Chapter 3

3 Possession in an Islamist valley

Spirits, Islamists and love in Chitral,
northern Pakistan

Magnus Marsden

Introduction

This chapter explores the role played by spirits and spirit possession (pari-khameik) in the lives of villagers and townspeople living in the northern-most district of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province: Chitral. Chitral is a large mountainous region that is home to about 300,000 Khowar-speaking people, as well as smaller communities of Pushtun-speaking Pukhtuns and approximately 3,000 non-Muslim Kalasha people.² Chitral’s Khowar-speaking people are all Muslims, although two doctrinal traditions are present in the region: the Sunni and Shi’a Ismai’li doctrinal clusters. The adherents of these two traditions live side-by-side in the region’s villages and small towns, and work as farmers, labour migrants to southern Pakistan cities, local government employees and shopkeepers.

My central aim is to document the ongoing vitality and significance of spirit possession to the everyday lives of both Sunni and Shi’a Ismai’li Muslims in the face of the opposition of powerful Sunni movements of Islamising reform and purification that consider the use of spirit possession as a form of healing to be an un-Islamic practice. Indeed, given the political support that such movements have received in recent years in the region (an Islamist leader represented the region in Pakistan’s National Assembly between 2002 and 2008), it would be easy to assume that spirit possession’s role in this and other comparable rural Muslim societies is becoming ever more constricted (Marsden 2007a). Alternatively, spirit possession’s significance could also be seen as important only for those at the social and economic peripheries of society. This is not least because all of the men and women who use spirits to heal in Chitral live in remote villages and valleys apparently distant from the region’s hubs of Islamic scholarship. Yet, as I show below, spirit possession in Chitral is deeply connected to local understandings of what an anthropologist might refer to as the “animated” nature of Chitral’s landscape (Humphrey 1995): spirits and fairies dwell in particular types of places, unexpectedly entering the bodies of people who pass by. As a result, Muslims holding very different opinions about practices such as spirit possession are constantly being asked to think about its spiritual claims.

Ethnographically, I address the ongoing significance of spirit possession to Muslim life in Chitral in relationship to two major themes. First, and in relationship to this book’s concern with illness and ritual healing, I am interested in the important role that those possessed by spirits play in healing what many young and older Chitralis refer to as the “greatest illness of them all”: lovesickness (ishqolahazi). One of the most common reasons I know for young Chitrali men and women to visit a pari-khan is because they have fallen in love and pari-khans are said to be able to bring such people together in marriage, even in the most difficult of circumstances. The greatest impediments to marriage for young lovers are usually because the relationship transgresses the Sunni–Shi’a sectarian boundary. Alternatively, Chitrali society is hierarchically stratified into different kinship groups (qawm) that are then also ranked according to their status: princely, gentry, yeoman and so-called servant families.3Marriages that transcend these differences continue to be rare. Unlike other anthropological studies in other Muslim societies where accounts focus on the choice of women to seek the assistance of those who communicate with the spirits, in Chitral young men and boys are most widely said to resolve their emotional difficulties through the use of pari-khans.

