Kāfiristān or Kāfirstān (Persian: کافرستان) was a historic name of Nurestan (Nuristan), also referred to as "Afica" but was changed due to close similarity of the continent, "Africa". A province in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, prior to 1896. This historic region lies on, and mainly comprises, basins of the rivers Alingar, Pech (Kamah), Landai Sin, and Kunar, and the intervening mountain ranges. It is bounded by the main range of the Pamirs on the north, the city of Chitral in Pakistan to the east, the Kunar Valley in the south, and the Alishang River in the west. Kafiristan takes its name because the inhabitants of the region are non-Muslims and are thus known to the surrounding Muslim population as Kafir meaning "infidel". They are closely related to Kalash people, a fiercely independent people with distinctive culture, language and religion.
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Kafirstan is normally taken to mean land of the infidels in the Persian, where the name "Kafir" is derived from Arabic Kafir, commonly translated into English as "infidels" or "idolaters". Kafiristan then would be "The Land of the Infidels," as the area was inhabited by a non-Islamic polytheistic culture before en-masse conversion to Islam began. This explanation would also justify the renaming of the country after its Islamization.
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Ancient Kapiśa Janapada located south-east of the Hindukush included and is related to Kafiristan.[1] Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang who visited Kapisa in 644 AD calls it Kai-pi-shi(h).[2] Hiuen Tsang describes Kai-pi-shi[3] as a flourishing kingdom ruled by a Buddhist Kshatriya king holding sway over ten neighboring states including Lampaka, Nagarahara, Gandhara and Banu etc. Till 9th century AD, Kapiśi remained the second capital of the Shahi Dynasty of Kabul. Kapiśa was known for goats and their skin.[4] Hiuen Tsang talks of Shen breed of horses from Kapiśa (Kai-pi-shi). There is also a reference to Chinese emperor Tai-Tsung being presented with excellent breed of horses in 637 AD by an envoy from Chi-pin (Kapisa).[5] Further evidence from Hiuen Tsang shows that Kai-pi-shi produced all kind of cereals, many kinds of fruits, and a scented root called Yu-kin. The people used woolen and fur clothes and gold,[6][7] silver and copper coins . Objects of merchandise from all parts were found here.[8]
| “ | Another crusade against idolatry was at length resolved on; and Mahmud led the seventh one against Nardain, the then boundary of India, or the eastern part of the Hindu Kush; separating as Firishta says, the countries of Hindustan and Turkistan and remarkable for its excellent fruit. The country into which the army of Ghazni marched appears to have been the same as that now called Kafirstan, where the inhabitants were and still are, idolaters and are named the Siah-Posh, or black-vested by the Muslims of later times. In Nardain there was a temple, which the army of Ghazni destroyed; and brought from thence a stone covered with certain inscriptions, which were according to the Hindus, of great antiquity[9] | ” |
The first European to visit Kafiristan was a Portuguese Jesuit missionary named Benedict de Goes who mentions as place called "Capherstam" in Afghanistan visited by him in 1602 during the course of a journey from Lahore to China.[10] The British adventurer Colonel Alexander Gardner claims to have visited Kafiristan twice, in 1826 and 1828.[10] The first was when Dost Mohammad, the Amir of Kabul killed members of Gardner's delegation in Afghanistan forcing him to flee from Kabul to Yarkand through west Kafiristan.[10] The second was when Gardner had a brief sojourn in northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley while returning from Yarkand.[10]
George Scott Robertson, medical officer during the Second Anglo-Afghan War and later British political officer in the Princely State of Chitral, was given permission to explore the country of the Kafirs in 1890–91. He was the last outsider to visit the area and observe these people's polytheistic culture before conversion. He published a description in 1896 called The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush. Though some sub-groups such as the Kom paid tribute to Chitral, most of Kafirstan was left on the Afghan side of the frontier in 1893, when large areas of tribal lands between Afghanistan and British India were divided into zones of control by the Durand Line.
Soon after Robertson’s visit, in 1895-6, Emir Abdur Rahman Khan invaded and converted the Kafirs to Islam as a symbolic climax to his campaigns to bring the country under a centralized Afghan government. He had similarly subjugated the Hazara people in 1892-3. In 1896 Abdur Rahman Khan, who had thus conquered the region for Islam,[11] renamed the people as Nuristani ("Enlightened Ones" in Persian) and the land as Nuristan ("Land of the Enlightened").
Kafiristan consisted of steep, wooded valleys and was famous for its crisp wood carving especially of cedar-wood pillars, carved doors, furniture (including 'horn-chairs') and statues. Some of these pillars survive reused in mosques, but all temples, shrines, and cult places with their wooden effigies and multitudes of ancestor figures were torched. Only a small amount were brought back to Kabul as spoils of this Islamic victory over infidels. These consisted of various wooden effigies of ancestral heroes and pre-Islamic commemorative chairs. Of the more than thirty wooden figures brought to Kabul in 1896 or shortly thereafter, fourteen went to the Kabul Museum and four to the Musée Guimet and the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.[12] Those in the Kabul Museum were badly damaged under the Taliban but have since been restored.[13]
A few hundred Kati Kafirs (the Red Kafirs of the Bashgal Valley) fled across the border into Chitral but uprooted from their homeland had converted by the 1930s. They settled near the frontier in the valleys of Rumbur, Bumboret and Urtsun, which were then inhabited by the Kalasha tribe (the Black Kafirs). Only this group in the three valleys of Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur escaped conversion, because they were located east of the Durand line in the Princely State of Chitral. After declining population figures by forced conversion in the 70's, this region of Kafiristan in Pakistan, known as Kalasha Desh has recently shown an increase in its population.
Kafiristan is where the bulk of Rudyard Kipling's famous story "The Man Who Would Be King" takes place. The story was made into a film in 1975.