‘The Lost Children of Alexander the Great: A journey to the Pagan Kalash People of Pakistan.’ Such is the title of a story published in what I suppose is a blog called Huffpost Travel. The author is some shithead idiot named Brian Glyn Williams. Moron Williams claims to be ‘Professor of Islamic History, U Mass Dartmouth.’
The story, and I confess I did not read it, is a travel story of a journey made to Rumbur Valley in Chitral by some semi-literate idiots from somewhere. I did not read it because every time I read anything like the title I begin this blog with, I see red. I want to kick the writer until he is castrated. And if she is a woman, I want to tell her that she is the finest example to cite when we wish to prove women are mentally deficient. (In normal life I do not believe this to be true.)
Williams is something of a professor like another stupid fucktard named David Petley who cursed our shores after the landslide created the Atabad Lake in Hunza. Fucktard Petley was in Gilgit shortly after the landslide, where he told our mandarins that the dam was going to break any moment to send a ‘wall of water’ screaming down the Indus Gorge to obliterate everything in its path all the way to the South Pole.
When a shithead white man utters even the most bizarre idiocy, we darkies take it for gospel. And our mandarins including the top man in ERRA (or was it already NDMA?) believed Scripture had just been updated.
In August the same year the lake was created I went to Hunza and came back to write a piece that the dam was not going anywhere. And if anything, the wall of water was staying where it was. Shithead Petley did not probably go see the trillions of cubic metres of aggregate that had formed the dam: the material was nearly 200 metres high and some 600 metres long. Immediately after all this earthwork settled in the bed of the Hunza River, it snowed. The melting snow percolating into the rubble cemented it. By March, when Shithead Petley arrived, the dam was as hard as any cement concrete manmade dam.
And now we have the Fucktard Williams giving this inane title to his travel story. The world is full of idiots, Pakistan most of all. And anyone who reads the crap will not notice that the claim only makes the heading. There is no discussion to the effect in the body of the text and there is nothing scientific about it. But morons who want to believe that the Kalasha are Greek peoples living in our midst will believe the rubbish with greater vehemence.
My twitter friend
@karachiahab recalls a National Geographic article of old in which the author was surprised to hear that the Kalasha themselves had never heard of Alexander! So how did it all begin?
In 1883, explorer William McNair went mapping in the Kalasha valleys and he was taken by their rather ‘European’ outlook. Admittedly, some of those people do have fair hair and light eyes. But then so do some people in village Gunz on the West Bay of Gwadar. And incidentally a lot of Afridis and some Shinwaris have similarly coloured eyes and fair hair. But McNair heard nothing to connect the Kalasha with Alexander.
Before the 1880s were out, another explorer Ney Elias (curious name) was in the same region. As before nothing was told him about Alexander being the Great Daddy of all the Kalasha people. With their maps ready, the British colonial officers came in force to install a ruler of their liking on the Chitral throne. We will not go into the details of that jiggery-pokery, suffice it to say that the man who led the first sortie was a military surgeon named Robertson.
This man was a stick in the mud with a stiff upper lip. If he had a Punjabi in his entourage, he would surely have been labelled with the C word. That was what Robertson was: an arsehole, that being the closest to the Punjabi C word. It was this man who first put it into Kalasha minds that they were European peoples. Probably because Robertson saw that like his compatriots of the late 19th century these people also did not bathe for years on end. Sometimes perhaps never once in a lifetime because it was noted that the women particularly smelled ‘abominably.’
But things have changed now. I think the Kalasha bathe at least once in their lives. The Europeans do somewhat better.
But back to our main discourse. If I recollect correctly, in his book Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, Robertson makes a clear allusion to the Kalasha people’s connection with Europeans – though not with Alexander of Macedonia. The madness took a quantum leap after Rudyard Kipling published his short story Man who would be King. In this wonderfully entertaining yarn we travel with two British Indian army deserters to Kalasha land where one of them pretends to be Alexander’s descendent.
Closer to our times, we have a half-brained Urdu ‘travel writer’ who has never read anything in his life about places he claims to visit but who produces a travel book at the drop of a hat. All his travel books have the same substance as the school essay produced by a grad 5 student titled ‘How I spent my Summer Vacations’.