My second major concern is with the ways in which different types of sacred and politico-social geographies interact with one another in Chitral. Whilst Chitral is a relatively small and sparsely populated region, it is also a complex and heterogeneous space (Marsden 2009). Chitralis say that the many valleys of which their region is made are inhabited by very different types of Muslims – some valleys are known as being strict, others for their “fun-loving” dispositions. Importantly, there are only three pari-khans in Chitral who are widely known to be experts (mahir) in their work.⁴Each of the three widely respected pari-khans (an Ismai’li woman and two Sunni men) live in villages that are remote and located in high valleys that branch out of the region’s most populated valley. The location of the pari-khans is not surprising: it is in such high villages and sharp, deep ravines where the human body is most “open” (kulao) to possession by spirits. Indeed, those prone to being possessed might even try to avoid such places, and I have also seen men suddenly become possessed as they sit in jeeps driving through deep ravines. So, most pari-khans live in villages located a long drive (at least seven hours by jeep) from Chitral’s urban administrative headquarters (Markaz) and its major villages. As in other South Asian societies where anthropologists have documented the extent to which “love marriage” is often a reflection of aspirations for modern, urban and conjugal forms of family life (Mody 2008), it is these towns and expanding villages where many of the region’s most lovesick youngsters live. Thus, seeking out the services of a pari-khan for most Chitralis involves a long journey along high mountain roads, and considerable expenditure on a jeep and driver. Visits paid to pari-khan involve interactions between not only humans and spirits but also Chitralis who refer to themselves as being “city dwellers” (shahri) and those said to inhabit its frontier peripheries (sarhad). It is also important to note that those most knowledgeable of the whereabouts of Chitral’s pari-khans, and those to whom people often turn to for advice concerning the legitimacy of the claims of these people to spiritual power, are Chitral’s jeep drivers. The drivers of the old American Wills’ jeeps not only bring people to the pari-khan, they are also central to their financial survival, and of the ongoing reconstitution of Chitral’s sacred landscape.

Spirits, fairies and jinns

The existence of jinns and possession are central to Islamic doctrinal teachings and a dimension of Muslim faith, practice and healing that has been documented and explored by anthropologists working in many different Muslim societies within and beyond South Asia (e.g. Lambek 1998; Flueckiger 2006). At the same time, the use of spirits to instrumentally achieve this worldly aim is held by some Islamic religious scholars, especially those often referred to by the problematic term “reform-minded” (Osella and Osella 2008), as being a deeply problematic practice. Some of Chitral’s Islamic scholars or dashman also argue that possession counts as Islam’s most unpardonable of sins: associationism or shirk.

Spirits and fairies are, nevertheless, a vibrant feature of the lives of many Chitrali village people that nourish and enrich everyday forms of village sociality. On the one hand, many Chitrali men and women visit expert mullahs who are well known both within and beyond the region for their ability to make amulets (tait) to perform a range of effects, including curing the sick (Marsden 2005). On the other hand, Chitralis also visit men and women who are said to be able to converse with spirits (Staley 1982). These people are known as pari-khans and also often ask the spirits to perform duties for them. The utmost reaches of the region’s highest valleys where pari-khans mostly live are said to be close to the mountain top abodes of the fairies and spirits, and the spiritually pure lakes with which these are associated. Men and women living in such places, thus, are often “descended upon” by the spirits, an experience that may have led some of them to actively cultivate their relationship with the spirit world. This is something they do through learning the arts of possession and spirit communication at the feet of a master or ustad, who is often but not always affiliated to a Sufi brotherhood.5The masters at the feet of whom such pari-khans have sat are very often themselves from outside Chitral, and often from dangerous mountain areas that are known for the inhospitality and violent dispositions of their inhabitants. During the course of this apprenticeship, the pari-khans develop their capacities to undertake a range of different forms of spiritual work, all of which allow them to use the powers of the spirits to have worldly effects. “Cooking prayers” (du’a pacheik), for example, is a complex, secretive and little understood ritual process through which pari-khans enter into relationships with the spirits. These pari-khans, thus, have put their own health in danger by engaging in such practices. Indeed, this danger not only results from having lived and studied in distant valleys – it is also an inseparable dimension of being a healer: those who use spirits to work for them will eventually be turned upon, I am told, by their once captive spirits who will take revenge on their jailers, causing them great bodily pain and, eventually, killing them.

