Mustafa Qadri
Last Updated:
People in a Pakistani frontier region threatened by the Taliban are trying to preserve a culture rich in poetry and dance from religious extremism.
The culture of the ethnic Pashtun peoples often delights in worldly pleasures – like sex and alcohol – considered un-Islamic by religious conservatives.
In the Badaber district of North-West Frontier province, the poems of the great Pashto literary figure, Ghani Khan, are still recited.
Khan celebrated such pleasures as “my beloved, my youth, and a cup of wine”.
Promises
He also offers a more immediate answer to any preaching about rewards in paradise:
Give the promises of eternal bliss to the Mullah after my death;
Could dreams of nymphs in the afterlife ever satisfy the poor?
Give me here just one nymph, smart, exalted and mesmerizing;
O God, if you do not do this, then keep your heavenly bounties;
I need them neither here nor in the afterlife.
The Taliban and other militant groups that champion a strict interpretation of Islam challenge such poetry.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, in the Swat valley before its recapture by the Pakistani army, the Taliban murdered several dancers and soothsayers they deemed immoral.
In Badaber, members of an anti-Taliban lashkar, or army, defend the vitally strategic tribal region, where the Taliban and government security forces wrestle for control.
Fazal Maula, who works for a non-government aid organisation there, told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia that Badaber, surrounded by tribal areas and with Peshawar province also on one side, is “the gateway into Peshawar”.
“Hardly six to seven kilometre area, in other words, protect the whole Peshawar from militancy and terrorism,” he says.
Ghani Khan (1914-1996) was the eldest son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi, who led the Pathans of today’s Pakistani North-West Frontier against British colonialism.
Outdates
His poetry echoes a style of verse that outdates the Taliban by about a century.
It paints a very different picture of the Pashtun peoples, who have more recently become associated with extremism.
But local communities are forming networks across religious, gender and political lines to preserve their culture and protect their society.
Fazal Maula says: “The people of Badaber area constituted different committees on the grassroots level to become united and to face this terrorism in the area.
“In this mobilisation process, mullah were also involved.”
But with many decades of radicalisation to contend with, it will take some time for the great poets to be heard in full again.