Muslim village intellectuals: The life of the mind in northern Pakistan

The findings reported in this article would not have been possible without the help and support of many people in Chitral. Fieldwork in Chitral was conducted with the generous support of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, an ESRC research studentship, and a grant from the British Academy Society for South Asian Studies. It has also benefited from sustained and insightful criticism from Dr Susan Bayly, and from four anonymous AT reviewers. Pseudonyms are used for places and people throughout the text. I first lived Chitral as a school‐leaver in 1995 and made three subsequent visits before conducting a 20‐month period of ‘formal’ anthropological fieldwork in the region between April 2000 and October 2001. This period of fieldwork was followed up by three further shorter stays. The most detailed studies of Pukhtun society are Barth 1959, Ahmed 1983, Lindholm 1982 and Banerjee 2000. There are a number of colonial accounts by British soldier‐scholars of Chitral: see, especially, Robertson 1899 and O'Brien 1895. On the region's history, see Parkes 2001. Many Chitral people do, however, understand and speak Urdu; those educated beyond the age of 16 are often also competent in English, and Chitral people who have lived in other regions of the Frontier are often fluent Pashto‐speakers. On sectarian conflict in Pakistan, see Nasr 2000. The number of religious seminaries in Pakistan's Frontier Province has increased greatly over the last 20 years; most of these are affiliated to the reformist Deobandi school, and Chitral is a major centre for the recruitment of students for these seminaries (see Malik 1996). On the history and development of Pakistan's madrassah network, see Zaman 2002. In both academic and popular literature, reform‐minded Muslims of many different doctrinal traditions are widely referred to as fundamentalists and Islamists. While it is important not to oversimplify, I will employ the term reformist to describe the wide range of ‘bearded ones’ (rigisweni) whom Chitrali villagers and townsfolk see as adherents of strict, reform‐minded Qur'anic forms of Islam. Such folk are also referred to as ‘hardened’ (saht), ‘preachers’ (tablighi) and ‘extremists’ (imtihai pasand). Women never attended this mahfil type of musical programme. Whilst women and girls did enjoy listening to local Khowar‐language music in the privacy of their own homes, they also often told me that they preferred the more ‘modern’ and lively Hindi film cassettes their male relatives bought in the bazaar for them. On the Jama'at‐e Islami, see Nasr 1994. See Kepel 2002.

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