Chitralis hold a very wide range of opinions concerning the “reality” or other-wise both of the performances of the pari-khan and the experiences of those who say they have been possessed by spirits and fairies. Indeed as my ethnographic material below demonstrates, proving the veracity or otherwise of the claims of a pari-khan is a major reason that many Chitralis give when asked why they have visited the homes of such people. At the same time, the region’s religious scholars engage in more formal debates concerning also the extent to which such practices are consistent with the teachings of the Qur’an and the Hadith.⁶As in other contentious dimensions of the Muslim lives of Chitralis, these debates are divided and complex. If some of the dashmanan declare such practices to be superstitious and un-Islamic, then others attest to the value of these practices for both religious and social reasons. There is no simple distinction between those who see pari-khans as a vestige of the region’s un-Islamic past and others who unthinkingly believe in the efficacy of what they do. Rather, Chitrali Muslims of a wide variety of backgrounds demonstrate much flexibility in their attitudes towards spirit possession and willingness to change their ideas about both the spiritual power of the pari-khans and those who claim their lives have been influenced by them.

It is also important to emphasise, however, that for most Chitralis the pari-khan is not a feature of “everyday life”. Rather, seeking out the services of a pari-khan is a course of action that most Chitrali Muslims will only pursue on a very limited number of occasions during the course of their life. This is especially the case with women who may have to travel several hours to a pari-khan, and persuade their husbands or close male relatives of the worthiness of making such a tedious and expensive journey along dangerous mountain roads. For others, such as drivers but also those who work in the many international NGOs operating in the region, visits to pari-khans are more frequent.

Spirit possession in an Islamist valley

During my stays in Chitral between 1995 and 2007 I heard many religious scholars argue that pari-khans who use spirits to perform forms of profane work are committing a very serious sin. What raises the attention of doctrinally inclined preachers and teachers in Chitral, moreover, is that many pari-khans accept or even request gifts as payment for their services, rending them open to accusations of instrumentally using God’s creatures. In order to understand the nature of this debate it is important that we consider the thinking and backgrounds of the religious scholars (the dashmanan) who oppose practices such as visiting pari-khans. These men are mostly trained in Pakistan’s Deobandi madrasas or religious seminaries, especially in the city of Peshawar, but also in Lahore and Karachi.7Whilst Sunni families send their children to madrasas from across Chitral’s villages and valleys, there are some valleys where particularly high rates of young men are sent for religious education in madrasas. The valleys with the highest rates of children attending madrasas are often also those that suffer from a shortage of land and water. The families of boys studying in madrasas benefit from the free food, education and accommodation provided by the madrasas and also from the future salaries these young men hope to earn as Islamic and Arabic teachers.

One valley known for having both a particularly high proportion of religious scholars and young men studying in madrasas is Lot Ovir. Lot Ovir is a long and narrow valley that runs to the north west of the Chitral’s largest and most populated valley. There are ten or so villages in the valley, a high school as well as several village primarily schools. The valley’s people – the Lot Oviris – are known for their love of Islam and also success as shopkeepers, a profession that Chitralis from other valleys where land and water are in more plentiful supply widely shun as being a low status and degrading profession. Given the shortage of land in their valley, Lot Oviris have been migrating out of their villages for at least the past century. Many of them own shops in the bazaar of Chitral’s district headquarters – Chitral Town. Yet they have also established a centre for their business outside the region – in the headquarters of the Frontier Province: Peshawar. Lot Oviri migrants living in Peshawar mostly own or rent shops selling hats, waistcoats and other items of clothing made from Chitral-produced wool. These shops are based mostly in one part of the old city, what is now referred to as the “Islamabad bazaar”. The name of the bazaar is not inconsequential to the identity and self-understanding of Chitral’s Peshawar-based Lot Oviris: when they moved to Peshawar shortly after Pakistan’s independence, they found cheap accommodation in this part of the city because it was the city’s red light district. Having settled there, however, the Chitrali village settlers are said to have immediately set to the task of ridding their part of the city of immorality. They were disgusted by the sight of scantily dressed city women selling themselves from windows overlooking the Chitrali shops. “We were simple and religious people from the mountains”, one man told me who had lived in the bazaar when it was a red light district, “and so we forced out the women buy writing to the government and renamed the bazaar ‘Islamabad bazaar’ – the place of Islam.”