In his book on the Kalasha, this insubstantial and therefore highly esteemed writer, provides irrefutable proof of the Kalasha being Greeks. This because they have effigies of horses on their homes. Now, Alexander rode a horse, ergo QED.
This man was writing this bullcrap because in those days, that is, the 1990s everyone and the Greek ambassador believed that the Kalasha were Greeks. He had to play to the gallery. However, back in 1986, I went to the two Kalasha valleys of Birir and Bumburet, spending several days in the latter valley in the home of a man who had some years earlier converted from the Kalasha religion. This provided me fascinating insights into Kalasha culture.
In my article published in the evening Star, I claimed that the Kalasha were Indo-Europeans like most of us. That their religion had evolved from the Vedic belief system. That was time when we did not know that one day DNA analysis will tell you where your forefather lived 80,000 years ago and that despite claiming to be a Syed or Awan or Arain, you have no Arab blood whatsoever.
But the fiction was romantic. And with a foolish Greek ambassador going ga-ga over his supposed kinsfolk in Chitral, everyone was telling us how they had visions in dreams that confirmed this ‘historical’ truth. By the way, speaking of Greek diplomats, gone are the days of the likes of Megasthenes (circa 300 BCE). With the current crop of immature idiots, it is no wonder that Greece is the way it is!
Then the science of DNA testing came of age. From being expensive it quickly dropped to the present rate of about US$ 70 or so. And one published report (I have a copy of it) shows that the Kalasha have no Greek blood whatsoever.
Urdu travel writer and Greek ambassador eat shit!
When I tell some moron that there is no record of Alexander crossing the 3200 metre-high and heavily snow-laden Lowari Pass in February, they immediately counter: the Kalasha are not directly descended from Alexander, but from his soldiers who, having wearied of years of warfare, deserted and went into hiding and wedded local women.
This is the most retarded bit of rubbish I have ever heard. Consider a German POW camp with Allied prisoners in World War II. Consider some making a break and going to hide in, say, Stuttgart or Munich and wedding local girls. For crying out loud that does not happen. If it had, men like Arjumand Malik of SSG would not have escaped from an Indian POW camp in 1972 and made it to Pakistan. He would have been married and living in India now.
Who has ever heard of a deserter in an enemy country living among the people his army was destroying? But human stupidity is truly infinite; there are no bounds to it. And there is no dearth of fucktards as the Huffpost article shows.
Anyone who has read the history of Alexander in any detail would know from the timetable of his passage through Swat and arrival in Taxila that he simply could not have crossed the Lowari into Chitral. Alexander arrived in Nawagai (Bajaur) in January 326 BCE and thereafter we have a very clear account of his passage through Swat and to the bridgehead on the Indus where he crossed over to
Taxila. No
Chitral.
Incidentally, Alexander in Chitral is the same was as we have Hazrat Ali all over Pakistan. His much revered footprints magically imprinted on solid rock when he simply placed his foot thereon exist from the Kech Bund Hills of
Turbat, through Lasbela and
Bolan Pass to
Rohri and Cholistan, to dozens of places in Punjab and a few in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as well. Banish the thought that the fourth caliph of Islam never had the time to cross the Euphrates.
Yet there are millions of Pakistani morons, driven by misplaced religious fervour rubbing their heads on the natural design or indentation on rocks and kissing them with nauseating passion. Incidentally, the one in Lasbela is nearly 20 inches long. Mighty over-sized feet for a man that we know was short-statured.
But as I said: there is simply no dearth of fucktards.
Labels: Alexander, Historic Myths, History
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
25 Comments:
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At 12 June 2016 at 15:51,
Bilal Qureshi said...
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Fantastic read
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At 12 June 2016 at 17:07,
Kaiser Tufail said...
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There is simply no dearth of fucktards! Love that new word. Vintage Salman!
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At 12 June 2016 at 17:35,
GhoseSpot said...
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Super read. Erudition cloaked in devastating humour is rare.
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At 12 June 2016 at 17:50,
Unknown said...
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Very colorful & interesting
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At 12 June 2016 at 18:43,
Unknown said...
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Sir whats the best book to read about Chitral History, excluding; Tribes of Hindokoosh, History of Northern Areas?
