Cannabis in Afghan culture

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A malang, a wandering holy man, in Kabul on 31 July 1928. Autochrome by Frédéric Gadmer for Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète.

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Cannabis in Afghan culture covers the place of hashish, called chars in Dari and Pashto, and to a lesser degree of bhang, in the social and religious life of Afghanistan. Hashish is smoked almost only by men, in a clay chillum or mixed with tobacco in a cigarette, and usually in company.

Regular smokers are called charsi, a name that carries a reputation for laziness and erratic behaviour. Smoking together has also taken a communal and ritual form, bound up with hospitality, music, poetry and Sufism, in the gatherings held at the tomb of Baba Qu-ye Mastan in Balkh and in the guesthouses of hosts near Kandahar. In 1976 the Kabul psychiatrist Asad Hassan Gobar found the plant mostly called bothae faquir, "the hermits' plant", after the hermits and faqirs who smoked it in search of religious insight.

Names and forms

Chars, pronounced chaars in Afghanistan, is the local form of hashish, and most Afghans smoke it in preference to the dried flowers.^{: para. 6} James Bradford and David Mansfield report a belief that the word comes from a Persian word for the leather pouch in which the sieved resin is stored to cure.^{: para. 6} Farmers thresh the dried plants and sieve them into a resin powder, garda, in first, second and third grades; most sell the powder, and traders press it into hashish.^{: 20, 22–23} The best northern powder is worked by hand over a flame into Jooshi hashish, which is also called Balkhi hashish or Sherak-i-Mazar, "milk of Mazar".^: 25

Smokers name hashish after the place it comes from, and the name sets its quality and price. In 2019 the dearest kind in Afghan markets was Shirak-e Panjshir from Panjshir, green in colour, strong-smelling and quick to melt in a cigarette or chillum. Shirak-e Mazar, the dark brown hashish of Balkh, came second; the black hashish of Kandahar and Logar third; and the cheapest was from Nangarhar. Some habitual smokers make their own. In Kabul a few plants are grown in a corner of the courtyard out of sight of guests and neighbours, and the dried flowers are sieved, warmed over a fire and pressed into a small piece of hashish. In the fields, cannabis sown along the bunds is often grown for personal use.^: 17 In the Wakhan the Wakhi grow hemp among the crops of their fields and gardens under the name chars.

Gobar wrote that charas was smoked in a chillum, the pipe also used for tobacco, or packed into a cigarette, and that a double smoking dose was called a paltha. Bhang was tried only very exceptionally, as was a sweet mixture called mofarrah.

Early accounts

Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, recorded in his memoirs many outings from Kabul in 1519 and 1520 at which he and his companions ate ma'jun, an intoxicating confection, sometimes instead of drinking wine or beer.^{: 386, 405, 416, 422–423} The Afghanistan Analysts Network describes ma'jun as a confection of honey, dates, oil and spices made with hashish or sometimes opium.

The Scottish diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote in his account of the kingdom of Kabul, first published in 1815, that wine was forbidden and drunk only by the rich, while bang, "though equally unlawful", was "used by the debauched in most parts of the country", and that among the Yusufzai of the plains the intoxication of opium and bang was "carried to the utmost excess".^: 280: 33 He described the gardens of faqirs as a resort of idle people, among them men who smoked intoxicating drugs.^: 346–347 Charles Masson, travelling through the Khyber country towards Jalalabad in the 1820s or 1830s, met an influential man of the valley known as Alladad Khan "Chirssi" because he smoked so much chirs. On another journey he saw Afghans in a caravan fill the chillum of Baloch toll-takers with chirs, so that the Baloch fell asleep and the caravan went on.^: 166: 179

H. W. Bellew, a member of the British political mission to Kandahar in 1857, found hemp grown near the cities and large towns for its resin, charras, which was often mixed with tobacco for smoking. In his account those who smoked it were thought disreputable, and the habit was therefore "confined almost entirely to the lower classes".^{: 9, 80–81}

A story retold by Robert Connell Clarke, which James Bradford calls perhaps apocryphal, tells of Baba Ku, a Central Asian healer who came to Afghanistan to cure plague victims with balls of charas and taught Afghans to smoke the chillum.^: 186

Hermits, faqirs and Sufi orders

Gobar, an associate professor of neuropsychiatry at Kabul University, attributed the name bothae faquir to the long use of the plant by hermits and faqirs, whom he described as mostly illiterate and heedless of formal religious teaching. In his account they regarded the plant as a gift from heaven and smoked it alone or, more often, in a group session meant to detach them from the material world. Most of the users he saw were hermits, taxi and truck drivers, prisoners and men who lived in teahouses, and he wrote that hermits and "less orthodox clergymen" smoked to reach a state of mind suited to metaphysical experience.

Writing in 1909 of the Afghan frontier, the medical missionary T. L. Pennell called the malang, or wandering dervish with his staff and begging bowl, the order most often seen in Afghanistan. He wrote that the faqirs, "like the Hindu Sadhus", constantly smoked charras and bhang with tobacco in their chillums, and that when intoxicated they were called mast and believed by the people to be possessed by divinity. Such a faqir, he added, was buried in a prominent place, often where roads crossed, and his tomb was held to have greater power than the man had had in life.^{: 237, 239}

Hashish is also smoked at some Sufi shrines kept by a malang. In Kabul's Kucheh Kharabat, the old street of the city's musicians, Sufi worshippers and musicians met late on Thursday nights in 2018 at the shrine of Charda Masoom. Children were sent home by the shrine's malang before the singing began, men sat in circles outside passing hashish round, and some of the worshippers were helped into trance by it during the music.