In the years that followed, these village traders expanded their businesses, eventually coming to dominate a large area of the Peshawar’s old city, popularly known as the “streets of the story tellers” (qissa kahwani). They benefited from the widespread popularity of the distinctive Chitrali woollen cap or pakol that they made. Particular styles of the pakol, for example, are worn by Pashtun communities living in different parts of the Frontier’s Federally Associated Tribal Areas. The cap was also popularised by the Panjshiri commander Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance with which he was later affiliated. By the 1990s, when I started fieldwork in the Frontier, thus, Peshawar’s Islamabad bazaar was an important centre of Chitrali economic activity. Its community of traders also had strong links to politically active movements of Islamic reform and purification within and beyond Pakistan. All of this was also evident in the political and religious attitudes of many of the bazaar’s shopkeepers themselves: they led protests in Peshawar, for example, against President Clinton’s bombing of Afghanistan in 1999, and again against the US decision to take military action against the Taliban in 2001.

The importance of Peshawar’s Islamabad bazaar to the emergence of Chitrali Islamic activism was not solely rooted in the businesses connections of the pakol sellers. The emergence of the Islamabad bazaar as a centre of reformist Islam was also closely related to the vigorous commitment towards the establishment and funding of a Deobandi madrasa in Peshawar. Through organising donations (chandah) the bazaaris were also central in the establishment of one such madrasa and of raising the profile of its director – a Deobandi trained Islamic scholar from Chitral. Both sons of the shopkeepers and their cousins and relatives from Chitral’s ill-irrigated valleys studied at the madrasa. By 2002, the Islamabad bazaaris were especially active in financially supporting and organising the successful election campaign of the madrasa’s director (who was aligned with the Jamaati Islami party)8to become the region’s Member of National Assembly. These Chitral Peshawar-based bazaaris closed their shops during the election campaign and swept across Chitral’s villages, staying in mosques and encouraging people to vote for the mullah.

Importantly, the traders of the Islamabad bazaar were widely known in Chitral for having cultivated a sense of Sunni community identity and of being openly hostile towards Chitral’s Shi’a Ismai’lis, who make up about 40 per cent of the region’s total population, although form a majority in certain sub-divisions within the district. In the summer of 1999, for instance, “the bazaar” rose in response to the killing in a Chitrali village near to Lot Ovir of a prominent and widely known Sunni religious scholar associated with the anti-Shi’a organisation – now banned in Pakistan – the Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan.⁹The scholar was killed by a young Chitrali Ismai’li man and many Sunnis in the region argued that his death was a sectarian conspiracy. They closed their bazaar and organised protest marches against Chitral’s Ismai’lis in Peshawar, where they had also burned effigies of the spiritual leaders of the Ismai’lis – the Aga Khan – and threatened to march on Chitral in order to expel the Ismai’lis from the district. In Lot Ovir itself an Ismai’li friend of mine, Amin, aged about twenty- five, heard a gathering of Sunni men saying that the Ismai’lis were non- Muslim infidels and that the Ismai’li leader the Aga Khan was seeking to convert the region’s Sunnis not merely to Ismai’li Islam but to Christianity. The speaker at the gathering, he told me, was instructing those gathered that it was the duty of the region’s Sunnis to launch jihad against the region’s Ismai’lis. When I asked my Ismai’li friend if he was not frightened to find himself in such a gathering, he told me that he had disguised himself as a Sunni, and nodded in agreement with the crowd at the speaker’s anti-Ismai’li comments whilst constantly moving his thumb beneath his shirt: wagging one’s thumb in Chitral is a sign to oneself and others that one is lying or saying something that one’s heart does not agree with. Lot Ovir people, then, are known and talked about both by Sunni and Shi’a Ismai’li Muslims in Chitral as holding ultra-orthodox views about Islam and of being hostile towards Ismai’lis.

