Every single Muslim in the subcontinent believes s/he is of Arab descent. If not direct Arab descent, then the illustrious ancestor had come from either Iran or Bukhara. Interestingly, the ancestor is always a great general or a saint. Never ever have we heard anyone boasting of an intellectual for a forebear. We hear of the progeny of savage robber kings, but there is no one who claims Abu Rehan Al-Beruni or Ibn Rushd as a distant sire.
Arab origin is the favourite fiction of all subcontinental Muslims. Most claim their ancestor arrived in Sindh with the army under Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ). But, I have heard of lineages reaching back to Old Testament prophets as well. An elderly Janjua (Rajput), from the Salt Range told me of a forefather named Ar, a son of the Prophet Isaac. Ar, he said, was the ancestor of the races that spoke the Aryan tongue!
Touted as a local intellectual, this worthy was unmindful of the fact that Aryan was not a tribal name but a linguistic classification. Neither could he tell me how the name Ar, not being in the Old Testament, had reached him. He insisted this name headed his family tree and was, therefore true. The chart, written on a piece of rather newish paper had been, the Janjua insisted, copied from an old original. The original was of course destroyed after the copy was made.
The Arains flaunt Salim al Raee as their father — the clan being called after his surname. A great and valiant general in the army of MbQ, this man was from an agricultural family of Syria, so the Tarikh-e-Araian tells us. Closer to our times, the Arains are indeed acclaimed for their green thumb for which reason Shah Jehan relocated a large bunch of them to mind the newly laid out Shalimar Garden of Lahore. Today, they are a very rich clan in Baghbanpura.
The Tarikh expounds on this fictional ancestor’s noble background and courage in battle to the extent that he almost outshines MbQ. But it does not give us any source or reference for the rubbish that sullies its pages. There are two authentic histories of the Arab conquest of Sindh. Ahmad Al Biladhuri’s Futuh ul Buladan (written circa 860) and Hamid bin Ali Kufi’s Tarikh-e-Hind wa Sindh, translated first into the Persian as Fatehnama Sindh and then into Sindhi as the Chachnama (written circa 1200).
There are dozens of names sprinkled across the pages of both works, but no mention is made of a blue-blooded warrior called Salim al Raee. There are other histories besides these two works which also disregard this name for the only reason that such a man never existed.
The Awans, similarly, have a fictional ancestor called Qutb Shah from the line of the last caliph of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs. My friend Kaiser Tufail, an Arain, has had himself genetically tested from the US. He has no trace of Arab blood. His line comes from what is now Uzbekistan and has lived from early historic times in the subcontinent. The rest of us of this clan will see similar results should we go through this exercise. Kaiser had his son-in-law, an Awan, also tested. He, too, is singularly clean of Arab genes.
Most of us are the progeny of converts. In their need to escape the discrimination of the so-called higher castes, our ancestors converted to a religion that in theory claimed to profess human equality regardless of colour or caste. I use the words ‘in theory’ because even as the Arabs converted our ancestors to Islam, they discriminated against them for being “Hindis” as we learn this from Ibn Batuta’s own prejudices. And he is not alone.
Consequently, even after conversion, my ancestors, poor agriculturists, were looked down upon by the Arabs and even those who had converted earlier the same way as they were by the Brahmans when they professed their Vedic belief. Within a generation or two, those early converts began the great lie of Arab ancestry to be equal to other converts and the Arabs. This became universal with time.
The challenge then is for all those, Baloch, Pathan, Punjabi et al, who have invented illegitimate fathers for ourselves to get ourselves tested and know the bitter truth.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 7th, 2012.
Pari Nagar
In 1984, I saw the ruins of Pari Nagar for the first time ever. And what a haunting, mystifying and awesome place it was. Smothered by thickly growing mesquite in the low ground, by the sand dune on which, the Virawah Rangers mess (Tharparker) sat. Here was an area of perhaps, two or three square kilometres choked with ruins constructed either from kiln-fired bricks or neatly dressed gray limestone.
There were stone foundations of houses some clearly palatial, others humbler; several ruined temples; arched doorways and, the most intriguing of all, a rectangular stone platform with a free-standing arch. The remains of the lintels and pillars, only a few then in place, the rest in the dust, were all richly carved with motifs that we still see in the Chaukandi-style tombs of Sindh and Balochistan.
Pari Nagar was established as a port way back in the 6th century BCE (by another estimation, 400 years later), on an arm of the Rann of Cutch coming right up into the desert. On this inland sea did Pari Nagar become a thriving port whose ships sailed to distant marts. Its Jain merchants, assiduous and honourable in matters of commerce and trade, made good money and the city flourished.
In the winter of 1222, glorious Pari Nagar met the beginning of its end. The cowardly Jalaluddin, erstwhile king of Khwarazm, fleeing before a general of Changez Khan’s army, turned up outside the gates of this city. Defeated, humiliated and pursued like a hunted beast, Jalaluddin in his frustration had already vented his spleen on the cities of Multan, Uch and Bhakkar. Looting and sacking, he had left behind smouldering ruins of those once great cities. He did likewise at Pari Nagar.
But after Jalaluddin withdrew towards Bhambore (which, too, he sacked), Pari Nagar rebounded right back. Powered by the riches of its Jain merchant class, the port city soon bustled anew. Another century was to pass before life slowly began to ebb away from the lively streets and market squares of Pari Nagar. The inland sea receded until it had completely forsaken the port. No longer could ships sail up into the desert. The commerce of Pari Nagar died; its merchant class forsook it for other places. The walls of the city fell silent, wild growth overtook the ruins and the abandoned buildings of the once beautiful city crumbled. Only its name, Pari Nagar, and tales of its grandeur refused to leave the collective memory of the people of Thar.
That was how I found it in April 1984: in the bazaar of Virawah men had tales and tales without end to tell of the past glory of Pari Nagar. Later, I checked with the Department of Archaeology in Karachi, but no investigation had taken place on this fabulous site and there was little to learn of its life in those far off times.
In the summer of 2009, I returned to Virawah with the hope of photographing the ruins of Pari Nagar. Other than one ruinous Jain temple and some scattered pieces of masonry, I found nothing amid the thick undergrowth. The place had been picked clean of the ruins. The Rangers man accompanying me said, the locals had over the years taken away the stones and bricks to make their own houses. Later, in the Virawah bazaar I found this to be true.
In anger, I turned on the Ranger: if he and his colleagues had spotted a young woman and man holding hands and strolling among the ruins, they would have belaboured them for obscenity. And here, the greatest obscenity, the pillaging of the cultural heritage of this sorry land took place right under their eyes and nobody moved.
But the Rangers in the desert are not the only ones to blame. The people of Pakistan are spectacularly blind when it comes to heritage and history. We embrace a false, contrived history; we reject our true heritage. That is the way we have been trained for the past six decades.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 14th, 2012.
This shitistani is saying, in effect "If only my father had slept with the maid rather than my mother, things would have been so good"