The Alafis’ refuge
31 August 2016
Just north of the junction of the two rivers, the small village of Shekhan is where one leaves the Turbat-Mand high road and goes north along the dry bed of the Shorma stream. The country is wild and desolate and possessed of a savage beauty. Views to the north are limited by the bleak, treeless crags of the Kech Bund that nowhere rise higher than 1,166 metres above the sea; to the east and west, the valley is fairly wide and dotted with trees and bushes that grow only in arid conditions.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Alafis in Makran
24 December 2015
The Alafi tribe of western Hejaz were among the earlier converts to Islam. Since before 680 CE, a large body of them frequently travelled back and forth between their country and Makran. Now, Makran at that time seems to have been very much like modern day Fata. Though part of the kingdom of Sindh under Raja Chach, it appears to have been only loosely held with a substantial foreign element running wild in the country.
In 684, when Abdul Malik bin Marwan took over as caliph, his deputy in Iraq, Hujaj bin Yusuf, appointed one Saeed of the family Kilabi to Makran. The man was entrusted with collecting money from this country as well as neighbouring regions wherever he could exercise pressure.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, History, Makran
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Gateway of the Breeze
12 August 2015
The taxi drove me the winding road up Koh e Batil, the massive sheer-sided hammerhead of Gwadar to see the 16th century Portuguese water tanks. The tanks turned out to be a disappointment being no more than a largish clay-choked, bone dry depression fringed by a few date trees. But the views from the vantage of the peak were priceless: the shimmering blue-grey Arabian Sea to the south, the town of Gwadar sprinkled far below on the narrow isthmus to the north with the graceful arcs of the east and west bays of Gwadar on either side of the habitation. Both bays were dotted with dozens of fishermen’s boats. Far away, beyond west bay, the curiously shaped hills of Pishukan scraped the welkin just like the skyline of some modern city. From my vantage, the idyll spread out below seemed part of a Mediterranean resort.
Here on the Makran seaboard, they have always been fishermen. Alexander’s chroniclers tell us of the Ichthyophagi – the Fish Eaters. The Greeks lament the absence of any other food but fish and tell us that even the Fish Eaters’ cattle ate only fish which gave its flesh a fishy taste. This tradition of a fishing culture giving its name to the land evidently goes farther back into history. The Shahnama of Firdausi, the great Persian poet, relates that Makran was part of the Persian empire during the Heroic Age (about 600 BCE) when Kai Kaus and Kai Khusro ruled that country. Even to the classical Persians this was the land of the Mahi Khoran (Fish Eaters again). No surprise then that the Makranis’ pronunciation of the name of their land ‘Mukkoran,’ is a clear throwback on the ancient Persian name.
Labels: Balochistan, Makran, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Island of the Sun
30 July 2014
If it hadn't been for Nearchus, Alexander's general and admiral of the fleet that set sail from Patala (Hyderabad) for the delta of the Euphrates River, we would never have known about Astola Island. At least not that it was sacred to the sun and, according to the people of Makran, enchanted as well. That was back in the autumn of the year 325 BC.
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Nearchus tells us of his arrival in Kalama and a rousing welcome by the natives. Kalama, by the way, is modern Kalamat on the Balochistan seaboard with its bay of crystal waters which makes it an undiscovered scuba divers' paradise. The natives also reported an island called Karbine. Later, having sailed on, Nearchus heard of the same island but referred to by another name. Now it was Nosala. He was also told that the island was dedicated to the sun god and being enchanted, no one could land on it.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Makran
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Verdant Makran?
27 July 2014
About fifteen or more years ago there appeared in a prestigious Pakistani news magazine the interview of an Italian woman pretending to be an archaeologist. Her theory was that Makran was a very fertile land of rich crops, fertile valleys and forest-covered hills. Then came that scourge of god Mahmud, the raider king of Ghazni, to destroy the ingenious underground irrigation system called karez. The subterranean rivulets ceased to flow, the farmland and orchards died out, the forests shrivelled away and Makran turned into the desert that we today know it to be.
