...: rumors simultaneously breed fear and confusion, help forge intimacy, and provide certainty and coherence. Rather than subvert power relations or simply critique the powerful, I suggest that rumors and conspiracy theories provide the means through which tribal Pashtuns live and make their way in a social...

... (TNSM) and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Acknowledging the importance of the wider geopolitical environment, I argue that the rise of the TNSM and TTP is a function of the historical salience of Islamic (jihad) idiom in Pashtun society, localized sources of discontent, and historical-structural...

.... The non-Pashtun forces sies in Kenya and Tanzania. At this stage, U.S. of Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, the pow- strategy was aimed not at the overthrow of the erful Uzbek militia of Abdul Rashid Dostum, Taliban but at pressurizing it to turn over bin...

... is widely used to denote any citizen of present- day Afghanistan, irrespective of ethnolinguistic affiliation, in this article I employ Afghan in its more restricted, premodern sense to denote the Pashtun. 49 4 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 37, No. 3, 2017 doi 10.1215...

... the language of surveillance and play with its permissibility in ways that disrupt the foundations of state power from which they nevertheless derive their authority. Ammara Maqsood's essay turns to the effect of rumors and conspiracy theories in Pakistan as these circulate among tribal Pashtuns, animating...

... journey across the Indian Ocean for Mecca Persian Travel Accounts to the West,” which in 1853, assuming the identity of and masquer- analyzed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ading as a Persian, Pashtun, and Arab traveler Persian travelers’ views of Europe and how these along the way. Sabri Ates...

... commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud the Pashtun-Taliban theocracy and to the Taliban’s the “Lion of Panjshir,” in his new capacity as mili- guest/patron, Osama bin Laden. As “smoking gun tary head of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. proof” of this connection between their Chechen While the U. S. had...

... among Pashtuns generate apparently conflicting emotional states—fear and panic, trust and familiarity. This lends a “trickster quality” to social relations and the environment, again underscoring the centrality of uncertainty in constituting a security milieu. Bajoghli's account of her research...

... to the beating heart of rumors and conspiracy theories in Pakistan as they circulate among tribal Pashtuns and animate their pervasive mistrust of both the Pakistani army and the Taliban, including when there is little to distinguish them. While rumors have been theorized as a powerful tool for the subversion...

... in that it was ethnically diverse, home to Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens who were for most of history, autonomous entities concentrated in different parts of the present-day nation-state of Afghanistan. The entity known as Afghanistan resembles a regional construct than a national one for most of its...

... at an airport in Saudi Arabia in 1980, where he sees a customs officer using a hammer to shatter chess pieces he has found in a Pashtun laborer's suitcase (52). The first half of this review will address Ahmed's remedies to the myopia of modern Muslims, which he challenges with a virile, self-assertive...

... in Gilgit, I was struck by how many were Pashtuns, originally from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. “I've been in Gilgit a long time,” an elderly cobbler laughed dismissively when I asked him when he came to Gilgit. I probed, “You must have come after the opening of the Karakoram Highway? In the 1970s?” He...

... as causing the oppression of women; and hind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare their stories are often mediated, in that they are food and give birth to children. For most Pashtuns coauthored with American or European journal- it’s a gloomy day when a daughter is born” (13). ists.63...

... of the obsolete 1973 constitution will be necessary to prevent the disintegration of Pakistan into separate Pashtun, Baluch, Sindi, and Punjabi states. There has never been true unity among its ethnic groups, only a forced...

... In contrast, in southern Afghanistan, ble proof of the presence of the government and where the insurgency is most active, the Taliban a Western-­led nation-­building effort. Hence it is draws strength from a Pashtun cultural ethos not surprising that insurgents have expended giving men considerable...

... Early in the anti- Soviet resistance, “the Pashtun or through intrusion) has had enormously dis- who settled in the North [of Afghanistan] in the ruptive e ects on Pakistan civil life — perhaps s left massively towards Pakistan.” In the above...

... the northern and British colonies’ newspapers. One of them provinces of India (presented as “Afghans, Pa- is extracted from the Cape Town’s daily, Cape thans, Afridis, and Pashtuns”) who were hosted Times, which under the headline “They Caught in February 1906 by the Liverpool Muslim In- Eric...

... furtively overheard conversations about film. But in the city of migrants his own Pashtun family was less receptive to cinema and expressed their consternation at what foreboded to be an all-consuming shauq (enthusiasm). Instead of homework, the school notebooks of the two friends were filled with scraps...

... constitutionalists (including royalist and republican factions within them); old guard military generals with strong connections to British India and Pashtun confederations in the east and south like Nader Khan, rivaling those with connections to Young Turk or other Hamidian exiles in Kabul like Mahmud Tarzi; late...

... the various Sunnis (e.g., Baluchis, chored among the predominant ethno-sectarian Pashtuns, Muhajers, Sindis) have placed obstacles to a group would be harmful to the interests of those in pan-Sunni fundamentalist party. These factors, in the minority. Depending on a variety of factors, a mi...