Talk:Raees dynasty

Merge Request

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No opposition to merge. TrangaBellam (talk) 17:30, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

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I am requesting a merge to the History section of Chitral. If I search for the subject in Google Scholar, there are only three hits (hardly any reliable source in Gbooks, either):

• A document on Chitral published by International Union for Conservation of Nature covers the "family" in p. 3-4. Different aspects of the polity under Raees is mentioned throughout the book.

• IUCN is not a reliable source for history and the extremely shallow bibliography (p. 112-114) speaks to it. That being said, most of the content is unsourced except for the occassional references to Ghufran, Mirza Muhammad. 1962. Nayi Tarikh-e-Chitral. Translated from Farsi into Urdu by Ghulam Murtaza. Peshawar: Public Art Press.

• (Ghufran 1962) is the topic of Tarikh-i-Chitral. A primary source, it is a translated (and updated) edition of a court-history commissioned by the last significant Mehtar of Chitral. Cacopardo (2010; p. 45-51) writes,

  Nai Tarikh-i-Chitral (NTCh) should be seen basically as a celebration of the Kator dynasty. It was written on the impetus of the court, a ruler himself is among the authors, and members of the royal family financed the publication of the 1962 edition. The view it presents of Chitral history is obviously that of the Kator and their ruling circle. Its account of pre-20th century events is based largely on oral traditions of the court and of the adamzada élite, complemented with selected information from other sources, such as western classical writers, Moghul historiography, or the modem history of Jammu published by Hashmatullah Khan in c 1939. As remarked by Stellrecht about modern local historiography of the area in general, both the chronicle and the oral traditions it derives from "can be considered as instruments of legitimation".

  The court intellectuals that contributed to NTCh had certainly realized the ideological force of a chronologically organized account. The main intentions of the authors were to trace as far back as acceptable the advent of Islam in Chitral, and to legitimate Kator rule by anticipating as much as possible its beginning. Accordingly, the authors of NTCh arranged oral tradition in a chronological scheme reaching back to the 7th century A.D., that is to the very beginnings of Islam.

  [...]

  Only very recently has NTCh's account been subjected to a critical investigation on the part of Wolfgang Holzwarth. On the basis of a comparative study of historical documents from surrounding areas, Holzwarth first challenged NTCh's reconstruction of the Rais period, arguing that it obscures "the penetration of Islamic civilization in Chitral and Gilgit." [...] The first independent Muslim ruler in Chitral was Shah Babur, a ruler who is not mentioned in NTCh and whose name had apparently been forgotten by Chitrali tradition. According to Bahr al-asrar—the 17th century court chronicle of the Uzbek khanate of Balkh—Shah Babur was a Shiah and was reigning in Chitral in 1620.

  [...]

  We can safely conclude, it seems, that pre-Kator Muslim rulers connected to Yarkand are documented in Chitral from the second half of the 16th to the middle of the 18th century. We can distinguish among them three possibly separate groups: the early nameless deputies of the rulers of Kashgar, the line of Shah Babur and Shah Rais, and that of Shah Nasir Shah Mahmud Shah Abdul Qadir Mir Padsha. It is possible that the latter two lines were in fact two sequential segments of the same dynasty, but of this we do not have definite proof.

  As for the first seven Rais rulers of NTCh, Holzwarth remarks that it is not clear where their names and the dates of their rule come from. They do not appear in any source, nor are they mentioned in known oral traditions. Biddulph who was writing before Ghufran's first work appeared, only found that there was memory of "a succession of princes styled Reis", one of which ruled Chitral at the end of the 16th century, but their names had not been preserved. Schomberg (1938) and Scott (1937) still report no names. In an oral text recorded by Lorimer (1980), the Rais are merely described as officers of the Muslim ruler of Yarkand, again with no names or dates. Finally, both in Shah-nama-i-Chitral (a poetical version of Ghufran's work) and in Aziz-ud-din's Tarikh-i-Chitral, Shah Nasir is the first "Raisiya" ruler of Chitral mentioned by name. He is also the founder of the Raisiya clan in the genealogy compiled in 1941 by Nasr-ul-Mulk from oral tradition.

