afghanistana century. 14 Its founder, Bayazid Ansari (b. 1525), or Pir Roshan, was from
the small Ormur or Baraki tribe, whose mother tongue was not Pushtu but
Ormuri. His father was a religious teacher but Ansari fell out with him and
his tribe because of his unorthodox opinions. Forced to flee, he made his
way into Mohmand tribal territory in the Khyber region and later made
his base in the mountain country of Tirah.
From the mid-1570s onwards Pir Roshan began to claim he was the
Mahdi, the Restorer whose appearance in the Last Days, according to
Islamic teaching, would usher in the Golden Age in which all the world
would be converted to Islam. After a visit to an unnamed Sufi mystic in
the Kandahar area, Pir Roshan declared jihad on the Mughals and found
strong support for his cause among the Yusufzai, Afridi, Orakzai and
Mohmand tribes. The Roshaniyya movement was heterodox in its theology
and was condemned by the orthodox Sunni establishment as heretical. Its
many critics punning referring to the movement as the tarikiyya, from the
Persian word for ‘darkness’. At the same time the Roshaniyya had strong
nationalistic overtones and one of Pir Roshan’s key demands was complete
independence from Mughal rule.
The Roshaniyya rebellion came at a difficult time for Akbar the Great,
who was already embroiled in a civil war with his brother Hakim, governor
of Lahore, as well as the conquest of Kashmir. When Akbar finally regained
control of Lahore and Peshawar in 1581, he marched up the Khyber Pass
and soundly defeated Pir Roshan at the Battle of Baro in Nangahar. A
The Khyber Pass, looking back towards Peshawar and the Indus plains.