Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
called 'the mad mullah' by the Brits, declared a
jihad
, a holy war,
from his village in the valley. He had one of the few boys he taught
in the little mosque school proclaimed 'king of Delhi' and marched
with them off to war. Three days later he'd managed to gather some
twenty thousand local tribesmen around him, and they attacked
British installations in the Malakand Pass and elsewhere. After a week
of bloody fighting that saw a few hundred casualties on both sides,
Mastun vanished back to his village, wherever it was, as swiftly and
as enigmatically as he had appeared.
The state of Swat was finally founded by Miangul Gulshahzada
Sir Abdul Wadud, a chieftain of the relatively petty Safi tribe. He
also happened to be the akond's grandson, and was known
affectionately as Badshah Sahib. He ruled successfully for twenty-
three years, thanks to both his family's saintly reputation and his
own genius for organisation. He had had to carve out a state from
scratch, building forts at either end of the valley, installing telephones
and other innovations that brought Shangri-la into the
communication age and made invasion by other tribes a thing of
the past. Knowing a good thing when they saw one, the British
quickly recognised the new progressive state and its enlightened
ruler. On December 12, 1949, during the upheaval following
Partition, Badshah Sahib turned Swat over to his son, Major-general
Miangul Jahan Zeb, H Pk, HQA, CIE - whatever the abbreviations
mean. Liaqat Ali Khan, then Pakistan's Prime Minister, installed
him as wali of Swat. Swat was the first state to accede to Pakistan,
immediately after independence. Although not precisely
independent in status, the state ran its own affairs, with its own
army of ten thousand men, a police force of two thousand, and its
own civil and criminal laws and system of administration.
In 1976, the wali was Miangul Jahan Zeb's son, Miangul
Aurangzeb, who had previously been ADC to the commander-in-
chief of Pakistan's army, then an elected member of Pakistan's
National Assembly, from Constituency NW-18. Like his father, he
ruled Swat with a legion of advisers, secretaries,
munsheers
,
qazis
,
hakims
, and
tehsildars
. Still a princely state within Pakistan, Swat then
meted out justice through a mixture of Islamic law, custom, and the
wali's orders - although Pakistan's central government managed
