Ethnic Design Collection Reto Zehnder

Northeast Afghanistan and western region of North Pakistan are an old cultural and ethnological retreat, where, in spacious valleys of the Hindu Kush, lived the Kafir (‘unbeliever’) tribes. With their own languages, religion and culture. They were only (forcefully) converted to Islam in the winter of 1895/96 in a military campaign by the Afghan Shah Abdur Rahman. And it was only then that their lands, difficult to access, were renamed Nuristan (‘Land of heavenly Light’). Remaining Kafiristani tribes (the Kalash) could only preserve their old culture in pockets in Northwest Pakistan, around Chitral.