REMNANTS OF ONE particular old faith lie just under the surface of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
In the 1970s, Louis Duprée wrote: “The Islam practiced in Afghan villages, nomad camps and most urban areas would be almost unrecognizable to a sophisticated Muslim scholar. Aside from faith in Allah and in Muhammad as the messenger of Allah, most beliefs relate to localized, pre-Muslim customs. Some of the ideals of Afghan tribal society run counter to literate Islamic principles.”
That still holds true.
A teacher of religious law at Kabul University has reluctantly offered the first clue. The practice of bacha posh can be traced, he believes, at least to “the Sassanid time” in Afghanistan, and with that the belief that such a child will spur actual sons through “magic.” It is common knowledge, according to the teacher. But he offers no books to prove it, nor further reference. While most countries have their share of folklore tales and myth, it would be both dangerous and potentially criminal to discuss the existence of influences other than Islam here.
During the Sassanid period, spanning the third to seventh centuries, Persians ruled Afghanistan under an empire stretching all the way to the Balkans. The dominant religion was Zoroastrianism.
Around 1,400 years before Jesus was born, and 2,000 years before Muhammad, a man named Zoroaster is believed to have lived in Afghanistan. He was the founder and prophet of the faith, where water, fire, earth, and wind are holy elements and the universe is the subject of a constant struggle between good and evil. In Zoroastrianism, humans have the power to choose, and thereby side with either evil or good, through “good deeds, good thoughts, good actions.” Zoroaster preached that every person should take responsibility for his or her own actions and not blindly follow the rules of society—a belief system that later came to inspire Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers. Zoroastrians were also astronomers and early to astrology, using it to predict cyclical events.
Once you know what to look for, remnants of Zoroastrian practices and beliefs are easily spotted in Afghan society today. A frequent sighting is the young boys (or girls made to look like them) on Kabul streets who offer protection from the evil eye. For a few coins, they rock a canister of burned seeds before passersby, in a ritual mimicking one performed by Zoroastrian temple attendants. Several elements of the traditional Afghan wedding ceremony follow Zoroastrian ritual, in particular the khastegari courting process of the bride’s parents by the groom’s family.
And each spring, Afghans throw a big party to welcome the season.
The calendar’s most exuberant holiday is the very un-Islamic but entirely Zoroastrian Nowruz, meaning “new day.” It usually falls on March 21, the first day of spring and the first day of the Persian calendar’s new year, when the cycle of life begins anew. The house is cleaned and the best food is brought out. Children receive new clothes. Flower-festooned flagpoles are raised, and bonfires are lit. Young men jump over smaller fires to purify body and mind. Conservative Islamic men in Afghanistan use harsh words for the festival, denouncing it as unacceptable and pagan.
In Zoroastrianism, marriage was an obligation, its main purpose being to produce sons to carry the family name or enter the priesthood, where only men were allowed. In a direct parallel to modern-day Afghan attempts to produce sons, “magic” was employed in various ways to make it happen. The very word that translates as “magic” can be traced to Zoroastrianism, where its priesthood, called magi, led rituals, coordinated the worship of fire, and handled all things magical.
In the Sassanid era, it was believed that during pregnancy, a woman could affect the sex of the fetus in her womb by performing certain rituals and relying on magic occurring through prayer, animal sacrifices, and visits to shrines. Appeals in shrines could for instance be directed to the Persian goddess Anahita; still a very popular name for girls in Afghanistan. She was seen as in charge of fertility and the protector of life-giving water, who can heal the wounded and seed women’s wombs. By appealing to her, a woman could nudge conception in the right direction.
Today, Afghans pray for sons in mosques, but as Louis Duprée found already in his time, “almost any stone thrown in Afghanistan” will hit a shrine, or a pir, which is the Zoroastrian name for a place of worship. In the valley of Paiminar, just north of Kabul, he located at least forty shrines dedicated to fertility, where women come to pray and buy magical amulets guaranteeing sons, often constructing little symbolic beds of straw to remind the saint to help out in the marital bed.
