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Origins of Pashtuns
(Who Are Pashtuns)?
By:
Ali Maisam Nazary
The Afghans a.k.a Pashtuns are people that
live in modern day Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
They speak an Indo-European language called Pashto or Pakhtu.
Little is known about where these people and their ancestors originated from.
However, months of research has revealed that “Afghans” was not a description
of an ethnicity or a nation. Instead, the concept of “Afghans” was the result
of an alliance between various tribes that spoke Pashto. We have categorized Pashtuns in three groups: Durranis/Abdalis
who live in modern day Afghanistan;
Ghilzais who are descendants of Sher
Khan Suri, and the Karlanris
who are eastern tribes like Afridis, Bangash, Waziris, etc. Each
category has its own story and has its own origins.
The original tribes of Gandahara
Valley (Peshawar) were called Karlanris.
They were tribes which spoke the first dialect of Pashto. According to The Pathans by Olaf Caroe, the first records found about these people were
during the Parthian dynasty of Persia
written by a Greek Historian named Herodotus. Herodotus says that Karlanris were Indo Aryan and Dravidians that migrated to
the west. Elphinestone tells us that Karlanris are descendants of Qais
and so they are Semitic. Olaf Caroe
also states that Karlanris aren’t Afghans but Pathans.
The next group is the Ghilzais. The Ghilzai Tribe is the biggest Afghan tribe. They live
mostly between the Durand Line and speak Pakhtu
which is similar to Pashto. The Ghilzais are the
archrivals of the Durranis another Afghan tribe. Our
Team has concluded that there are three theories behind their origins. Olaf Caroe states in The Pathans that Ghilzais are
descendants of Khalaj Turks who came with Attila
and the Huns. Mahmoud Kashgari,
writing in Baghdad
in the eleventh century and the Russian orientalist
Barthold both identified the Ghilzais
also as the Turkish Khalaj, who made up one of the
twenty-four clans of the tribal confederacy of the Oghuz
Turks. Olaf Caroe also
states that after several centuries these tribes became Pashtunized
and they formed a unique dialect of Pakhtu with a
lot of Turkish vocabulary.
He also says the word Ghilzai comes from Khalaj which
evolved through time from Khalaj to Khalji to Ghalji to Ghalzai or Ghilzai. The next
theory for their origins is that Bibi Mato, a Pashtun woman whose
father was Bitan, the son of Qais,
was raped by a Turkish prince, Prince Hussein, who was traveling
to the Suleiman
Mountains. Bibi Mato bore a son and she
named him Ghalzai which means ‘son of a thief.’ Ghilzai was Ibrahim Lodhi's half brother. Lodhi
which means eldest in Pashto was older than Ghilzai.
People today think Lodhi and Ghilzai
are the same but they aren’t. The third theory is that most Ghilzai sub-tribes like Mangal,
Jaji, Jadran, and Karot, etc are descendants of Genghis Khan. In Paul
Kahn’s The Secret History of the Mongols Kahn says that Jadarin
is the name of the clan that Changiz Khan was from
and Jaji was the name of Changiz's
grandfather who was also the leader of the Jadarin
clan. "Orya" is the name of one of Changiz's grandson and "Oryakhil"
is a name of a Ghilzai tribe. It also says Karo was the title of a spiritual man in the clan of Changiz Khan's first wife. And now, Karokhil
is the name of the name of a Ghilzai tribe. And
Also Mongols call themselves Mangal and a Ghilzai tribe is called Mangal
in Paktia.
The last Afghan group is the Abdalis or the Durranis. The Abdalis were
actually from the Suleiman Mountains and they started migrating to southern Afghanistan
around the 17th and 18th centuries. They were called Abdalis
until Ahmad Khan Abdali changed it to Durrani because Nadir Afshar
called him Dur e Durran
which means Pearl of Pearls in Parsi. The Abdalis have been ruling Afghanistan from 1747 to 1978
when Daud Khan was overthrown in the Saur Revolution. Today, most of them are Persianized and don’t know a single word of Pashto. In
the book Maghzan e Afghan written by Nehmatullah during the Mughul
dynasty of India, it
states that Afghan was the grandson of King Saul or King Talut
of Israel.
Afghan was raised in David's Court and was a great general for King Salomon. When
the Babylonians destroyed Israel
the descendants of Afghan named Afghana migrated to
the Mountains west of India
which they named the mountains after Suleiman.
When Muhammad was in Medina, Qais, the leader of
the Afghans traveled to Medina where he meet Prophet Muhamad and converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdur Rashid. Well this is more a myth than reality
because four hundred years after Prophet Muhamad
died Afghans formed an alliance with the Rajputs
against Sultan Mahmouds campaign to convert the
people. In his book Afghan Namah, Dr. Afshar Yazdi says that the Durranis were Semitic who spoke a Pashto dialect that had
a lot of Hebrew vocabulary and that Durranis served
Darius and his descendants. Olaf Caroe also states that the Durranis
are Semitic and that they are the descendants of Abdal
the great grandson of Sarbanr which was Qais's eldest son. Another Theory on their origins is
that the Abdalis were Hephthalites*.There
are indeed signs for a Hephthalite origin for the Abdali Pashtuns.The Hephthalite, a coalition of many different nomadic tribes
of Turkistan, predominantly Eastern Iranian speaking, created a powerful
empire in the Hindu Kush until they were defeated
and totally destroyed by Sassanid Shahnshah Khusrow Anushirvan (in alliance with Oghuz
Turks, probably the Khilji). Until their destrcution, the Hephthalites
were the "de facto" rulers of Persia. They were the ones who
managed to kill Piruz and who kept the young Khusrow as a puppet. They managed to defeat the Chinese
and the Oghuz and Kyrgiz
Turks.
The final battle lasted 8
days, and the leader of the Hephthalites was killed
by the Persians.the Hephthalites
were hunted and killed, and only a very few managed to hide themselves in the
mountains of the Hindu Kush or to escape to India
(where they re-appeared as "White Huns" under Mihirakula
Khaqan - obviously led by a Turkish elite, "Mihirakula" being the Indian pronounciation
of the Turkish name "Mihr-Qul",
"slave of Mitra", a common name among
Turks influenced by Persian mythology back then). Right here stops the
history of the "Hephthalites" - they
totally disappeared from history. And suddenly, out of the
"barbarian" tribes of the Hindu Kush, a
new tribe rises to power: the "Abdali
confederation" (striking similarities to "Hephthalite"),
speaking an Eastern Iranian tongue (like the Hephthalites,
who spoke an un-known Eastern Iranian language and usually used Bactrian as
the administrative language), having a "Turkic-like" clan-system
(the Hephthalites were a confederation of Iranian,
Turkic, and Mongol nomads), and being very patriarchic
(indicating later Turkish influences among the descendants of the Hephthalites, since they were - like all Iranian and
Indian peoples - "women-friendly", even preforming
polyandry).
*A small note regarding the name:
"Hephthalites", "Haytali"
or "Hephtal"
were the names of this nomadic confederation. The term "White Hun"
was invented by Procopius of Caesaria,
who believed the Hephthalites to be
"Huns", although they looked different (indo-european
instead of east-asian like the Huns) and behaved
different (they preformed - like Persians and Bactrians
- polyandry, while Huns and Mongols had patriarchic
system). That's why he called them "White Huns".
References:
The Pathans by Olaf
Caroe
Afghan Nama
by Dr Afshar Yazdi
Encyclepedia of Britanicca
Encyclepedia of Iranica
Maghzan e Afghan by Nehmatullah
Tareekh Al Hind by Al Beruni
alinazary@msn.com
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