For those who have not travelled through Makran, it is a harsh land of eroded hills here; stark rocky walls; stretches of sand dunes that are sometimes so finely shaped like the crescent as though by the hand of the master sculptor; glittering white salt pans that stretch as far as the eye can see and flat plains strewn with rocks. The few rivers that run here weave a thin ribbon of green through this vast landscape. And that is how Makran has been for the past several millenniums, no matter what some self-styled Italian archaeologist might have to tell us. And of that we have sufficient historical proof.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, Balochistan, Makran
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘half of what I have seen’
23 February 2014
In January 1986, I rode a Corps of Engineers truck loaded with a concrete mixer to Agore. My objective was the famed temple of Sri Mata Hinglaj in the valley of the Hingol River not far upstream from the river’s delta. Other than a journey of thirty-six hours by a beat-up pilgrim bus that I had already missed, this was the only available transport.
We had left Karachi in cold, pre-dawn darkness – at 2.30 AM to be precise. Near Uthal we gave off the old RCD Highway and swung west into a great desolation of sand and stunted grass. Thereafter we trundled along at about ten to fifteen kilometres an hour – for fourteen hours. That brought us to the banks of the Hingol River and the Engineers camp.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, FWO, Makran, Makran Coastal Highway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Civil Military Relations
22 February 2014
Over the past four months I have made two trips [1, 2] to Makran and have had extended exchanges with local men as well as with several defence services officers at various levels. These latter were from the navy and army. The lessons to draw were remarkable.
First off, most defence officers agreed that the people of Makran are simple, peaceable and friendly who appreciate developmental work in their district and that mischief does not come naturally to them. This would make them a community easy to work with and find acceptance from. Also, officers were of the view that the insurgents causing strife from time to time infiltrated into Makran from the more troubled districts of Balochistan to the northward.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, FWO, Makran, Makran Coastal Highway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 01:30,
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Makran is a beautiful country
12 February 2014
On 26 Jan I was northbound out of Karachi along the old RCD Highway. At Uthal we turned west. FWO, the builders of the new Makran Coastal Highway, call this spot Zero Point and the road is designated N-10 in the grand scheme of National Highways Authority.
Agore, before the highway was laid out, was as remote as a village could ever be in Makran. But now despite having stopped at the mud volcanoes, we made it in a few hours. The landscape at the volcanoes was as surreal and eerie as ever. A bleak landscape of small tufts of withered grass, a flat, featureless sky, and, once we left the highway, not a sign of human intervention. In this dream world, the three cones rising out of the flatness were other worldly. In another country, this would be a spa with thousands of tourists flocking here to rub themselves with the mineral rich mud.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, FWO, Makran, Makran Coastal Highway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Riddle in the Kech Hills
22 October 2013
The Chachnama, an early history of the Arab conquest of Sindh is a great repository of knowledge concerning the Arab invasion of Sindh. Among other things (like revealing the base character of some early Muslim heroes) it recounts how Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the governor of Iraq, famous for having sent his nephew and son in law Mohammed bin Qasim on the successful expedition against Sindh, earlier deputed a man called Saeed Kilabi to Makran.
On the borders of Makran, Kilabi met one Safahwi Hammami of the tribe of Alafi (we are not told who this man was) and asked him to join whatever expedition Kilabi was hastening to. It comes out of the words of the Chachnama that Hammami had some sort of gripe against Hajjaj and took offence at Kilabi’s presumption that he would join the man’s enterprise. There also appears to have been an altercation between the two when Hammami refused to join up. This cost him not only his head but his skin as well: Kilabi cut off the poor man’s top, and dispatched it to bin Yusuf. The Chachnama tells us that he also flayed the body, but does not say what the cruel man did with the skin. The book goes on to tell us that having then installed himself in Makran, Kilabi ‘succeeded in securing more wealth from Hindustan (than was ever secured before).’
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, History, Makran, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Makran Coastal Highway
08 October 2013
Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) have done a lot of good work in the country. But their work mostly goes unacknowledged. But then they got a good man in Lahore as their Public Relations Officer. Major (retired) Husain Qazi has sound notions on what needs to be done and he was fortunate to have Major General Javed Bukhari as head of FWO (currently GOC Swat). Consequently when Husain suggested a coffee table book be written about the Markan Coast Highway (MCH) the project was approved and I was asked to undertake the job.
Now, MCH takes off westward from the old RCD Highway near Uthal which sits about 100 km north of Karachi and stretches almost as straight as an arrow all the way to the Iranian frontier north of Jivani. It thus connects Karachi with Ormara, Pasni, Gwadar and Jivani – coastal towns that were once accessible only by air. Of course you could take the hard bus ride that lasted nearly forty-eight hours from Karachi to Gwadar. But for that you had to be a sucker for punishment.
