3 - Chief Trajectories of Militant Religious Activism in the Pashtun Borderland: The Antecedents

Summary

After having already probed here and there into the earlier political history of the region, our archaeological endeavour proper sets in at the pivotal moment that inhabitants of the Pashtun Borderland developed manifest imperial aspirations themselves.

At that time, the region had been dominated more by views on community and society, alongside mechanisms to put these into practice, which were somewhat at odds with the various forms of imperialism to which they had been subjected. Yet, without the latter, a distinct Pashtun ethnic identity would perhaps not have emerged to such an extent that it could serve as a major element in the ideological justification of their own imperial ambitions. After all, while larger empires around the Pashtun Borderland had emerged and disappeared, the Borderland itself, alongside a distinct ethnic identity which was considered worth defending against external forces, remained rather fluid in shape until the early eighteenth century.