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| India-Pakistan |
| The endangered Kalash |
| 2016-06-23 |
| [DAWN] THE recent clash between the Kalash community and their more numerous Moslem neighbours, caused by a girl’s change of faith, appears to have been amicably resolved. However, denial ain't just a river in Egypt... the incident should awaken the government and the people both to their duty to save the tiny Kalash minority from extinction. This month’s attack on the Kalash again brought out their tradition of tolerance. Reena, a 14-year-old Kalash girl, was reported to have converted to Islam and chosen to stay with a Moslem family. Then she went back to her parents’ home and complained of having been forcibly converted. This enraged the Moslem neighbours and they attacked Kalash homes. The authorities intervened and the parties agreed to respect the girl’s wishes. The matter ended when the girl deposed before a magistrate that she had adopted Islam of her own free will, and her family accepted her choice. The affair highlighted the Kalash tradition of treating change of religion as something normal. Reena’s own uncle and aunt had embraced Islam before her. For some time, however, the Kalash have been showing signs of anxiety at the rate of conversions. In January this year, 12 Kalashas were reported to have converted to Islam within a month. According to a front man of the Kalash People’s Development Network, about 100 Kalashas embraced Islam over the past few years. Once a large community that ruled the Chitral region, the Kalash population has shrunk to about 3,000 heads. They are also reported to have lost control of a large part of their lands through sale to Moslems or otherwise. In this situation their fears of extinction cannot be summarily dismissed. The matter of conversion is not as simple as it is sometimes made out to be, especially by some Moslem holy mans who run conversion services. One of them once declared that the Kalash girls were turning to Islam as they had become aware of the difference between right and wrong. Another view is that educated Kalash girls change their faith to improve their marital prospects. Such statements cannot conceal the fact that members of religious minorities are under economic and social pressure to give up their status as second- or third-class citizens and join the privileged Moslem community. Thus while one has no quarrel with voluntary conversions, the state must ensure that minorities are not driven to give up their faith by denial of their rights or unbearable discrimination in social and economic terms. Such conversions are perhaps not welcome in Islam either. Besides, the question whether minors should be considered competent to change their religion needs to be resolved. Unfortunately, there have been reasons to discount the narrative of all conversions to Islam being free and voluntary. Two years ago, the Supreme Court took suo motu ...a legal term, from the Latin. Roughly translated it means I saw what you did, you bastard... action on reports of threats to the Kalash to convert to Islam or face death. The court accepted the explanation of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... government that the threat mentioned in news reports was not new and that an old story had been "picked up by some sections of media for vested interests [sic]". All this was based on a report from the Malakand commissioner who had gone to a Kalash village and was able to report that "the representatives of the Kalash minority expressed complete satisfaction over the response of the administration and they were satisfied with the security arrangements in the valleys". The commissioner’s report, as reproduced in the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment of June 2014, devotes more space to the deployment of security forces near the Kalash villages and along the border with Afghanistan than to the question of conversions or the Kalash people’s rights in general. These security arrangements are important because the danger of incursions by zealots from across the border cannot be ignored. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 The endangered Kalash Is that a California delta fish? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2016-06-23 09:37 |