Nuristanis Erotic

The Nuristanis live in a knot of steep valleys in the Hindu Kush, in the northeastern corner of Afghanistan. Until 1896 they were known to outsiders as the Kafirs — the unbelievers — and their region as Kafiristan. That name was not their own, and it stuck because they had spent centuries refusing the religion of every kingdom that surrounded them. Their territory is hard country: narrow gorges, oak and cedar forests on the lower slopes, snow above. Villages cling to the sides of valleys in stacked timber-and-stone houses, the flat roof of one home serving as the front yard of the one above it. The land made them difficult to conquer, and for a long time it made them difficult to know.

Their languages — Kati, Kamviri, Vasi-vari, Askunu, Prasun, Waigali, Tregami — form the Nuristani branch of Indo-European. It is a small branch and a strange one: not Indo-Aryan, not Iranian, but a third sibling that broke off early and developed in isolation. Linguists still argue about exactly where it sits on the family tree. The community itself splits along old lines, with the Safed-Posh Kaffirs (the "white-robed," including the Askunis) on one side and the Kamkata-viris (Kata, Kom, and related groups) on the other, each with its own speech, lineage memory, and traditional rivalries.

The conversion to Sunni Islam came late and came at the point of a sword. In 1895–96 the Afghan amir Abdur Rahman Khan launched a military campaign that subdued the valleys within a year, after which the region was renamed Nuristan — the Land of Light. Older religion, older shrines, and a great deal of carved wooden iconography were destroyed, though some pieces survive in museums in Kabul and elsewhere. Islam has now been the framework of Nuristani life for more than a century, but earlier layers persist quietly: a vocabulary of clan-honor and oath, traditions of pastoral transhumance moving herds between summer and winter pastures, distinctive woodcarving on house pillars and grave markers, and a strong sense of being separate from the Pashtun and Tajik majorities around them. Through the Soviet war, the civil wars, and the Taliban years, Nuristan has remained one of the more closed corners of Afghanistan — geographically, linguistically, and in temperament.