Labels: Balochistan, Books, FWO, Makran, Makran Coastal Highway, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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To Makran
23 September 2013
There was no direct connection between Karachi and Gwadar. You travelled up north to Lasbela, thought the desiccated Jhao Pass to Awaran (oh, so beautiful and picturesque) and then across 250 km of the most anxiety-making desert to Turbat where you arrived with much of the desert deposited upon your person. In between you spent the night sleeping on the sandy floor of an inn fearing some scorpion or centipede will get into your ears or, worse, your pants.
Labels: Balochistan, Books, FWO, Makran, Makran Coastal Highway, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Date City
27 June 2013
Abu Ishaq Al Istakhari was a native of a town the Greek called Persepolis in southwest Iran that had, over time, come to be known as Istakhar. He was a great traveller who journeyed across the Muslim empire from the shores of the Atlantic to India during the 10th century and wrote a brilliant geography titled Kitabul Akalim or the Book of Climates. Together with Ibn Haukal, who crossed paths and exchanged notes with him in Sindh, he accounts for those few medieval geographers, Arab and Persian, who actually travelled through the lands whose geography they wrote. The rest were simply copyists or transcribers.
Among other things Istakhari tells us that Makran was a vast but desert country whose largest city was Kanazbun. Over time alteration of diacritical marks or misreading rendered the name into various forms like Kirbun, Kirbuz, Firabuz and Kinarbur. But we now know that all these names were referring to the town way out in the backwaters of Balochistan that we today call Punjgur. Whatever name they called it; all the writers were in agreement that this was no little hick town in the desert. They all wrote of it as being a large, rich and rather cultured city.
Labels: Balochistan, Makran, Punjgur
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Sea Monsters and the Sun God
08 June 2013
Excerpt from Sea Monsters and the Sun God: Travels in Pakistan
The sea heaved gently as we prepared to set out on the dawn tide. The end of October was a good time for a landlubber like me to be putting out to sea. The last of the monsoon winds had already blown themselves out and the sea was going to be calm until the end of next February. Abdul Majeed, the captain, whose crinkly hair stood erect as if his scalp was electrically charged – just as in the comics, and his coxswain Noor Jan, poled the boat away from the jetty. A couple of smart yanks and the two outboard motors puttered to life easing us out of Pasni fish harbour and into the open sea. The jetty fell away, the rock of Jebel e Zareen loomed to our right wall-like in the darkness and behind us Pasni went dark in another power break. Somewhere in the gloom ahead lay the island of Astola – the object of our voyage. We were following up two thousand three hundred and twenty-four years – almost to the day, after Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral of the fleet had set foot on it.
Our ship, scarce bigger than a large rowboat, had no name and the thought that we were to cross twenty-two nautical miles of sea in this dinky little craft petrified me. But Maqsood, the turner, to whom I had been introduced only the day before and who had opted to come out with me appeared unaffected as he calmly pulled on his cigarette. For our captain and helmsman, it was evidently business as usual for no sooner had we cleared the breakwaters that Noor Jan wrapped the ends of the two rudder ropes around his toes and began to nod sleepily.
Labels: Balochistan, Makran, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Icthyophagi — the Fish Eaters
06 February 2013
Greek chroniclers of Alexander tell us of his near disastrous march from Lasbela westward across the Makran wilderness. They know this desert country by the name of Gedrosia. These same chroniclers also tell us that along the seaboard of this largely uninhabited wasteland lay the country of the Icthyophagi — the Fish Eaters.
They give the coastal area this name because Alexander’s admiral of the fleet Nearchus and his men found no food other than fish in this country. There being scarcely any vegetation, the cattle fed on fish and, so it is recorded, their flesh had a fishy taste. Even the huts that the Icthyophagi lived in were built using the spine and ribs of giant fish. (I have seen giant vertebrae used as stools and rough tables by old and young alike.) These were evidently whales which the Greeks mention as ‘sea monsters’ and whose abundance they report. Sadly this profusion is no longer the case because today’s Makrani fishermen rarely see these wonderful sea mammals.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, History, Makran
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:08,
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