To Sunni Muslims, saints are decidedly un-Islamic, since the prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade revering the tombs of humans. But shrines are still visited by current-day Afghans who come to pray there. Some shrines have been converted into mosques; others are places where followers of the Shia denomination of Islam—which took hold in Iran and later incorporated many Zoroastrian traditions—believe an important holy man is buried. At more modest shrines, the tale of who the buried saint may be—or if one existed at all—may be muddled. But all are still thought to fulfill wishes delivered in prayer, which are often said to revolve around having sons.
In Jalalabad, a shrine dedicated to fertility is well-known and recommended for sons. Many women also take the journey to the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif to pray for sons. When a territory is conquered, whatever came before is often erased from history books, and its places of worship eradicated or repurposed. Officially, the Blue Mosque is said to hold the remains of one of the prophet Muhammad’s relatives, but it also stands in the middle of what used to be the center for Zoroastrianism: Afghanistan’s Balkh province, where Zoroaster is believed to have lived and died.
In Kabul, women can often name at least one or two shrines specializing in boosting fertility. They will offer informed reviews on which shrine produces the best results, based on the successes of sisters, daughters, and friends. The shrines can be ornate or dusty holes-in-the-wall, with male shrine keepers.
These places of worship usually charge a small fee, and some offer tips on specific prayers that may make a son arrive sooner. Fluttering green flags sprinkled across Kabul announce their shrines’ locations: There is one on the road to the airport; another next to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. At the one by Kabul River, mostly poor women gather to pray and bring sacrifices in the form of sweet desserts for their wishes to be fulfilled. The Shrine of Hazrat Ali, a short drive from Kabul by Kharga Lake, is a popular excursion for newlyweds.
At the Pir Beland Shahib, near a hotel where mostly foreigners stay, seventy-eight irregular steps lead up to an open-air shrine surrounded by brick walls. There, young women and men respectfully enter after removing their shoes, first kissing the flagpole three times, then kissing several of the strips of fabric and scarves tied as wish ribbons throughout the shrines—all typical for a Zoroastrian place of worship. A silent prayer is said, eyes closed facing the sun, followed by the lighting of candles or making a small offering of money or foods.
Forty-year-old Fatima, who is pregnant with a child she has confirmed is a son, is triumphant as she leaves: For some things, shrines just work better than mosques, she explains to Setareh after she and I have raced each other up the steps one day.
Fatima is a Muslim; a devout one at that, she confirms. But she was taking no chances in her desperate need for a son. That could always use a little extra help from the gods.
ANOTHER ZOROASTRIAN TRADITION is to divide foods by the hot or cold effect they have on the body, and the belief that certain foods can heal disease if used and combined correctly. These classifications do not correlate to food that may be heated or spicy, but rather to the effect they are believed to have on a person’s blood. It was also thought that the sex of an unborn child could be determined by eating certain types of food, to make a woman’s blood more “hot” or “cold.” Anthropologist Charles Lindholm recorded these same beliefs and food classification system in his research into Pashtun culture in the 1980s.
According to Professor Nahid Pirnazar, a lecturer of Iranian studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, chapter 16 of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian collection of sacred scripture, is a primer for how boys and girls are conceived, respectively.
It reads like a tutorial with Dr. Fareiba, detailing how elements of hot and cold in the body affect conception of either a male or a female child:
The female seed is cold and moist, and its flow is from the loins, and the color is white, red, and yellow; and the male seed is hot and dry, its flow is from the brain of the head, and the color is white and mud-colored. All the seed of the females which issues beforehand, takes a place within the womb, and the seed of the males will remain above it, and will fill the space of the womb; whatever refrains therefrom becomes blood again, enters into the veins of the females, and at the time any one is born it becomes milk and nourishes him, as all milk arises from the seed of the males, and the blood is that of the females. These four things, they say, are male, and these female: the sky, metal, wind, and fire are male, and are never otherwise; the water, earth, plants, and fish are female, and are never otherwise; the remaining creation consists of male and female.
