Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [24]
Seen from a long historical perspective, things look rather different. Modern democracy is a quite recent Western innovation. In the past, European societies were in many ways close to that of Pakistan today – and indeed, modern Europe has generated far more dreadful atrocities than anything Islam or South Asia has yet achieved. In the future – who can say? The virtues of courage, honour and hospitality, in which Pakistanis excel, do after all have their permanent worth.
It may also be worthwhile in this context to recall the words which the science fiction novelist John Wyndham put into the mouth of a professor asked to give advice on future careers in a world threatened by radical climate change. He had two recommendations: ‘Find a hilltop, and fortify it’; and ‘Enlist in a regiment with a famous name. There’ll be a use for you.’21 Pakistan has plenty of famous regiments, and local chieftains have been fortifying hilltops for thousands of years. They may yet cope better with the future than the successful elites of today’s world.
A NOTE ON KINSHIP TERMS
That kinship is of critical importance in Pakistan is something on which all the academic experts agree – which is nice, because they tend to agree on nothing else about the subject. For me, the definitive word was said 100 years ago by the great British civil servant and ethnographer Sir Denzil Ibbetson. After an official career lasting decades in the Punjab, he wrote:
An old agnostic is said to have summed up his philosophy in the following words: ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am not quite sure that I know that.’ His words express very exactly my own feelings regarding caste in the Panjab. My experience is that it is almost impossible to make any statement whatever regarding any one of the castes we have to deal with, absolutely true though it may be for one part of the province, which shall not presently be contradicted with equal truth as regards the same people in some other district.22
Thus the English term ‘tribe’ can be translated into several different local words, which overlap with other English meanings. Qaum can mean tribe, people, ethnicity or even nation. Zat is related to the Indian word jati, for a ‘sub-caste’ in Hinduism. ‘Tribe’ can also mean several very different things in different parts of Pakistan. Among the Baloch tribes (not just in Balochistan but in Sindh and southern Punjab as well), a tribe means something like the old clans of Scotland, a tightly knit group under an autocratic chieftain.
Among the Pathans, however, while tribal membership is a tremendously important marker of identity and status, the tribes are divided into endless rivalrous sub-tribes, for which new leading men emerge in every generation. Meanwhile in Punjab, the Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars and others were presumably tightly knit nomadic tribes in the distant past, but long ago spread out and intermingled territorially across the whole of what is now northern India and Pakistan (the Gujjars have given their name to a state in India as well as a city in Pakistan, among many other places).
Originally assimilated to the Hindu caste system as kshatriyas (the warrior caste) thanks to their conquests, many Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs later converted to Islam or Sikhism. Within Pakistan, they have no collective overall political identity at all, but have a certain community of sentiment, including a strong sense of superiority to everyone else, and a strong preference for marrying each other. An appeal to fellow Rajput or Jat feeling may gain some limited help when all else fails. More important in terms of loyalty and mobilization is the local sub-clan, as in Chauhan Rajput, Alpial Rajput and so on. The Sayyids and Qureishis are groups peculiar to Islam, being (ostensibly) descendants of the Prophet and his clan, and therefore of Arabic