Importantly too the merchants and scholars of Islamabad bazaar also have significant transnational ties with Muslim communities beyond Pakistan. The Jamaat-i Islami trained Imams of two mosques in the British cities of Manchester and Hull, along with several Chitrali hafiz(men who have memorised the Qur’an) who are employed to teach the Qur’an in these mosques have strong ties to the bazaar – all are from Lot Ovir and all of them have close relatives in Islamabad bazaar.

A combination of factors – geography, migration, particular forms of trade and urban political activism – have all played a significant role in making the Lot Ovir valley one of Chitral’s key centres of Islamic religious activism. What is the importance of this to our understanding of the ongoing significance of spirit possession in Chitral? Lot Ovir is not only a major centre of Islamic activism in Chitral. Given its position at the base of Chitral’s highest mountain (Terich Mir), also known as the “abode of the fairies”, Lot Ovir is also the home of the region’s most well known pari-khan, raising important questions therefore about how these two very different religious geographies – one organised around Islamist forms of activism, politics and morality, and the other in relationship to the exuberance and presence of the spirit world – interact.

At one level, Chitral people are aware that Lot Ovir and other places in the region similar to it are socially and morally more complex than merely being bastions of the type of reformist Islam that is hostile towards more local forms of spirituality. Some Chitral Ismai’lis I spoke to suggested that the reality of life in the Ovir valley was very different from the external image that many people had of it. They told me that they had visited the valley expecting the people to be strict and unwelcoming but had discovered that the valley was in fact a place of great vice. The boys, I was told, could be seen sitting by the side of the village paths and smoking cigarettes full of hashish in open view of their neighbours and elders – the air of Lot Ovir I was told was always rich with the aroma of hashish smoke. Indeed, one man told me that it was not only smoking hashish that the people of Ovir got up to: they were also renowned for their love of sex, and there were more sexual liaisons in the villages of Ovir than anywhere else in Chitral.

I have explored elsewhere how Chitral is home to a vibrant tradition of elopement marriage (Marsden 2007b). Elopement was one important way in which relations between families from different ranked positions in Chitral’s complex status group system were maintained and created even though public ideology condoned them. Elopement marriages continue to persist to this day. This is in spite of the attitudes of some of the region’s Sunni mullahs who say that elopement is a sign of the growing immorality of Chitrali society and that those who elope should be punished and of a growing class of NGO and government employees who increasingly seek to forge marriage relations with one another. At the same time, the region’s young people often talk about romantic engagements and elopement marriages as registering their independence, individuality and modernity. Nevertheless, love and maintaining a love relationship remains stressful. In some families there are very real threats posed to young people (especially women) who engage in love relations – having been accused of being involved in impermissible love relationships several young women commit suicide in Chitral each year by throwing themselves into the Chitral river.

Most stories of successful elopement marriages (alueik) in Chitral include in their telling and retelling the name “Pakhturi” – a small village located at the very upper reaches of the Lot Ovir valley. The village is a long drive – about three hours – from the main road that connects Chitral Town to the district’s northern villages. The small village of Pakhturi is known, however, across the region for being home to pir (a man of special spiritual insight) who is also a pari-khan.

The pir, a small, round man with a purposefully unkempt beard, lives in a house in the village, is childless despite having three wives, and sees his many guests in his own room – a traditional if sparse Chitrali home full of empty bottles of Western medicine. He is a man about whom much is said in Chitral, and, some claim, even beyond – there are rumours that he uses the spirits to help some of Pakistan’s most well-known politicians win their election campaigns. His levels of spiritual insight are legendary – those dirty enough to enter his house without having washed after having engaged in sex are shouted at and told to leave immediately, for the pir “knows” they are in a state of impurity. The pir is known not just for being able to communicate with the spirits but also for a varied portfolio of spiritual practices, ranging from making amulets, to “cooking prayers”, to also bringing the spirits into his body and making them perform various forms of spiritual work for him. Like all other pari-khans the pir is in great pain, for, as his spiritual power is gradually weakening, he is unable to control the fairies and they have started to physically hurt him.