The belief in magic trickery for conceiving sons is also illustrated by the legend of the rainbow in Afghanistan. The rainbow, a favorite element in every mythology from the Norse to the Navajo people, often symbolizes wish fulfillment. In Afghanistan, finding a rainbow promises a very special reward: It holds magical powers to turn an unborn child into a boy when a pregnant woman walks under it. Afghan girls are also told that they can become boys by walking under a rainbow, and many little girls have tried. As a child, Setareh did it too, she confesses when I probe her on it. All her girlfriends tried to find the rainbow so they could become boys.
The name for the rainbow, Kaman-e-Rostam, is a reference to the mythical hero Rostam from the Persian epic Shahnameh, which tells the history of greater Persia from that time when Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion and Afghanistan was part of the empire. The Persian epic even has its own bacha posh: the warrior woman Gordafarid, an Amazon who disguises herself as a man to intervene in battle and defend her land. Interestingly, the same rainbow myth of gender-changing is told in parts of Eastern Europe, including Albania and Montenegro.
WITH EVERY NEW conqueror—Alexander, the Parthians, and the Sassanids—the Zoroastrian faith was tweaked and expanded upon in Afghanistan. At the height of its reach, the faith had around fifty million followers across the empires. Zoroastrianism and its practices took hold in many places beyond Afghanistan, including Pakistan, India, Iran, parts of Iraq and Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Jordan, Chechnya, Kuwait, Egypt, parts of Libya and Sudan, and the current-day -stans of the former Soviet Union. Parts of the Balkans—where the “sworn virgins” are found—were also influenced by the Sassanid Empire, with Zoroastrianism as its dominant religion.
As Arabs, Mongols, and Turks arrived and introduced Islam, Zoroastrians were tolerated at first, but eventually temples were burned, priests were killed, and the defeated were forced to convert to Islam. Today, Zoroastrianism officially only has a few thousand followers in the United States, Canada, England, and the Gulf nations. The official number of Zoroastrians in Afghanistan today is zero.
But it is more than coincidental that old myths and remnants of another religion appear in several different places on earth with both a history and some present-day occurrences of girls living as boys. Louis Duprée named the architectural site Surkh Kotal, where a gigantic Zoroastrian fire temple has been excavated in the Afghan province of Balkh, a meeting point between East and West. Greek script has been found on limestone blocks there, indicating Zoroastrian rituals may have spread in both directions from Afghanistan. It also shows how Zoroastrianism has parallels to other prehistoric faiths and cultures, including Norse mythology from the Middle Ages, which also happens to be riddled with women taking the roles of men.
Sweden’s Viktor Rydberg, a scholar of comparative mythology, suggested that Zoroastrianism and Old Norse beliefs might have a common Indo-European origin. Zoroastrian scholar Mary Boyce also noted that the earliest recorded prayers of Zoroaster’s match Norse religious practices, pointing to an ancient connection between the two worlds.
To those who want to exert absolute control through religion, remnants of other faiths were always a problem, and shreds of Zoroastrianism are a provocation. Religious leaders in Iran, for instance, attempted to abolish Nowruz, but reconsidered when Iranians mounted too much of a protest.
More than just dress codes were enforced by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice; they worked hard to destroy ancient Zoroastrian and other archaeological sites in Afghanistan during their rule and banned “sorcery,” to make sure no “magic” was employed. Visiting shrines was not permitted, and the Nowruz holiday was abolished. As soon as the Taliban was driven from power, Nowruz was celebrated again.
A certain yearly gathering at the UN General Assembly in New York also provides a snapshot of how difficult it is to kill an ancient faith and its traditional practices. Particularly, perhaps, when they contain creative elements for how to cope in hardline patriarchal societies.
At the United Nations, ambassadors of countries divided by languages, cultures, wars, religions, and even nuclear threats, stand side by side, taking part in the Nowruz celebration stemming from when they were all part of a Persian Empire. At the event, the UN ambassadors of Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan line up on stage at the headquarters in New York. All wear their best spring outfits, recognizing for a brief moment that they at one time had something in common.
And still do, since girls continue to be born in many places where they are not always welcomed.
