A historical lead in: Zarif aw Awrang

[BarakzaiAbdali]

A few questions to gauge the audience for an interesting true story I want to tell you all about two Pashtuns from a bygone era: Zafir and Awrang.

Please avoid cliché responses such as "I just want my children to contribute to the world....I just want them to be good people...If your kid is Saddam what does it matter if he is a Muslim. etc" Focus on the questions at hand.

1. How important is Pashto to you with respect to passing it on to your inheritors?
2. How important is Islam?
3. Does one have more importance or is your goal to accomplish both in tandem?
4. Do you study the past to make decisions towards these goals?
5. How important is passing along the history of our people?

[BarakzaiAbdali]

PS, this story may take a long time to tell with some gaps when I have to attend to other matters, but I think you will enjoy it.

[Insight]

A few questions to gauge the audience for an interesting true story I want to tell you all about two Pashtuns from a bygone era: Zafir and Awrang.

Please avoid cliché responses such as "I just want my children to contribute to the world....I just want them to be good people...If your kid is Saddam what does it matter if he is a Muslim. etc" Focus on the questions at hand

.

1. How important is Pashto to you with respect to passing it on to your inheritors?

It is important to me but as a half-Pashtun whose father is also watered down, it is something I aspire to. Unfortunately, that is where it is at for me. I see the advantages of speaking and living Pashto especially in the West and I want that.

2. How important is Islam?

Very important, but I can improve. I don't consider myself religious just because i keep my prayers (prayers are like breathing and eating)

Aside from the spuritual connection with Allah(swt) I feel that Islam is much more.

For example, being environmentally conscious is something that is Islamic.

Being kind to animals is something the Prophet(pbuh) instructed.

Islam is much more than people realize.

3. Does one have more importance or is your goal to accomplish both in tandem?

Islam is more important to me than Pashto. Even if I spoke Pashto, I would hold the same view.

4. Do you study the past to make decisions towards these goals?

Yes.


5. How important is passing along the history of our people?[/QUOTE]

This is very important to me.

When my father was small, his father told him that we come from Bani Israel. When I was small, he started telling me the same. I know this may not address this question entirely, but stories like that kept me drawn to my identity.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Nobody wants to hear a great story of Zafar and Awrang? A true story (stories) with many important lessons for our diaspora?

[maneatinglizard]

Let’s hear it wrora.

[Admin Khan]

Salam BA wrora,

Please share.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Sorry, spelled the name wrong. Let's first talk of Zarif. A good friend of mine from my residency days sent me an article about this early Pashtun immigrant (likely the first wave) to the US.

Who knows? I may be late the game and maybe many of you read this story years ago...

Zarif Khan’s Tamales and the Muslims of Sheridan, Wyoming | The New Yorker

You will enjoy reading this amazing story of one of our early Pashtun immigrants. What we discover is that there were waves well before the large scale scattering of Pashtuns in the 1960s-1980s all across this world.

A poor 12 year old boy from Bara, Khybar agency goes abroad and builds a fortune with the odds stacked against him in a part of the United States not well known in modern times for its welcoming stance to non white immigrants. He goes on to leave devout progeny that carries forward the banner of Pashto and Islam hand in hand in that very land.

Here are some amazing quotes from this story:

Zarif Khan immigrated to the American frontier. Born around 1887, Khan came from a little village called Bara, not far from the Khyber Pass, in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His parents were poor, and the region was politically unstable. Khan’s childhood would have been marked by privation and conflict—if he had any childhood to speak of. Family legend has it that he was just twelve when he left.

But in the Rocky Mountain West the tamale trade was dominated by men from Afghanistan.

Specifically, it was dominated by men from Afghanistan with the surname Khan. (The men were generally unrelated; the name is extremely common.) In the first two decades of the twentieth century, tamale-selling Afghan Khans could be found in Deadwood and Fargo and Reno; in Seattle and Spokane and Wenatchee, Washington; in Butte, Montana, which boasted eighteen such tamale men by 1913, and all over the rest of the state as well—in Flathead, Fort Benton, Silver Bow, Anaconda, Havre, Great Falls, Red Lodge, Miles City, Chinook, Billings. Starting in 1908, you could buy tamales in Alaska from a Buhadin Khan, a Habib Khan, an M. Khan, and a guy called Tamale Joe, whose real name was likely also Khan.

He had a predecessor: one Azed Khan, born in 1871 in the Afghan village of Behbudi. Azed was the town’s first tamale vender; when Zarif first appears in the Sheridan business directory, it is as his assistant. Over the next ten years, three more tamale salesmen and one chili peddler set up shop in Sheridan. All were named Khan, all lived in the same modest house on North Scott Street, and by 1923 all but Zarif were gone.

In 1963, not long after Merriam was born, the family once again returned to Bara. This time, though, in addition to showing off his baby, Khan had business to conduct. Like many immigrants, he had spent much of his working life funneling money back home: paying to build wells and mosques in areas where travelers would otherwise have no water to drink and nowhere to pray, buying land for his relatives to farm and houses for them to live in. Now he began giving all of that away, distributing deeds to those who were living in his properties and money to nearly everyone.