  The first seven Rais rulers of NTCh are therefore most probably a recent invention, while the last three are in all likelihood historical. [See my indented reply]. However, when the oral traditions of Chitral refer to a Rais dynasty, we cannot tell for sure whether this particular line is meant, for the term may well refer indiscriminately to all pre-Kator Muslim rulers of Chitral.

• One jingoist paper uploaded to SSRN by some colonel, which is not a reliable source.
• One article in PalArch's "The Journal of Archaeology of Egypt / Egyptology" which spares a single line:

  Historically, Kalasha once ruled most of the southern part of Chitral till first Muslim ruler from Raees dynasty defeated the last king of Kalasha, Raja Wai around fourteenth century to fifteenth century (Siiger, 1956; Loude &Lievre, 1984; Cacopardo, 1991).

• Siiger, 1956 is the exploits of a Danish ethnographer who travelled across S. Asia in 1940s: he collected Kalash folklores etc. and explicitly cautioned readers against uncritically assuming them to be positivist sources.
• Cacopardo, 1991 is enlightening:

  All Chitralis have heard the stories of the Kalasha rulers of the past.

  The story tells that these Kalasha rulers were defeated by the first Muslim kings of Chitral, the legendary Rais, about whom quite little is known and this defeat is variously dated between the 14th and the 15th or 16th century (!).

  It is to be doubted, however, that the Kalasha actually ever had the kind of princely rulers that characterized the more recent Muslim states in the area, such as the one of the historical Kator family who controlled the Chitral area, including the subjugated Kalasha, until Pakistan's independence in 1947. There are many reasons to believe that the so-called Kalasha kings of the past were actually a peculiar kind of tribal 'big men' who were much closer to the figure of the redistributory chief than to that of a prince.

• The currently-cited "History of Chitral-an Outline" is an unreliable source.

To summarize, we know nothing about this dynasty except what can be obtained from folk-lore and a questionable royal chronicle. Modern historians/ethnographers do not accept these narratives at face value and doubt the existence of any Rais dynasty. Eventually when inscriptions, coins etc. are located, they rarely corroborate these legends except in confirming the thrust of history. So far, such evidences are yet to be found for Chitral and the historical scape remains poor:

It should be remarked that there exhists no exhaustive and scientifically founded account of the history of Chitral. All Western syntheses on the subject, from the earliest attempt by Biddulph to the most recent one by L'Homme, are the result of a variable mixture of conjectures, oral traditions, scanty evidence, and previous questionable sources.

A series of documents issued by the Mehtars that have been preserved in Chitral and were translated in NTCh. According to Holzwarth, who has recently obtained copies of the documents and is now studying them, those translations are not very reliable and the dates associated with the texts are mostly incorrect. The critical edition of these sanads, which are among the most important chronological references for pre-British history of Chitral, will throw much light on the past of the district.

TrangaBellam (talk) 07:52, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That being said, not everything is discardable. One "Shah Mamud" is mentioned in the Chinese chronicles of 1764 as having conquered the region with the aid of Chinese troops which can be read as a version of NTCh's eponymous Raees purging out the Kator usurpers (1630 CE) in the Battle of Danin with aid from Kashgar and Yarkand. The year is obviously wrong, since we have a royal decree from 1740 wherein Shah Mahmud, the son of Shah Nasir, exempted some subject from forced labor. These two rulers are historically corroborated but Cacopardo doubts whether they belonged to the (alleged) Raees dynasty. TrangaBellam (talk) 12:15, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 18 January 2023

Qaqlasht → Raees dynastyRaees dynasty – Reverting yet another hijacking of an existing article. Awaiting action on this editor who has been reported at WP:ANI. David Biddulph (talk) 18:11, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Would have moved it back already if it wasn't for the redirect blocking it. Vif12vf/Tiberius (talk) 23:19, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

I'd have done that too if I could have done, so hence this RM. One of the particularly annoying things about this editor is his habit of repeatedly shuffling page titles to & fro and leaving redirects blocking moves. - David Biddulph (talk) 01:38, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

• Speedy move. But that kinda goes without saying by this point. O.N.R. ^(talk) 03:17, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
• Speedy moved. Should it happen in the future, please fill the request in the "Revert undiscussed moves" section of WP:RMTR rather than as a structured RM. Thanks. No such user (talk) 13:47, 19 January 2023 (UTC)