4 - Chief Trajectories of Militant Religious Activism in the Pashtun Borderland: Acceleration in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Summary

Religious discourse in a specific environment, such as the Pashtun Borderland, was decidedly shaped by highly localized, traditional Islamic articulations, while ideational cross-pollination with more universalist ones appears to have historically been rather limited, especially among the subaltern strata of society. The most dominant expressions belong, first and foremost, to a spectrum of Sufi Islam that ranged from the ecstatic kind of the mendicant dervish to the sober variety epitomized in the Naqshbandiyyah-Mujaddidiyyah. During the first decades of the twentieth century, as we have seen, the latter especially was widely absorbed into diverse local manifestations of “Frontier Deobandiyyat”, which turned this particular Islamic response to the challenges of an aggressively expanding global modernity into the one that, despite its origins outside the region, had been establishing itself across the Pashtun Borderland much more successfully than any of its various competitors.