The pir’s ability to use the fairies in this way is said to be the product of his study and hard work. He “called the fairies” to “enter his body” some twenty years ago, after he had sat at the feet of a spiritual master from the Chishti Sufi brotherhood in the “lawless” region of Tangel and Darel and learned the science of conversing with the spirits and fairies for five or more years. The pir had also spent seven months alone in a mountain cave without food or drink, the period during which he perfected and cultivated his spiritual powers. Now the pir is said to be the most influential of Chitral’s pari-khans, his main competitors being an Ismai’li woman from a high valley close to the Afghan border, and another Sunni man from a village closer to Chitral Town.

People visit the pir from miles around in order to seek out his powers and ask him to solve their problems. Sohail, for example, is a Sunni man, aged about twenty-four, the son of a jeep driver and himself now also a driver. He lives in Chitral Town and his story is representative of those of many other young men I have spoken to who have visited the pir at what they say was a crucial juncture of their lives – having fallen in love. In the summer of 2007 Sohail established a “line” with a Sunni girl, resident in Chitral Town, although whose family home was in a village called Barreneis, a village known for the especially strict religiosity of its inhabitants. His love for the girl was choking him, Sohail told me, so he went somewhere “special” for advice. I asked him where, and he refused to tell me, but when I guessed and told him that I thought it was to Pakhturi he had travelled, he asked how I knew of the place and why I had been there. The pir had helped him by “cooking a prayer”, a complex process that nobody other than the pir knew. This process, however, would pull the girl’s heart towards Sohail and make her marry him. Later that day Sohail had returned to Chitral Town and picked the girl up in his jeep outside the school, driven off with her and conducted nikah – the Islamic marriage ceremony – with a mullah in a pre-arranged secret location. Whilst everything had been conducted in secret, word soon leaked that Sohail had taken the girl – her family quickly came to know that their daughter had “gone”. They contacted the police, and accused Sohail of “abducting” and “kidnapping” their daughter, who, they claimed, was only fifteen and, thus, under the legal age of marriage. The police immediately travelled the short drive from their station to Sohail’s house, and informed his father of their need to speak to Sohail. Sohail’s neighbours, however, had already told the newly married couple the police were coming, and so they had fled to the house of a relative – “a bearded one” who had recently joined the Tablighi Jamaat having been known as a drinker of alcohol and lover of girls until he was in his late thirties.10The couple stayed in the man’s house until Sohail’s family persuaded the girl’s father to accept his daughter’s marriage to their son.

Such dramatic tales of elopement marriages, often if not always involving the help of the pir, are a feature of much spring and summer conversation in Chitral. Young couples such as Sohail and his new wife speak of challenging the outdated ideas of status hierarchy in the region. They claim they are from a new generation who are not prepared to follow the stifling social hierarchy of years gone by. Some mullahs claim that such couples have contravened shari’a law. These mullahs argue that the pir’s activities contribute to making Chitrali society immoral because he encourages young people to act against the advice of their parents. In contrast, men like the pir say that these mullahs are mistaken. If it was not for his spiritual work, then young couples would not marry but instead engage in adulterous behaviour: far from being a force behind the region’s immorality he is, he says, helping to address the young people’s problems in a way that the region’s mullahs are unwilling to do so.

Importantly, some Chitrali mullahs having met with the pir or heard of what he does also change their ideas about the type of power he exerts over others and the moral acceptability or otherwise of this power. One mullah I spoke to, for example, was trained in the Chitrali-run Deobandi madrasa in Peshawar that I mentioned above, although he now works in the English city of Hull where he teaches the Qur’an at a mosque the director of which is also Lot Oviri. This man only visits Lot Ovir during the summers, and he told me how he had always laughed condescendingly when people told him of the pir’s spiritual powers. Yet, one day, he had secretly visited the pir in order to “test” his spiritual insight and power. The pir had called the spirits into his presence (wujud), started to physically shake and talk in a voice so different from his usual one that, he told me, it could not simply have been a case of the pir purposefully changing his own voice. The spirits had gone on to talk about dimensions of the young and sceptical mullah’s past that were profoundly secret that he changed his views about the pir, spirit possession and the forms of knowledge and power available to him. After that day, he told me, he advised people that the man deserved respect even from formally trained mullahs.

