Contested narratives of religious marginalization : perspectives from the Kalash community

Abstract

Since 2014, when the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan threatened the Kalash of Chitral with forced conversion, external media, NGO, and academic accounts have largely converged on a single narrative: that this last surviving pre-Islamic indigenous community faces systematic religious persecution and cultural extinction. Yet this narrative has rarely been tested against the testimony of the Kalash themselves. This thesis asks how Kalash community members perceive claims of forced conversion and religious persecution, and how these contested narratives shape their identity, inter-communal relations, and sense of security. This study argues that the existing external narrative regarding the persecution of the Kalash through systematically forced conversions and oppression due to Islamist extremism is not true according to the evidence presented by Kalash respondents. Employing Miranda Fricker's theory of epistemic injustice which analyzes that the divergence between external and internal accounts is not a factual disagreement but testimonial injustice discounts Kalash self-reports as credible knowledge, while hermeneutical injustice does not give a platform to contest the frames imposed upon it. Using a purposive questionnaire administered to 59 respondents across the Bumburet, Rumbur, and Birir valleys, combining closed- and open-ended items, the research finds that 96.6% of respondents feel free to practice their religion, 69.5% attribute conversion to free choice, and 78% have never witnessed a forced conversion, with marriage and personal conviction cited as the dominant drivers. Respondents instead identify economic marginalization, land dispossession, language endangerment, and media misrepresentation as their most pressing concerns. Rather than denying hardship, the Kalash narrative redefines its source shifting attention from imagined forced conversion to structural neglect and calls for a reorganization of scholarly, media, and policy attention accordingly.