Pashtun tribal society is a broadly studied phenomenon on which scholarship has been conducted dating from the Babur-nama of the mid-seventeenth century.39 English language scholarship dates from the first substantive contact between the British and the Pashtuns in
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Jordan‟s population of just over 6 million includes around a million Palestinian refugees still living in camps, and as much as twice that number integrated into Jordanian society. In addition there are between 700,000 and a million Iraqi‟s living in Jordan as refugees as a result of the war in Iraq. See: „UNRWA Country and Area Distribution of Palestinian Refugees‟;
http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/pdf/rr_countryandarea.pdf . Accessed 17th October, 2010. See also Black, Ian „Rich or Poor. A million Iraqi refugees strain the hospitality of Jordan‟ The Guardian 24thJanuary, 2007; http://wwwguardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan24/iraq.ianblack . Accessed 17th October 2010.
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Saudi Prince Khalid al Faisal, who is the governor of Makkah (Mecca), placed the number of Hajj pilgrims at 2,521,000 for Hajj 1430 A.H. (2009 C.E.). See: The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Washington D.C., Public Affairs Section, „2,521,000 pilgrims participated in Hajj 1430‟;
http://www.saudiembassy.net/latest_news/news11290904.aspx . Accessed 18th October, 2010. The lesser pilgrimage of Umrah saw 3,950,000 in 2010. See Nuqudy News Portal “ةيدوعسلا: فصو رايلم ريال
قافوا هيرمتعملا غلابلا مهددع 3,950 نويلم” available at http://www.nuqudy.com/20100912922/arab-markets/
. Accessed 20th October, 2010.
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The Baburnama is an autobiographical account of Zahir ud Din Muhammad Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, firstly in Afghanistan and then over most of the Indian subcontinent, between 1526 and 1858. Included in it is a section addressing the origins and tribal organanisation of the Pashtuns, the first such literary work to do so. See: Beveridge, Annette (translator) Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur ,Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1979.
the early nineteenth century.40 Since then, an extensive body of literature has been developed addressing the Pashtun tribal phenomenon from historical, sociological and anthropological perspectives. Absent from this literature is a treatment of the Afghan borderland specifically from the perspective of borderland studies, an omission made more conspicuous by the fact that the Afghan borderland is one of the most enduring, salient and dynamic borderlands of all .
Extensive literature has been dedicated to mapping the Pashto language and the Pashtun culture manifest in pashtunwali. This literature constitutes indispensable background information for a borderland study, establishing the socio-cultural context within which the borderland phenomenon occurs. The core works in this regard in the English language emerged in the 1950s, a period that saw a growth in the treatment of Pashtun tribes in sociological literature. Olaf Caroe’s The Pathans (1958) remains the most comprehensive treatise in the English language on Pashtun society to date. James Spain’s The Way of the Pathans (1962) is another work of note from the same period. Beyond these authors, there have been a host of works by retired diplomats and military officials treating aspects of Pashtun culture, society, history and politics. A number of noteworthy analytical studies have been published between 1960 and 1980 treating specific themes within the social sciences, ranging from analyses of structures of tribal authority, to aspects of women’s roles both in the political life of the tribe and in family roles, to patterns of trade, land ownership and conflict resolution amongst tribes. From this period, Louis Dupree’s Afghanistan (1973) is the most comprehensive, testified to by its lasting relevance today.
The 1980’s saw a renewed focus in literature dedicated to Pashtun studies, driven by the writings of prominent journalists detailing their experiences with the mujahideen during the anti-Soviet campaign. A trend emerged seeing the publication of a large number of works covering Pashtun dynamics, largely portraying the Pashtun as egalitarian, freedom-loving and natural allies of the west.41 The emergence of the Taliban in the early 1990s was covered less extensively, with a renewed critical focus on the militia emerging from before the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban (2001) is a notable work from the period,
40 The first major work in the English language is Mountstuart Elphinstone‟s An Account of the
Kingdom of Caubul. See: Elphinstone, Mountstuart An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Brown and Murray, London 1815 (Reprinted Oxford University Press, London, 1972).
41 Prominent in this trend are the works of Sandy Gall. As well as reporting from Afghanistan with the
Mujahideen, Gall also produced two documentaries covering the anti-soviet struggle which were also
published as written works: Afghanistan: Behind Russian Lines (1982); Allah Against the Gunships (1984); and Agony of a Nation (1986).
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characterised by emboldening the threat perception of the Taliban, a trend further contributed to by literature dedicated to developmental aid and reconstruction efforts in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and FATA. During the same period, Pashtun culture has tended to be covered in the context of its suitability in providing a haven for trans-national threats to state-security, particularly to that of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but with an increasingly extra- regional threat perception since 2009.42 Most of this literature falls within the perspectives of collective security and strategic studies.
Beyond the security and strategic studies fields, the Afghan borderland has been treated in detail by indigenous authors from a socio-political and anthropological perspective. Azmat Hayat Khan’s The Durand Line (2005) remains the seminal contemporary work addressing the Durand Line from the socio-political and geo-political perspectives. Khan presents a thorough analysis of the Durand Line and the experiences of Afghanistan and Pakistan relating to it, exploring the impact of the Durand Line upon the tribes contiguous with it. However, Khan does not extend his detailed analysis beyond the Durand Line, or infer lessons from his study that are applicable in other contexts. The Durand Line presents detailed information, but is limited in the scope of analysis it presents. Iftkhar Hussain Shah’s Some Major Tribes along the Durand Line (2002) is another significant contribution to the sociological and anthropological discourse on the Afghan borderland. Essentially a survey of the tribal reality in FATA and southern Afghanistan, Some Major Tribes provides a detailed assessment of the demographic reality of the borderland. As with The Durand Line, Some Major Tribes falls short of providing a theoretical construct that may be applied in other realities. The most comprehensive survey of the borderland in the either English or Pashto is Sher Muhammad Mohmand’s FATA: A Socio- Cultural and Geo-Political History (2003). This work is a complete survey of the tribal, social, cultural and political reality of the FATA region. The scope and degree of detail in FATA warrants its mentioning here, despite the fact that is not an academic enquiry and breaks no theoretical ground.