The End Closes In on Endangered Diverse Cultures : Pakistan’s Kalash Forsake Pagan Tradition for Islam

At the edge of a scraggy, narrow footpath off the ancient Silk Road, Baram Shah rests and stares into an isolated glen below.

The rich green fields and clean, rushing river belie a tragedy in Bumburet Valley. There is a kind of genocide going on, Shah says: A centuries-old culture, a way of life and a unique pagan religion are on the brink of extinction.

“The Muslims are coming every week to convert us,” Shah, 62, says as he hefts a 40-pound pack of corn onto his back. “It’s a big problem.”

A forgotten band of Indo Aryans--descendants, perhaps, of Alexander the Great’s armies--the Kalash are a rare non-Muslim community in devoutly Islamic Pakistan.

In the Bumburet Valley, more than half the Kalash people have turned to Islam. With only about 4,000 Kalash still following the old ways, many fear it is only a matter of time before their culture is lost. More than 6,000 Muslims--mostly Kalash converts--also live in Bumburet and two nearby valleys.

The Kalash sacrifice goats to appease their gods, worship woodland pixies and speak a language that has no written form.

Before the turn of the century, the Kalash thrived in seven valleys, isolated and protected by unforgiving mountain terrain.

In the 1970s, the introduction of roads brought missionaries.

Sitting among friends, innkeeper Noor Shahiddin sips homemade wine from a tin cup.

“The Muslim men come into the Kalash lands and take the women and turn them to Islam,” he says, turning to his wife, Fatima, clad in the traditional Kalash costume of black, hand-woven dress lined with bright embroidery and dozens of orange, red and yellow bead necklaces.

The conversation is interrupted when a nearby loudspeaker crackles to life. Within seconds, the Muslim call to prayer blares through the valley, bouncing from mountainside to mountainside.

The intrusion contradicts the Pakistani government’s claim to have banned Muslim clerics and Christian missionaries.

“To save the Kalash, we need our valley with no Muslims,” Shahiddin says. “If not, we will be gone in 20 or 30 years.”

For a people whose identity is intrinsically linked with religion, conversion to Islam amounts to cultural annihilation.

Their origins are something of a mystery. The popular theory among anthropologists is that they are descendants of Alexander the Great’s invading army, which swept across the Hindu Kush sometime around 330 B.C.

Left on their own, life is simple and clean. But some Kalash rituals and practices are an affront to conservative Muslims. The local Pakistani name for the Kalash communities is “Kafiristan”--Land of Infidels.

“These practices are un-Islamic. These people are un-Islamic,” says Maulana Abdullah Mohammed, a Muslim cleric from the nearby town of Chitral.

He readily admits trying to encourage the Kalash to embrace Islam. But he says people convert of their own free will.

In the valley, Faizal Jan, a farmer, strolls along a deodar-wooded mountain path. He heads toward a rough collection of rocks that serves as a makeshift Kalash temple to Sajigor, a guardian deity.

“We pray and make sacrifices to Sajigor for protection and to save the Kalash,” he says.