Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland

Sana Haroon examines religious organisation and mobilisation in the North-West Frontier Tribal Areas, a non-administered region on the Indo-Afghan border. The Tribal Areas was defined topographically as a strategic zone of defence for British India, but also determined to be socially distinct and hence left outside the judicial, legislative and social institutions of greater colonial India. Conditions of Tribal Areas autonomy came to emphasise the role and importance of the mullas operating in the region, and the mullas jealously protected this administrative alienation. Despite its great distance from the centres of political organisation in India and Afghanistan, the frontier occasionally functioned as a military organisation ground for both Indian and Afghan anti-colonial activists until independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.