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Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict (1724)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mikhail Pelevin Open the ORCID record for Mikhail Pelevin [Opens in a new window]
Mikhail Pelevin*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Asian and African Studies, St. Petersburg State University
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Abstract

The article examines the contents and the historical background of five early specimens of diplomatic correspondence on the Pashtun tribal territories. Written in Persian by the Khatak chief Afzal Khān (d. circa 1740/41) these letters supplement the author’s Pashto account of his political conflict with the Khatak spiritual leaders, the sheikhs, in 1724. While in the letters the tribal chief appealed for judicial settlement of the conflict via legal procedure in the Sharia Court of Peshawar, in verbal negotiations he sought extrajudicial administrative arbitration or tribal practices of reconciliation according to the Pashtun customary law. The article conttrunains new materials for the historiography of Pashtun tribes and for comparative study of conflict patterns in Muslim tribal societies.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 495 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2017

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