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Kāfiristān, or Kāfirstān (; ; ), is a historical region that covered present-day Nuristan Province in Afghanistan and its surroundings. This historic region lies on, and mainly comprises, the basins of the rivers Alingar River, Pech River, Landai Sin and Kunar River, and the intervening mountain ranges. It is bounded by the main range of the Hindu Kush on the north, Pakistan Chitral District to the east, the Kunar Valley in the south and the Alishang River in the west.
Kafiristan took its name from the enduring kafir (non-Muslim) Nuristanis inhabitants who once practised what authors consider as a form of animism and ancestor worship with elements of Indo-Iranian (Vedic- or Hinduism) religion; they were thus known to the surrounding predominantly Sunni Islam population as , meaning "disbelievers" or "infidels". They are closely related to the Kalash people, an independent people with a distinctive culture, language and religion, who reside in the Chitral District of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
The area extending from modern Nuristan to Kashmir was known as "Peristan", a vast area containing a host of "Kafir" cultures and Indo-European languages that became Islamized over a long period of time, which eventually led them to become Muslim on the orders of Emir Abdur Rahman Khan who conquered the territory in 1895–96. The region was earlier surrounded by Buddhist states that temporarily brought literacy and state rule to the mountains; the decline of Buddhism heavily isolated the region. It was surrounded by Muslim states in the 16th century.
American adventurer Colonel Alexander Gardner claimed to have visited Kafiristan twice, in 1826 and 1828. On the first occasion, Dost Mohammad, the amir of Kabul, killed members of Gardner's delegation in Afghanistan and forced him to flee from Kabul to Yarkant County through west Kafiristan. On his second visit, Gardner briefly sojourned in northern Kafiristan and the Kunar Valley while returning from Yarkand.
In 1883, William Watts McNair, a British surveyor on leave, explored the area disguised as a hakim. He reported on the journey later that year to the Royal Geographical Society.
George Scott Robertson, Physician during the Second Anglo-Afghan War and later British political officer in the princely state of Chitral, was given permission to explore the country of the Kafirs in 1890–91. He was the last outsider to visit the area and observe these people's polytheistic culture before their conversion to Islam. Robertson's 1896 account was entitled The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush. Though some sub-groups such as the Kom paid tribute to Chitral, the majority of Kafiristan was left on the Afghan side of the frontier in 1893, when large areas of tribal lands between Afghanistan and British India were divided into zones of control by the Durand Line.
The territory between Afghanistan and British Raj was Durand Line. Part of the frontier lying between Nawa Kotal in the outskirts of Mohmand District and Bashgal Valley on the outskirts of Kafiristan was demarcated by 1895 in an agreement reached on 9 April 1895. Emir Abdur Rahman Khan wanted to force every community and tribal confederation to accept his single interpretation of Islam due to it being the only uniting factor. After the subjugation of Hazaras, Kafiristan was the last remaining autonomous part.
Abdur Rahman Khan's forces invaded Kafiristan in the winter of 1895–96 and captured it in 40 days according to his autobiography. Columns invaded it from the west through Panjshir to Kullum, the strongest fort of the region. The columns from the north came through Badakhshan and from the east through Asmar. A small column also came from south-west through Laghman Province. The Kafirs were resettled in Laghman while the region was settled by veteran soldiers and other Afghans. The Kafirs were converted and some also converted to avoid the jizya.
A few years after Robertson's visit, in 1895–96, Abdur Rahman Khan invaded and converted the Kafirs to Islam as a symbolic climax to his campaigns to bring the country under a centralised Afghan government. He had similarly subjugated the Hazaras in 1892–93. In 1896 Abdur Rahman Khan, who had thus conquered the region for Islam,Tanner, Stephen. Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002. p. 64 renamed the people the Nuristanis ("Enlightened Ones" in Persian language) and the land as Nuristan ("Land of the Enlightened").
Kafiristan was full of steep and wooded valleys. It was famous for its precise wood carving, especially of cedar-wood pillars, carved doors, furniture (including "horn furniture") and statuary. Some of these pillars survive, as they were reused in mosques, but temples, shrines, and centers of local cults, with their wooden effigies and multitudes of ancestor figures were torched and burnt to the ground. Only a small fraction brought back to Kabul as spoils of this Islamic victory over infidels. These consisted of various wooden effigies of ancestral heroes and pre-Islamic commemorative chairs. Of the more than thirty wooden figures brought to Kabul in 1896 or shortly thereafter, fourteen went to the Kabul Museum and four to the Guimet Museum and the Musée de l'Homme located in Paris.Edelberg, Lennart. "Statues de bois rapporte‚ es du Kafiristan aà Kabul apreàs la conquête de cette province par l'Emir Abdul Rahman en 1895/96," Arts Asiatiques 7, 1960, pp. 243–286
Those in the Kabul Museum were badly damaged under the Taliban but have since been restored. Their last cultural and religious activities just before their forced conversion were however recorded by the Westerners. EARLY EXPLORERS OF KAFIRISTAN
A few hundred Kata people, known as the "Red Kafirs" of the Bashgal Valley, fled across the border into Chitral but, uprooted from their homeland, they converted by the 1930s. They settled near the frontier in the valleys of Rumbur, Bumburet and Urtsun, which were then inhabited by the Kalash people or the Black Kafirs. Only this group in the five valleys of Birir Valley, Bumburet, Rumbur, Jineret and Urtsun escaped conversion, because they were located east of the Durand Line in the princely state of Chitral. However, by the 1940s the southern valleys of Urtsun and Jingeret had been converted. After a decline in population caused by forced conversion in the 1970s, this region of Kafiristan in Pakistan, known as Kalasha Desh, has recently shown an increase in its population.
In early 1991, the Republic of Afghanistan government recognized the de facto autonomy of Nuristan and created a new province of that name from districts of Kunar Province and Laghman Province.
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