Part One is here.
Churchill biographer Con Coughlin also describes their character in unflattering terms: “The Pashtuns invariably used violence to resolve their differences, which led to feuds between families lasting for generations. The Pashtun language even contains a specific word to define revenge between cousins. In many respects these frontiersmen were warriors in the Homeric sense, enjoying fighting for its own sake, often internecine, for the blood feud was central to their way of life. They took offence easily, were jealous of their personal honour and savagely cruel to any opponent no longer able to defend himself. They tortured, mutilated and killed without compunction.”[1] The modern-day “Taliban remains predominantly a Pashtun movement.”[2]
Churchill came to the same conclusion. Churchill begins his 1898 book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War, by giving us the physical and anthropological context of the expedition:
Every tribesman has a blood feud with his neighbor. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger….Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion [Islam], which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword—the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men—stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica.[3]
Churchill notes the Pathans’ (Pashtuns’) contradictory character, and, despite their chivalry, they treat their women as objects to be bought sold, or bartered.
We see them in their squalid, loopholed hovels, amid dirt and ignorance, as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as the tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful. Those simple family virtues, which idealists usually ascribe to primitive peoples, are conspicuously absent. Their wives and their womenkind generally, have no position but that of animals. They are freely bought and sold, and are not infrequently bartered for rifles. Truth is unknown among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from which they regard an oath. In any dispute about a field boundary, it is customary for both claimants to walk round the boundary he claims, with a Koran in his hand, swearing that all the time he is walking on his own land. To meet the difficulty of a false oath, while he is walking over his neighbor’s land, he puts a little dust from his own field into his shoes. As both sides are acquainted with the trick, the dismal farce of swearing is usually soon abandoned, in favor of an appeal to force.[4]
All are held in the grip of miserable superstition. The power of the ziarat, or sacred tomb, is wonderful. Sick children are carried on the backs of buffaloes, sometimes sixty or seventy miles, to be deposited in front of such a shrine, after which they are carried back—if they survive the journey—in the same way. It is painful even to think of what the wretched child suffers in being thus jolted over the cattle tracks. But the tribesmen consider the treatment much more efficacious than any infidel prescription. To go to a ziarat and put a stick in the ground is sufficient to ensure the fulfillment of a wish. To sit swinging a stone or coloured glass ball, suspended by a string from a tree, and tied there by some fakir, is a sure method of securing a fine male heir. To make a cow give good milk, a little should be plastered on some favorite stone near the tomb of a holy man. These are but a few instances; but they may suffice to reveal a state of mental development at which civilization hardly knows whether to laugh or weep.”[5]
Thus they are all held in the grip of superstition, which leaves them open to chicaneries of their mullahs, the religious class:
Their superstition exposes them to the rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood ‘Mullahs,’ ‘Sahibzadas,’ ‘Akhundzadas,’ ‘Fakirs,’—and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, [precursers of modern-day Taliban] who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of droit du seigneur, and no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write. As Macaulay has said of Wycherley’s plays, ‘they are protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters.’ They are ‘safe, because they are too filthy to handle, and too noisome even to approach.’[6]
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[1] Con Coughlin, Churchill’s First War, p.127.
[2] Con Coughlin, Churchill’s First War, p.128.
[3] MFF, pp.3-4.
[4] MFF, Chapter 1, p.7.
[5] MFF, p.7
[6] MFF Chapter 1, pp.7-8.
ploome says
Give them green cards and admission to Harvard. They fit right in.
Keith O says
It’s so interesting to read the flowery style of language used by the British aristocracy during the Victorian era.
Churchill himself was quite the orator, a trait that has been attributed to his over protective mother. She actually bought him a Mauser C96 pistol to use when he was in the cavalry as a young man and that he stated saved his life on multiple occasions.