Most importantly for the Pakistani brethren who are so forceful in denying the title Afghan because of the decades of propaganda hoisted on you to make you forget who you are (or worse class status makes you embarrassed of it), the most poignant quote is:

By 1914, the Sheridan Enterprise was referring to him, inaccurately but affectionately, as “the well-known Turkish tamale vendor.” (In fairness, nearly all references to Khan’s nationality were inaccurate, including his own. Although he identified as Afghan and official documents pertaining to his life reflect that, his natal village was ceded to British India before his birth, and today belongs to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.)

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Before we turn to Awrang, the lessons from Zarif Khan's life are many:

1. He never forgot who he was even though he was just a young child when he left
2. He lived his existence with nang and Islam was very very intricately tied with his nang:

He made them at home, from chickens he kept in the back yard and killed in halal fashion.

3. He lived Pashto and did not shout about his heritage or lineage from the hills. He certainly, in all those years, and with all that wealth, could have married a local but instead he went back to his people and married within his own Pashtuns. He also helped his native village and did what is very hard for our people: ceded land he had purchased to people.
4. He left his family early and in untimely fashion but their love for Islam and their heritage comes through even through today. That is Zarif's greatest legacy in Wyoming. And these same descendants struggle for Islam and maintaining the houses of worship.

For those that want to hear and know more:
The Wyoming Legacy Of Zarif Khan

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Awrang's story is a bit more detailed and interesting and goes in a different direction. Next time.

[Traveller]

I've always been interested with the stories of people from modern-day Pakistani Pakhtunkhwa who migrated to the west before or just after the creation of Pakistan(In this guy's case he was born before the Durand Line agreement which makes it even more interesting) and how they identified themselves. Thank you for sharing. Can't wait to hear Awrang's story

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I've always been interested with the stories of people from modern-day Pakistani Pakhtunkhwa who migrated to the west before or just after the creation of Pakistan(In this guy's case he was born before the Durand Line agreement which makes it even more interesting) and how they identified themselves. Thank you for sharing. Can't wait to hear Awrang's story

Will be the first time it is ever heard publicly beyond some inaccurate references here and there, as I have met Awrang's family. Perhaps when it is told those that own him can do him the justice of resurrecting his legacy and remembering him after they forgot him. I personally would not wish to own that legacy - but he was one of our people so we will tell his story if at least as cautionary tale.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

PS Admin
Can you correct the thread title to change it from Zafir to Zarif ?

[torkham]

A few questions to gauge the audience for an interesting true story I want to tell you all about two Pashtuns from a bygone era: Zafir and Awrang.

Please avoid cliché responses such as "I just want my children to contribute to the world....I just want them to be good people...If your kid is Saddam what does it matter if he is a Muslim. etc" Focus on the questions at hand.

1. How important is Pashto to you with respect to passing it on to your inheritors?
VERY IMPORTANT. I USE PASHTO WITH MY CHILDREN AND MY RELATIVES AND HOPE MY CHILDREN WILL ACHIEVE FLUENCY. FOR COHESION, IT IS MY EGO, SUPEREGO AND ID.
2. How important is Islam?
PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE. ISLAM IS A PART OF ME AND IF IT IS DETACHED THAN I SHALL CEASE TO EXIST AS I.
3. Does one have more importance or is your goal to accomplish both in tandem?
LANGUAGE AND FAITH ARE TWO DIFFERENT STRANDS; WHERE PASHTO AND ISLAM HEAD RESPECTIVE STRANDS.
4. Do you study the past to make decisions towards these goals?
YES. I CONSIDER THE PRECEDENTS OF MY ANCESTORS AND WEIGH MY SOCIAL AND CULTURAL DECISIONS IN LIGHT OF SUCH.
5. How important is passing along the history of our people?
I AM OF OPINION THAT IT IS IMPORTANT TO PASS ON OUR HISTORY TO OUR PEOPLE FOR MAINTAINING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COHESION.

Come BA, the tension is high lol. Elaborate on the Aurangzeb story.

[Insight]

I think this is kind of relevant

When I was in the UK visiting my grandfather's grave there was a gravestone nearby belonging to a Dost Muhammad Khan from Peshawar. He had married an English woman. It said her name on his gravestone.

He arrived in London in 1940s or something. Everytime I am at that graveyard, I see that grave. I have always wondered if his descendants are still Muslim and still identify as Pashtun OR if they have melted and lost their identity.

Sure there is love that crosses religious/ethnic differences but sometimes at what cost to a man/woman's legacy and descendants especially if the spouse does not fully commit to a conversion and new culture.

[Iblis_Efreetzai]

"At the end of time, a moment will come when just one man remains. Then the moment will pass. Man will be gone. There will be nothing to show that we were ever here... but stardust." - from the film Sunshine