INTRODUCTION

I have demonstrated in chapter 5, then, that Chitral has a rich tradition of intellectual and creative life embodied in the popularity and sophisticated appreciation of the music and poetry of groups like the Nobles. In this chapter we see something equally striking: the ways in which the region's ulama think and act, and the ways in which villagers think about them, is far from simplistic or straightforward. The statement above, made by a twenty-three-year-old woman, shows that there is, for some Rowshan people, more to the village's ulama than their beards (rigish), rosary beads (dazbeh) and overtly pious lifestyles suggest. Men who have received recognised and certified training in the Islamic sciences are known in Khowar as the dashmanan (singular, dashman) – a word that derives from the Persian danish meaning ‘knowledge’. It is critical that we explore the lives of region's dashmanan given their importance in Chitral life, but also because of how easily one might assume that they are perceived as one-dimensional founts of puritanical ‘Islamic’ authority, either universally deferred to, or ‘resisted’ in a simplistic sense. An exploration of how much more complex the reality is reveals much about both Islam and Chitral, and the very active ways in which Chitral people think about the act of thought and the nature of emotion.