Far from being a peripheral dimension of the Islamic tradition in Chitral, the pir and other men and women like him play a central role not only in local debates concerning how it is best for Chitralis to ensure the emotional and bodily well-being and reproduction of their community, in addition to those concerning the foundations upon which religious authority should be based. It is not insignificant that Chitral’s best- known healer does not merely live in remote isolation from wider developments in Islamic identity and authority in the region, but is intimately connected to them.

Sunnis and Ismai’lis: sectarian dimensions

As I noted above, Lot Ovir’s Sunni mullahs are also known by the region’s Muslims for their “sectarianism”. Many of the mullahs from the region say that Shi’a Ismai’lis are non-Muslims and some even argue that there is a case for a full-scale jihad against them. Indeed, at moments of sectarian tension in Chitral, Lot Oviris frequently play a central role in the organisation of anti-Ismai’li protest marches. I want to discuss now, however, how far the complexity of Chitral’s sacred geography means that such divisions are also often transcended. Here, as elsewhere in South Asia, relationships cross religious boundaries and, resultantly, so do forms of spiritual healing. The pir, notably, whilst both being Sunni and living in a valley known for the anti-Ismai’li attitudes of its inhabitants, is nevertheless visited by Ismai’lis who say they believe in his capacity to heal the sick.

I want now to briefly consider a journey made by a mixed group of Sunni and Ismai’li to the pir, asking what types of views and attitudes they voiced about the man, possession and the world of the spirits, and seeking to show the importance of the pir in creating shared forms of spiritual practices that cut across the Sunni–Ismai’li boundary. In particular, I seek to show that what is of central importance in this setting is not always whether or not people accept or oppose the extent to which possession is a practice that is Islamic or otherwise. I’m interested, rather, in the forms of social relationships that visiting such a religious authority makes possible. I also want to emphasise how far this and other pari-khans are visited by people with the aim of not merely being cured, but also of testing the veracity of the pari-khan’s claims to spiritual insight and power.

I made my first visit to see the pir with a group of four men from the mixed Sunni–Ismai’li villages in which I was then conducting research. The group included the son of an Ismai’li Seyyid 11– himself called Pir, part in respect of him being a descendant from the Prophet and part, mockingly, by the villagers – a Sunni man, Aftab, in his mid-thirties who had until recently been a member of the reformist Jamaat-i Islami party, and Ghaffar, a driver who was a well-known aficionado of pari-khans in Chitral, and also had the reputation of being hot-headed because he was said to be a heavy smoker of hashish. Whilst both Ghaffar and Pir said they had visited the pir on many occasions before, and too have faith in his spiritual powers, Aftab was not merely sceptical of this and other pari-khans, he would also often tell me that these people just cheated villagers and also led them away from the true teachings of Islam. Aftab, indeed, had studied for MAs both in Philosophy and in International Relations, and presented himself to villagers as a “new Muslim” (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). At one level, he was interested in Islamism, and an avid reader of the work of the great reformist Muslim Mawlana Mawdudi.¹²Yet, at the same time, he also sought to distance himself from those in the villages who were unthinking in their commitment to Islamist parties, such as the Jamaat-i Islamis. He wanted to accompany us to see the pir in Lot Ovir because he had heard a great deal about the man and was keen to see what type of a person he was, and why people believed in him.

The trip to the pir was a success. The pir was happy with Ghaffar’s gift of a box of mangoes (his favourite fruit), the Ismai’li Pir was delighted to visit him again, whilst Aftab, on the return journey, suggested that it was the remoteness of the place and the difficulty of getting there that invested the man with a type of spiritual aura, which he himself had experienced despite not “believing” in the pir’s ability to interact with the spirits. It would, therefore, as I have been suggesting throughout this chapter, be problematic to see spirit possession in this Muslim society as being a source of shared faith that transcended other types of religious differences, such as those between Sunnis and Ismai’lis, or so-called traditionalists and reformists. Yet what is significant is the extent to which social relationships do cross these religious boundaries.

