the Kalasha’s lower-lying territory had been conquered by the mehtars (princes) of Chitral, and they had been compelled to pay tribute in the form of forced labor. The Kalasha were of no use to Robertson, who wanted to find fighting men: they were “a thoroughly servile and degraded race,” he sniffed. The tribe with which he chose to live, the Kam, were by contrast the most warlike of all the Kafirs. When trying one day to describe to the Kam what a fat man looked like, he had trouble getting them to understand. Few of them had ever seen such a thing. He met with success only when he talked to the local priest, who “for a long time was puzzled. My meaning dawned on him as he exclaimed, ‘I remember killing a man near Asmar who was just as you describe—the word is skior.’”

  The priest was not alone in being a killer. Blood feuds were not just an occasional mishap among the Kam; they were a way of life. The nearest Muslim villages were targets for murderous raids, often conducted for spoils (in such a poor community, it might be worth killing a man just to have his clothes) or as revenge for the steady encroachment of Muslim tribes on Kam land. Robertson made a list of the qualities that the Kam admired, at the top of which was an ability to kill—the other being “a good hill-man, ever ready to quarrel, and of an amorous disposition.” The Kam often had vendettas against each other, but a neat custom enabled them to dodge these if they wished: a man needed only to pretend to hide from his would-be killer, who then pretended not to see him.

  Members of a tribe who failed to kill the tribe’s sworn enemies might be pelted with ashes by their own people. They might become the target of practical jokes, and at public banquets their wives would turn their faces away when serving them with food. Gal, shame, was a powerful motivation among the Kam. So was caste. Those who slipped down the social ladder might end up among the low-caste brojan, who were liable to be bought and sold like medieval serfs. On the other hand, a young man who had killed five victims was allowed to wear a blue scarf made from their clothing; Robertson saw quite a few of these during his visit. He also met Torag Merak, a man who appears to have walked straight out of a Victorian adventure novel. Merak, “the richest man in Kafiristan,” came to see Robertson dressed in a bright red robe and carrying a bronze shield. “He had strong Semitic features, and his long locks, matted into rat’s-tails, fell upon his gaudy shoulders, while occasionally he turned a proud glance to see if the stranger appreciated his grandeur.”

  Merak claimed to have killed more than a hundred people, many of them women and children, and to celebrate the fact, he had tied a small bell to the end of his staff. ”In his gloomy eyes,” Robertson wrote, “there is a world of pathos. They belie him utterly. He is at heart a howling savage, while in repose his features are those of a man saddened from gazing on the sufferings of a troubled world.” Luckily for Robertson, being a Christian meant that he was regarded as a fellow non-Muslim and a kind of honorary Kafir. The British already had a reputation among the Kam, though of a rather peculiar kind: they told Robertson that Gish, their god of war, had gone to live in London.

  Death, in any case, was hard to ignore among the Kam. All Kafirs buried their dead in the open air, probably just because it was usually too hard to dig in the frozen ground. The stink of the rotting bodies, Robertson commented, would waft through the village when the wind blew in the wrong direction. And when there was a funeral, it was marked with a dance—with the corpse propped up on a chair in the
midst of the dancers.

  Robertson’s portrait was as unflattering in its way as Marco Polo’s had been centuries before. He wrote that the Kam never washed, that they stole from him incessantly, and that “lying comes as easily to them as breathing.” But to Robertson, steeped as he was in the British Empire’s martial tradition, these qualities were outweighed by “their splendid courage, their domestic affections, and their overpowering love of freedom.” In other ways, he says, they were made what they were by circumstance. “For them, the world has not grown softer as it has grown older . . . if they had been different, they would have been enslaved long ago.”

  For all that he admired the Kam for their love of freedom, he was the inadvertent harbinger of their subjugation. His journey had a covert purpose: the British authorities were trying to decide whether the Kafir tribes were worth including in their Empire. Robertson’s mission, disclosed in the India Office’s secret papers, was “to examine their tribal organisation and discover their value as friendly disposed but neutral allies, or active partisans in war.” His verdict was that they should be left alone. The Kafirs had, he wrote to his superiors, “no strategic or political importance whatever . . . and ought not to be interfered with in any way.” It was perhaps wise policy, proposed for good motives, but it spelled the end of Kafiristan.

  Afghanistan, whose territory the Kafirs abutted, was then ruled by Abdur Rahman Khan, called the “Iron Amir” by the British. In his memoirs, the old amir claimed that he wanted the Kafirs in his army because “they were such a brave race of people that I considered that they would in time make very useful soldiers under my rule.” (He was right: in due course they became the elite of the Afghan army.) He also wanted to outdo Tamerlane by conquering Kafiristan. And although he was not a religious zealot—he employed, for instance, a Hindu secretary—he wanted to claim the glory of a jihad against nonbelievers. In 1895 three military units loyal to Abdur Rahman advanced on Kafiristan in a pincer movement. They struck in the depths of winter, when the Kafirs would find it hard to escape. Given that his enemies, however brave and brutal, had not yet mastered the use of the rifle and were mostly fighting with bows and arrows, Abdur Rahman’s victory was guaranteed. The Kafirs were given the choice of Islam or death; in the 1950s, the British travel writer Eric Newby was shown a stone red with the blood of those who chose execution. Abdur Rahman won the title Zia ul-Millat wa ul-Din, “light of the nation and the faith.” The territory that Abdur Rahman conquered was eventually renamed Nuristan, the “land of light,” to celebrate its forced conversion.