Pakhtunkhwa: A heroic history of struggle for freedom and liberty

[Toramana]

Some people-most possibly non-Pashtuns disguising as Pashtuns- here have pointed to the passivity of Pashtuns of Pukhtunkwa to invasions and occupation. To counter such claims, I cite here evidences of Pukhtunkhwa Pashtuns heroic resistance to foreign control. Such resistance was carried out both at political level as well as at the level of armed struggle.

I will begin here with era of Mughal rule. Babur, in 16th Century recruited a force around Kabul (including a sizeable number of Khwashgi Pashtuns from Ghorband to the north-west of Kabul) to bring down Pashtun Ibrahim Lodhi at Panipat. He also tried to win favor of Yousafzais of Swat but failed. With his victory over Ibrahim, the era of Mughal rule over Hindustan started. With that also started the long struggle of Pukhtunkhwa Pashtuns against Mughals.

Byzid Ansari called Pir-i-Rokhan was the first Pashtun that tried to organize a Pashtun resistance against Mughals. And the campaign he started lasted almost for three generations culminating only with the death/exile/incarceration of his grandsons Jalal Khan and Kamal Khan.

Pir-i-Rokhan was a Burki Pashtun from Kani-guram. Not only did he start a military struggle, he also motivated the first school in Pashto poetry called the Roshnaya School to which belonged such prominent poets like Mirza Khan Ansari, Arzani, Khwesgi, etc.

He also poineered Pashto script/alphabet.

[BLS_1919v2.0]

Who could say Pashtunkhwa was politically passive or militarily? There is not a village where there wasn't fighting against the british, the first non-violent army was from there, one of the first revolutionary Pashtun politicians, poets, etc. Pashtunkhwa problems are that we are political sub divided into too many polities and that has made any real measure of movement weakened...but I doubt people could fairly say Pashtunkhwa didn't struggle, they fought in all three anglo-afghan wars including other famus fronts at Dargai, khyber, waziristan, Mandokhel, Malakand division, etc.

[Toramana]

"In the middle of the 16th century a mysterious Order emerged, from among the Pashtun (Pathan) tribes in the Himalaya Mountains, in Khurasan’s easternmost provinces , which we know today as Afghanistan. These regions were then part of the Mughal State, and for over 80 years, from 1560 to 1638, the Mughal Empire battled this mysterious secret society, which rapidly spread among Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes."

http://kali-yuga.org/?p=513

"In many ways the movement itself, in a sense, represented a flowering of Pashtun nationalism. While the Pashtun Afghans inhabited the region for thousands of years, they were but one of many related Indo-Aryan nations and ethnic groups in Khorasan. They had no real literature in their language, and possessed only an inchoate sense of national status. The writings of Ansari were deliberately put in Pashtu, and not Persian (Dari)."

"These teachings were presented in highly persuasive and powerful poetic verse, and without a doubt were the first real examples of modern Pashtu literature. Shaykh Ansari’s writings influenced even the style of the polemics of his bitterest enemies, his own opponents were forced to write in his mode in their polemics against him, and he influenced such seminal literary figures as Khushal Khan Khattak (1613-1689), who helped ignite a seventeenth century revival and renaissance in Pashtu letters.
Pashtu prose and poetry not only flowered due to Ansari’s movement, but his writings formally introduced themes of esoteric mysticism into Pashtu literature. Ansari even devised the very alphabet of the Pashtu language."

[Toramana]

"Shaykh Darwaza authored a book, Makhzanul Islam (the treasure of Islam), which summed up his positions and his critique of Ansari. For a time, their respective followers continued a battle of words, each side in turn (ironically) further enriching Pashtu as a language of philosophical and religious discourse. Since Pashtu was never used as a vehicle of philosophical and religious speculation, this war of words all but defined the language in its modern form. Ansari, in particular, played a role similar to that of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Dante in codifying the modern language.

By strategic adoption of particular Pashtun tribal elders, and maintaining himself outside of the Pashtun tribal system, which made him independent of any single tribe’s patronage, Ansari was able to mold together a collective identity greater than the individual tribal level. In his genius he molded, for the first time, in the minds of these rustic, belligerent mountain Pashtuns, a sense of a greater identity. Not just a feeling of greater collective Islamic identity, but also an elite sense of identity as a Rawshanite, and for the first time, a dawning of a more lucid identity as a Pashtun, as an Afghan.

In a sense, this made Ansari into a covert father of modern Afghanistan...."

[Toramana]

"Besides his reputation as a revolutionary, Pir Roshan invented Pushto script thus ensuring the emergence of Pashto literature and writing, which enabled Khushal Khan Khattak, a century later, in his prolific contributions to Pashto poetry and prose for which Khattak is famous. Pir Roshan realized that Pashto could not be written in Arabic script owing to some of its peculiar sounds. He, therefore, invented 13 alphabets to represent those sounds, thus making written Pashto a reality. Some of these alphabets patched up vocal differences between the hard and soft dialects of Pashto as well. Some people question why Pir Roshan's contribution to Pashto nationalism and Pashto language has been sorely neglected? This is possibly attributed to two reasons: first, he was from the small—but influential—tribe of Baraki, whose mother tongue was Ormuri (a Western Persian language) not Pashto and whose lineage was attributed via his Baraki roots to the Kurdistan region and could not supposedly be traced to one of the Pashtun confederations, although rumor has it that the Barakzai (sons of Barak) are originally "Baraki." Second, his "Roshaniya" movement was militarily crushed over and over although his ideas spread beyond the Pukhtunkhwa region. The victors in a concerted effort demonized the man and his movement as being a "secret cult," and in the minds of many this character assassination stuck. Pir Roshan, however, is credited with writing the first ever book in Pashto language; Khair-ul-Bayan and thus sowing the seed of Pashto literature. The book was thought to be lost but Moulana Abdul Qaadir of Pashto Academy-Peshawar, discovered a hand-written copy of it in a Library of University of Tübingen Germany. Khairul-Bayanâ is written in four languages i.e., Pashto, Persian, and Arabic, and is considered the first book on Pashto prose."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir_Roshan

[Toramana]

Karzai wants comprehensive research on Pir Rokhan

"Afghan President Hamid Karzai has stressed the need for carrying out substantive research on the hidden aspects of Pir Rokhan. Bayazid Ansari popularly known as Pir Rokhan was an epoch-making personality who for the first time gave an awareness of national identity to the Pakhtuns.

Afghanistan Academy of Sciences and Literature, Kabul arranged a two-day national seminar on the life, literary, social and political contributions of the legendary poet, a political visionary, religious scholar and spiritual guide Bayazid Ansari alias Pir Rokhan.
Prof Abdul Bari Rashid, director Afghanistan Academy of Letters (AAL) read out a written message of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai."

http://khyberwatch.com/nandara/index...sk=view&id=242