The religion of Nuristan, before and after 1896

Worship happened out of doors and in wood. A village shrine was a small carved building, or a niche of cedar boards with the god's face or figure cut into it, set beside a sacred stone and an altar. The great gods had temples. The temple of Imra at Kushteki, in the middle of the Parun valley, was the largest building in Kafiristan, a square timber hall with a carved front and a great door, which Robertson saw from outside and was not allowed to enter. The gods were pictured seated on stools or on goats; Imra alone rode a horse. The horns, rosettes and chevrons cut into those boards are the motifs Nuristani carvers still use.

Three kinds of men served the gods, and Robertson gives their names in the language of Kamdesh. The utah was the priest, from a hereditary family, who made the sacrifices and kept the rites. The pshur was the seer, a man the god entered during a ceremony, who shook, cried out and spoke for the god, and might demand another goat on the god's behalf. The debilala was the chanter, who sang the hymns that told the gods' stories. There were also women who acted as seers in some places, though the record of them is thin.

The centre of the religion was sacrifice. Goats above all, and cattle for the great occasions, were killed at the altar, their blood offered to the god and the meat shared out. Juniper was burned so that the smoke rose with the offering, and flour, butter and wine were thrown on the fire. Klimburg describes the cult as resting on the purifying, god-pleasing effect of a bonfire and its smell of juniper, burnt blood and butterfat, and every account of a Kafir ceremony comes back to that fire.

Beneath it all ran a strict sense of pure and impure. The high pastures, the goats and the men who kept them were pure; the valley floor, the fields and the women who worked them were the other domain, and rules kept the two apart. Women went to a separate house outside the village to give birth and for their monthly seclusion, under the protection of Nirmali. The craftsmen, the bari, who did the carving and smithing, were counted impure and kept out of the rites. That division shaped the whole society, and it has outlasted the religion by more than a century.

It ended in one winter. After the Durand Line of 1893 left Kafiristan inside Afghanistan, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan sent his army into the valleys in the winter of 1895 to 1896, when snow closed the passes, with the stated task of destroying the old religion and putting Islam in its place. By his own account the country fell in forty days. The shrines and temples were burned with the effigies in them, the priests were killed, driven out or won over, and mosques were raised where the altars had stood. In 1896 the Amir named the land Nuristan, the land of light.

Not everything burned. More than thirty of the wooden figures were carried to Kabul. Fourteen reached the Kabul Museum, four went to museums in Paris, and the Kabul figures, smashed by the Taliban in 2001, have since been repaired and are on show again. Robertson's book, published that same year, became the only detailed record of the religion made while it was alive.

The conversion was quicker on paper than in the heart. For a generation, the historian Vartan Gregorian and others have written, old rites went on in private or under new names, with prayers said over the old altars and goddesses quietly becoming Muslim saints. Boys were sent to Kabul to be schooled as Muslims and came back as the valleys' first mullahs, and by the time our grandparents were born Islam was simply the faith of Nuristan.

Across the eastern passes, in three small valleys of Chitral in Pakistan, the Kalash still keep a religion closely related to the one described above. They were on the British side of the 1893 line, so the Amir's army never reached them, and they number a few thousand today. Their gods overlap with the old Kafir pantheon, their festivals follow the same round of the year, and their carved effigies and horned altars look like the ones that burned in Nuristan. Anyone who wants to see what Kafiristan was like within living reach should look there.

They are cousins, not the same people. Kalasha is an Indo-Aryan language, not a Nuristani one, and the Kalash have their own history. But Kalasha-ala, the name the books give to the Waygali language, carries the same word, and the two religions were plainly branches of one tree. Scholars such as Michael Witzel have used Kalash practice to fill gaps in what Robertson recorded, with the caution that a living cousin is not the thing itself.