Pashtun artists: ‘When you lose your culture, you’re faceless and vulnerable’

Jamal Shah is painting a body crouched and contorted in “murgha”, a form of corporal punishment used in South Asia. “It’s a metaphor for how people have been exploited and dehumanised in Pakistan,” says the silver-haired Pashtun artist at his visual and performing arts school in Islamabad.

Shah is a decorated and multi-hyphenated figure in Pakistani cultural life. “I trained as a visual artist but I’m more of a drifter,” says Shah (66) who has had parallel careers as an actor, director, musician and former director general of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts.

The artist was born in Balochistan, an elephantine but sparsely populated province along Pakistan’s border with Iran and Afghanistan. It’s an area which has long drawn militants and smugglers and where nomadic Pashtun tribes historically roamed.

“Pashtuns have always been fierce fighters,” says Shah in the office beside his studio. “They’ve never left any invader in peace, whether it was Alexander the Great, the Persians, or the British.”

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The US joined that select list when the predominantly Pashtun Taliban retook Kabul last August after two decades of insurgency.

Today, about 50 million Pashtuns lie on either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, their Pashtun nation severed by the Durand Line. The border was imposed in 1893 by the foreign secretary of India, Mortimer Durand, when Pakistan formed part of British India.

“By and large though all Pashtuns in Pakistan still call themselves Afghans,” says Shah “although the term Pashtun is much older”.

In her travel book on Northern Pakistan in the 1970s, the late Dervla Murphy described Pashtun hospitality as a “blending of complete informality with meticulous attention to every tiny need [that] makes one feel simultaneously an honoured guest and a loved member of the family”.

Almost as famed as Pashtun hospitality are their ferocious blood feuds. Governed by a code called Pashtunwali that prioritises honour and condones revenge, Pashtuns have often engaged in vicious intertribal fighting to avenge their clan’s honour.

Pashtunwali was enforced by tribal councils known as jirgas and provided certain rules of engagement for fighters. “Even in the worst cases, Pashtunwali doesn’t allow anyone to harm a woman, elderly person or child,” says Shah, “but now that’s gone.”

Since the so-called war on terror began, Pashtuns living in Pakistan’s northwestern frontier have been routinely targeted and caught in the crossfire of the Taliban’s battle with the Pakistani and American militaries. “There was no honour or dignity when they left,” says Shah.

In Peshawar, which lies 50km from the Afghan border, local artist Arshad Hussain describes how he was abducted in 2008 by the Taliban because of his work on a Pashto-language entertainment channel – “I was blindfolded and kept in chains for nine days.”

The Taliban in Pakistan, which operates separately from the Afghan branch, attacked his son’s school in Peshawar, massacring 147 students and teachers in 2014. “Everybody’s suffering because of this extremism,” says Hussain.

When the Afghan communist party led a coup in 1978, it had “a certain appeal”, says Shah. “Pashtun culture was not alien to socialism.” Many Pashtuns had already become involved in the workers’ movement in the 1960s and 1970s in Karachi where they dominated the transport sector.

The fledgling communist regime in Kabul, however, proved cruel, divided and divisive to the country’s many devout Muslims. In an effort to install a new communist leader, the Soviet Union embarked on a quixotic and devastating invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The US saw an opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union with a long and drawn-out foreign war and began to fund an international force of religious Muslim fighters known as the mujahideen to fight the Soviet forces.

“People were brought to Pakistan to be trained while Pashtuns were recruited through madrasas which had started mushrooming here,” says Shah.

Many of the madrasas were funded by Saudi Arabia, which feared the growing influence of Shia Iran. The religious schools preached Deobandism and Wahhabism, puritanical forms of Sunni Islam which prohibited non-religious music and dance.

“Historically, Pashtuns were liberal Muslims because their culture dominated their religion,” says Shah. “The madrasas injected radical Islam very cleverly into Pashtun communities [which are predominantly Sunni], as they knew they would be the best soldiers. They were turned into ferocious monsters.”

With casualties high and the war at a stalemate, Soviet forces withdrew in 1989. Afghanistan was left in the control of several mujahideen warlords, and a coalition quickly fell apart and plunged the impoverished country into anarchy.

Many of the tribal leaders who formed jirgas and resolved conflicts within Pashtun communities were killed during the Soviet-Afghan war. The loss of these leaders combined with the growing influence of religious madrasas meant that the jirgas were increasingly replaced by Sharia law courts.

These courts adhere to a strict legal code based on Islamic scriptures. In contrast “jirgas were personal and very pluralistic”, says Shah “except for the inclusion of women who never became part of the jirga”.

The nascent Taliban began challenging the warlords in 1994. Its founder, Mullah Omar, had received military training in Pakistan during the Afghan-Soviet War and strictly adhered to Deobandism.

“Initially, people were appreciative of them because they were willing to counter the atrocities of the warlords,” says Shah, “but within a few months, they were doing the same things as the warlords.”

After seizing Kabul in 1996, the Taliban drew inspiration from Saudi Arabia and established a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice which enforced a prohibition on music and dance. “We lost our customs and our festivals,” says Shah. “When you lose your culture, you’re faceless, you’re vulnerable.”

“Lots of writers, musicians and dancers were either killed or stopped from performing by the clergy,” he says. “They knew that Pashtuns cling to their culture and that becomes their strength.”

“Artists and musicians are soft targets,” says Hussain. The Pakistani Taliban have imposed similar music bans in ethnic Pashtun areas under its influence such as Waziristan and Khyber.

After the fall of Kabul last August, many Pashtun artists in Afghanistan struggled to secure asylum in western countries and fled across the border to Peshawar. “There’s no work and they’re struggling for their livelihood, says Hussain. “The police keep harassing them on the streets because they don’t have visas.”

“I raised my voice for the Afghani artists because for me art is beyond borders,” says the Pashtun actor. “Art connects and brings us closer and that is a very powerful tool.”