"He's Just a Man!": Pashtun Salafists and the Representation of the Prophet

• Published in: Welt des Islams Vol. 60; no. 2-3; pp. 170 - 204
• Main Author: Hartung, Jan-Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Leiden | Boston Brill 01.05.2020
• ISSN: 0043-2539; 1570-0607; 0043-2539
• DOI: 10.1163/15700607-06023P02

Abstract Against the widespread understanding that Salafism in Pashtun religious circles owes its establishment to the close interaction with Arab representatives of that current since the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1990, a theologically quite radical form had indigenously emerged already in the late 1940s. This current, originating in the small town of Panjpīr in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, stands out by a rigid Salafī epistemology. In the present article, the emergence of this scholarly orientation, as well as its peculiar position on the humanity of the Prophet, is historically traced from the South Asian Ṭarīqah-yi Muḥammadiyyah in the early nineteenth century, via the missionary activities of a group of Deobandī scholars in the early twentieth. As demonstrated, these developments are inseparably linked to the ­specific socio-economic, political and cultural setting of the mountainous borderland between today's nation-states of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Finally, it is shown how the distinct view on the Prophet's nature consistently feeds into the empowerment of sociopolitical action, ultimately sustaining the emergence and activities of organizations like the Jamāʿat-i Ishāʿat al-Tawḥīd va l-Sunna in Panjpīr, or the short-lived Islamic Emirate of Kunar in north-eastern Afghanistan in the early 1990s.1