I didn’t really know my dad very well.
It’s understandable, I didn’t even meet him until he was 31 years old and I don’t remember a lot of the next 5 or 6 years. Then he was in the military for a couple of years. He was in his mid-30’s by the time he did his mandatory military service. His friend said he was lucky he was tall. They put the tall guys in the front to march and they didn’t have to breathe so much dust. His boot-camp mates called him grandpa because of his advanced age.
He was the 4th of 10 children, his father died in an accident when he was 13 leaving his mother Babo to raise the family.
His father was a military officer though illiterate and the only thing my dad ever quoted him to me was asking if he had done his school homework. “I finished it,” my not yet father said. “Do another page,” his dad told him.
Eventually, maybe when I was 21 or so I realized the extent of his sense of humor, but by that time I’d been living on my own for a few years. He had a dry but gentle wit and what were likely some of his best jokes had sailed right over my head. Once in a while it looked like he might be chuckling after delivering an unrecognized zinger but he would wipe his mouth with a napkin suppressing his smirk.
He seemed fluid in 2 cultures, in Afghan culture as well as US. He was fluent in 3 languages and could read at least a little in 4. He was conventional and wildly unconventional, depending on perspective. He’d had a pierced ear when he was young. His older brothers held him down and did it for him. “You’ll thank us later,” they said. He also had a tattoo on his left arm that he did himself, his name Hakim in Arabic script. He didn’t ever explain why he did it other than “in case I lose my arm someone can return it.” But usually that sort of thing is for if you lose your whole self someone can return your body to your family. I don’t know what he might have been up to in his first 31 years for that to be a situation.
He had a series of pock marks on his back along the sides of his spine which he said were from being leached as a child for some illness. He had used marijuana, medicinally.
He was a Muslim, apparently very stern with his siblings in his youth but he had his own ideas about proper practice. He became disenchanted with the fundamentalist form of Islam the Saudi’s began to promote in recent decades and tho he had performed the hajj he came to believe that the seeming nationalism of the pilgrimage was antithetical to the spirit of Islam and people should refuse it, making a donation to the poor of the cost of travel instead.
A Pakhtun, his moral principles were rooted in the tradition of Pakhtunwali, an ancient set of guidelines, traditions, codes of conduct that long pre-dated Islamic/Abrahamic law.
The Pashtun are a collection of tribes that mostly inhabit the mountainous regions of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At least some of the tribes may pre-date the arrival of the steppe Aryans, Indo-Iranian nomads or pastoralist horse riding people. It isn’t a homogeneous ethnic group, various tribes were accepted over time simply by living in the place, learning the language and accepting Pakhtunwali. And dancing the Attan. One or 2 tribes even claim an origin as “lost” Hebrew tribes, but mostly these are people who arrived or were in the region when the Vedas were complied, and the Avesta. The Vedas are the origin of Hindu culture and the Pashtuns are mentioned in their texts. The Avesta are the root of Zoroastrianism, Zoroaster himself was from the region, and Zoroastrianism or Ahura Mazda worship (mazdayana) was the religion of Achaemenid Persians like Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, Artaxerxes. You can read about them in the Bible and some of that is based in truth, but a lot of it is pure bunk (a lot of it is defamatory bunk) despite the contention some people make about the Bible being literal truth. It is worth considering how well the ancient Jews were treated by the ancient Iranians and that may be rooted in the steppe origins of codes of conduct like Pakhtunwali.
The steppe people tended to value oral traditions of history, mythology and traditions kept through generations of rote memorization as opposed to the recorded laws and codes of literate groups such as Mesopotamians like Hammurabi or Leviticus of the Jews with numerous and detailed prescriptions for punishment.
Pakhtunwali is more of set of principles to live by, justice, hospitality, asylum, tolerance, kindness, arbitration of disputes through council of elders, etc. The Pashtuns existed between, traded with, or were part of the steppe Saka, the Persians, Mesopotamians, Indus culture, Oxus culture, Bactria, the Macedonian Greeks, Buddhist kingdoms, the Kushans, the Mongols, and eventually the Islamic Arabs. Many well known people were born, lived, or travelled through the region Zoroaster, Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Rumi, Genghis Khan, Marco Polo, and lots of very famous people who most Americans have no idea about.
Through it all Pakhtunwali persists.
It was maddeningly stupid when after the terrorist attack of 9/11 President George W Bush issued an ultimatum to the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden. “Either you’re with us or you’re agin us,” he sort of said having learned his Texas culture from a bad Western movie or Gunsmoke. Under Pakhtunwali the Taliban were honor bound to protect Bin Laden from his enemies as long as he was under their auspices, until his enemies could arrange a council of elders of some sort to arrange a handover to a judicial body. The US invasion of Afghanistan, in the eyes of the Taliban, was an act of dishonor and was subject to the necessity of revenge. There is a saying that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, but an Afghan wag countered that Afghanistan is the graveyard of Afghans. A Pakhtun proverb “revenge in a hundred years is too soon.” Turns out Americans tolerance is only about 20 years and Donald Trump negotiated a surrender to the Taliban in 2020.
So, anyway, my dad was steeped in concepts of justice, tolerance, loyalty, kindness, dignity, and hospitality that derived from ancient cultures pre-dating the basically single Abrahamic religion of Judiaism/Christianity/Islam. He grew up in a culture of diversity far broader than that of Whitehall, NY where he eventually retired. He really loved Whitehall, but I suspect he derived some good natured amusement from a place where the Italian Catholics had a separate church from the French and Irish Catholics.
Once I was riding with him in his pickup through the village where he was the municipal engineer and sewer treatment plant operator. A man on the street flipped him his middle finger. My dad smiled and waved, “hello” he called out.