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At 13 June 2016 at 09:21,
tariq ahsan said...
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Sir, your argument is so good, I'd like to share it with youngsters, but...
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At 13 June 2016 at 10:49,
Eyup Sultan said...
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Logical & convincing!
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At 13 June 2016 at 11:50,
Salman Rashid said...
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Thank your very much to Bilal, Sandip, Mohsin and Eyup. And to you, Kaiser. Tariq Ahsan, take heart and paraphrase for the youngsters you want to pass the truth on to. Good luck.
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At 13 June 2016 at 11:53,
Salman Rashid said...
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Unknown, there is sadly no one book to read on Chitral history. From Raverty to Younghusband to the work of McNair and Elias to the wonderful researches of John Keay you have to cram everything. As well as that there are dozens of papers in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society to which you will have no access.
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At 13 June 2016 at 13:02,
said...
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It is all convincing and methodically worded article. Good read sir
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At 13 June 2016 at 14:46,
Salman Rashid said...
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Thank you, Athar.
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At 13 June 2016 at 19:57,
Unknown said...
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You are right Sir, Kalasha could be indo eureopeon, But there is on point i did't undertand yet, If you can check surrounding areas of Chitral, Northen Afghan(Persian Tajik desendents), and in North east we have mix Turkic-Chinese or Ughur tukic tribes in Xinkiang(muslim province) in China, So all surroundings peoples have diffent culures and living styles, Even before pre-islamic times they had same Nomadic culture, but how does Kalsha came in berween them?
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At 14 June 2016 at 09:26,
Salman Rashid said...
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Soaman Khan, this no great mystery. The Kalasha culture was once spread all over Chitral and versions of it even spilled into Swat on the south and into Yasin etc on the northeast. With Islam encroaching, the Kalasha began to be squeezed into a smaller and smaller area until they were confined to what the Muslims called Kafiristan. It is to their credit that the Kalasha people held on to their ancient pagan-animistic culture in the face of such extreme Muslim pressure.
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At 15 June 2016 at 14:11,
said...
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hard hitting, brilliant. I completely agree with you, we don't bother to do our own research, are intellectually stagnant (& lazy) and love to fall for all sorts of historical bullshit, especially if its falling from a gora's mouth.
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At 15 June 2016 at 14:58,
Salman Rashid said...
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True that, Anonymous. Thank you for the support.
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At 17 June 2016 at 15:29,
Saif said...
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Fascinating, sir. Any thoughts on whether or not the Nuristani are descendants of the Macedonian Army?
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At 19 June 2016 at 18:04,
said...
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Thank You Salman Saheb. But Bactra was a Greek kingdom in what is called modern day Afghanistan and so there is a remote chance about the possibility of people of Greek Origin or descendants crossing Wakhan strip into the modern day Chitral. Matti paoo sir . itna ghussa na karo kai Sikandar jaag jaye.....lolxx
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At 20 June 2016 at 10:20,
Salman Rashid said...
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Dear Anonymous, most people do not know it but there was a colony of Greeks in Bactra and Sogdiana banished there by Darius the Great in about 490 BCE. But if you do a proper scientific study, there is simply no connection of Greek and Kalasha. We must try to propogate the truth.
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At 21 June 2016 at 11:33,
shekhar borkar said...
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hats off mr.salman rashid
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At 21 June 2016 at 11:46,
Salman Rashid said...
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Thank you, Shekhar. However, a lot of Pakistani who, having been brought up on a diet of shit, like to believe rubbish. They are virtually up in arms against this piece.
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At 13 July 2016 at 14:18,
vina said...
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Love ur sense of humour, and delicious insouciance.
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At 13 July 2016 at 16:47,
Salman Rashid said...
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Thank you, Vina. Strangely, most Pakistanis do not understand humour or sarcasm. My piece (also on this blog) on euthanasia was taken very seriously by at least a couple of gents.
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At 16 July 2016 at 23:22,
said...
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How many people's DNA was analysed, don't believe in the Greek descendant theory, but curious to know.
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At 16 July 2016 at 23:23,
said...
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How many people's DNA were analysed, not believing in the Greek descendant theory but curious to know.
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At 17 August 2016 at 12:31,
kamran badshah said...
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Fantastic
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