His assessment of the tribal mudslimes he came into contact with has changed little in the intervening 100+ years, further showing how little they have and are willing to change since medieval times.
roger wilkinson says
It wasn’t just the aristocracy! Churchill was in a sense an heir to the wonderful prose of the Victorian era. Educated Englishmen possessed a wonderful clarity and confidence of thought which found expression in superb prose; the subtlety and precision of thought and expression is quite remarkable to the modern mind. I will give three examples among many I know that were written by men who were clearly not aristocrats: Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle – you don’t have to subscribe to Darwinism to enjoy this beautiful book; The naturalist on the river Amazons by HW Bates is later Victorian and interesting in so many ways, but always wonderful language; and a book I am reading at present, The life of the Rev Thomas Collins by Samuel Coley. Reading the beautifully ordered works of writers like these is mentally stimulating, like listening to Mozart, and calming, healing. For modern day Afghanistan, read In the land of blue burqas by Kate McCord, not unfortunately in Victorian English but a fascinating account of an American woman working in Afghanistan in the not too distant past, in which she recounts her experience dealing with Islam, particularly among the women.
Eva says
The writers you speak of may not have been aristocrats, but they would have belonged to the upper classes. Education was the exclusive preserve of the rich.
No working class (or even middle class child) would have been taught to write like this, if they had been taught to read and write at all.
susan says
….great article, and a great perception of a race so evil/
mick says
Great article. Just reserved Con Coughlin’s book at the library. The ‘skunk’ defence. Brilliant.
chelseaboy says
“Hey darlin’ got some new friends coming to dinner….”
Jim Johnson says
Excellent articles (#1 and #2). Too bad this story is not page 1 of the NY Times. I fear the story will not get out, although way down deep in the minds of all, this truth is there with one observation of today’s Taliban.
Mad Mac says
Afghanistan: The graveyard of Empires.
We should never have gone there.
Or as Rudyard Kipling put it:
East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.
Now western civilization is being taken over by hijrah:
Jihad by immigration.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires is a myth! Genghiz Khan showed how to overrun Afghanistan: it could be done w/ a scorched-earth campaign & massacring whole cities like Herat. No Western power today would do this since it violates Geneva Convention rules, which are written to force Western armies become saints, while armies of countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia can do what they like. But no, Afghanistan is not unconquerable, if one knows to avoid today’s rules of war, which the Afghans don’t play by
Another thing about that poem “The ballad of East & West” is the depiction of the Pathan thief being rewarded by being given a post in the British army, & depicting the generosity of the Pathans, which was fictional. That’s a part of why in the Great Game – that proxy war b/w Britain and Russia – I consider the Russians as the forces of good & the Brits as the forces of evil. Let’s contrast what they did
The Brits, while colonizing India, toppled 2 major anti-islamic emerging powers – the Marathas, that had taken over much of India, and the Sikhs, who had taken over all of Punjab (today’s entire north Pakistan and Kashmir). Then, in order to take on the Russians, they allied w/ both Afghanistan and Iran. While those 2 were not as deranged as today’s Taliban and Islamic Republic, they were still pretty fanatical
Russia in the meantime got into Turkistan due to Kazakh raids on the Russian frontier – abducting Russian women & children & selling them in the slave markets of Buqhara and Xeva. So Tsar Nikolai I sent his armies into Turkistan and they destroyed the khanates of Buqhara, Xeva, Qoqon and conquered most of Turkistan. Afghanistan was what they were threatening, and that was where the Brits got in
Note that the center of much of the medieval jihad conquests was in Turkistan – which included Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and the Rajavi-Khorasan province of Iran. Or to put some more familiarity w/ the cities, they were Buqhara, Samarqand, Ghazni, Ghowr, Herat, Nishabour, Ma’ashed and Merw. As far as India went, a lot of those jihads came from this region. Russia conquering Turkistan ensured that there would never be a jihad threat from that region. Britain saving Afghanistan from Russia and destroying Hindu & Sikh empires ensured that the jihad would live to fight another day, even though the Mughal sultanate was destroyed
Ralph says
I particularly appreciated “Infidel’s” insights. I had previously read Sir Winston’s comments re the ragheads and on reading them again I am reminded of the old comment by George Santayana in around 1885, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
Muslims are the curse of the Earth. Lethal cockroaches of no redeeming value, anywhere.