Conclusion

Spirit possession and the forms of ritual healing with which it is associated continue to exert significance over the lives of Chitral’s Muslim population. This is made clear by the significant social and economic resources that Chitrali Muslims deploy in order to visit pari-khans. One of the most important domains of life in Chitral where the importance of possession and the spirits exert themselves most clearly is in the field of love, and especially of marriages of elopement. Pari-khans play a central role, according to a wide range of different types of people in the region, of “tying the intellects” of the region’s girls and young women and thus allowing them to act against the wishes of their parents. Pari-khans thus are involved in what many of the region’s Muslims, but especially the dashmanan, see as being a deeply morally problematic practice. Yet debates about the moral legitimacy and efficacy of the use of spirits to heal sufferers of “the greatest illness of them all” are more complex than simple shouting matches between those in favour and opposed to the practice. And it is not simply the case that all of the region’s Deobandi educated mullahs hold negative viewpoints about the relevance of spirit possession to the health and reproduction of the Chitrali community today. Some argue that the impediment to young people choosing their own marriage partner – status differences – is itself something that contravenes the key teachings and values of Islam. Moreover, I have also sought to emphasise the flexibility of people’s attitudes towards the efficacy of spirit possession in this highly Islamised region of South Asia. Whilst there are some Muslims in the region who are categorically opposed to all forms of spirit possession, and others, like Ghaffar, who assert that believing in the ability of trained masters to interact with the spirits is a critical dimension of being Muslim, for many others belief in possession and communication with the spirits is not merely something that is contextual but also worthy of thought and critical reflection. This flexibility, I think, will ensure the ongoing importance of the spirits and the pari-khans to Chitrali ideas about community health and reproduction for many years to come.

Notes

1 See Staley 1982 for a discussion of spirit possession in Chitral. Staley’s account is based on fieldwork conducted in northern Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s. My focus on the ongoing significance of spirit possession in the context of the rapid growth of Islamic reform movements in the region over the past twenty years is intended to complement Staley’s earlier account.

2 On Kalasha society and religion, see Parkes 2001.

3 Chitral was a semi-independent princely state in British India and was only fully incorporated into Pakistan in 1969. Its one- time ruling Katore family remain influential to this day: Chitral’s current representative to Pakistan’s National Assembly is a prince (shahzada).

4 Yet there are many others who have either yet to earn wider reputations or, alternatively, are roundly dismissed as fakes.

5 I have spoken to pari-khans who are affiliated to the Chisti brotherhood in Chitral. It is important to note however that many pari-khans do not refer to themselves as having been taught by any Sufi master or refer to themselves as being “Sufis”.

6 Most such debate involves Sunni religious authorities. Most of the Ismai’li people I spoke to who were sceptical of pari-khans expressed their opposition to people because they “told lies” and “cheated” people rather than for theological or doctrinal reasons.

7 Deobandi here refers to a network of religious schools that now criss-cross South Asia but that originated in British India in the late nineteenth century in the town of Deoband (Metcalf 1982; Zaman 2002).

8 The Jamaat- i Islami party is one of Pakistan’s most influential “Islamist” political parties.

9 The Sipah-e Sahaba-e Pakistan and its leader Azam Tariq were widely recognised as being responsible for the targeted killing of Shi’a leaders and religious authorities in Pakistan during much of the 1990s.

10 The Tablighi Jama’at is a global movement of Islamic preaching and purification that was established in Gujarat, India (Metcalf 1993).

11 The use of the term “Seyyid” signals a person’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad.

12 Mawlana Mawdudi (d. 1979) was the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami party and wrote widely mostly on subjects pertaining to Islam’s relationship to politics (Ahmad 2009).

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