Hosts of smoking gatherings in Balkh and Kandahar drew on the vocabulary of Sufi orders. Baba Qu was said to have been the disciple of a well-known Sufi leader in Balkh. The helpers of Mrech Agha in Kandahar called themselves his muridan, the word for the followers of a Sufi tariqa, and sang a tarana, a religious song, for him; his household was called his langar, the name for the free kitchen kept at religious gatherings across Central and South Asia. Fabrizio Foschini, Jelena Bjelica and Obaid Ali, writing for the Afghanistan Analysts Network, compare these gatherings with Sufi brotherhoods, which offered Afghan men companionship beyond kinship, and describe the "social charsis" as meeting in the shadow of holy shrines.

Smoking together

Hashish is usually smoked in a group or with a friend, whereas opium was more often taken alone. The chillum is the rural way of smoking, kept up mostly by older men; in towns smokers empty a cigarette and refill it with hashish and tobacco, and younger smokers improvise pipes, such as an apple pierced with holes. When a chillum or cigarette goes round a circle, passing it on is called parah. Smokers recite short rhymed invocations as they do so, some wishing well to the young men in the circle and ill to those who hate them, others urging the smoker to forget his sorrow. Hashish makes the smoker hungry for a large, fatty meal, and Gobar found users convinced that smoking without fat was harmful, since only fat could absorb the drug's toxins.

In the 1960s teahouses called saqikhana, which served only charas smokers, could be found in Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.^{: para. 9} The saqi is the cup-bearer of classical Persian poetry, who serves a drink that lets the drinker forget his troubles.

Regional practice

Balkh

Baba Qu-ye Mastan lived in the first half of the 20th century and is buried in the town of Balkh. Across northern Afghanistan he is remembered for his generosity, giving food and chars to anyone in need, and smokers in Balkh praise him in a short rhyme before lighting their cigarettes or chillums.^: 186 After his death his companions built a chillumkhana ("chillum house"), also called a saqikhana, beside his grave: a dark, low-ceilinged hall with stone benches along the walls, where a caretaker fills and lights the chillums. Whoever enters must smoke, as a tribute to Baba Qu. Visitors may give money or hashish, though only the best Shirak-e Mazar is smoked there, and those who cannot give smoke free. Doors and windows are kept shut so that the smoke stays in the room, a way of smoking called shishaband or darwazaband, "closed window" or "closed door".

The traveller Felix de Rosen, who looked for the tomb in 2011, found it in a clearing beside a busy road: a small fenced grave under a large grapevine hung with red ribbons, kept by a young man named Ali who called himself its malang. Ali lived on donations, gave advice to local people and had become malang when his teacher, the previous keeper, died. He smoked hashish in an alcove beside the tomb while he talked. Accounts of Baba Qu himself differ. The guidebook de Rosen quotes calls him a pre-Islamic holy man of Bactria, credited with being the first to refine hashish, while the Afghanistan Analysts Network places his life in the first half of the 20th century.

Kandahar

A teacher posted to Spin Boldak in the reign of Zahir Shah recalled visiting, on his days off, the guesthouse of Zabar Ali Padsha at Khadanay, about halfway between Spin Boldak and Kandahar. Zabar Ali, an old man who had never married, kept servants whose only task was to fill chillums with the best hashish for his guests, and had lambs killed to feed them late in the night.

Mrech Agha, "Mr Chili Pepper", later kept the same kind of house outside Kandahar city. He received anyone who wished to smoke, helped by servants and volunteers, and went on holding court through the battles of the mujahideen and later of the Taliban and government forces until his death in 2014. Kandahar taxi drivers carried placards with verses in his praise, and a Pashto song praises him. After his death his eldest son meant to dismiss the servants because of the cost, but his father's younger widow undertook to pay for the household herself.

Medicine

Gobar found that some local healers (hakeem) prescribed cannabis for indigestion and gastric discomfort, although opium was the more common remedy. An Afghan living near the Pakistan border told the travel writer Peter Levi in the late 1960s that hashish was good for bringing on sleep.^: 192

Stigma, humour and song

Gobar wrote that most Afghans avoided hashish because they believed it caused insanity and made men cowardly. Bradford suggests that Gobar's own class and profession may have shaped this judgement of a drug used overwhelmingly by ordinary people.^: 193 Bradford and Mansfield describe Afghan attitudes to hashish in the 1960s as indifferent or ambivalent.^{: para. 10}

An Afghan man may smoke now and then without much harm to his standing, more easily than if he drank alcohol or took opium, while for a woman the stigma of any drug is far greater. The regular smoker is a charsi, a name associated with laziness, rascality and fits of rage, and used for anyone who argues or boasts beyond reason. Hashish is a common subject of jokes and songs. The Pashto folk song "Adam Khana Charsi", in the tradition of women's landay poetry, mocks a husband too sleepy for his wife, and singers who perform it act out the lethargy of the chronic smoker. In popular belief hashish is most often linked with a loss of sexual desire, and so with a man's failure to father children.

Hashish smoking is almost entirely a male practice. In 20 years of practice Gobar met only one woman who smoked it.

Travellers in the 1960s and 1970s

Shops on Chicken Street in Kabul in November 1975, photographed by a passenger on an overland bus from London to India.

In the 1960s and 1970s Western travellers on the Hippie Trail came to Afghanistan for its cheap and strong hashish.^{: para. 9} In Kabul they found it in the stalls of Chicken Street in Shahr-e Naw and in hotels such as the Noor and the Mustafa.^: 190 Bradford writes that many came believing hashish to be to Afghanistan what wine was to France, with little knowledge of local customs or laws and with simplified notions of "oriental" drug use.^: 190

Afghan magazines answered with satire. A cartoon in Karavan of 31 January 1970 showed hippies demanding hashish as their right, and one in Afghan Millat in 1971 showed a policeman telling a hippie that the "memory" he was taking home was chars.^: 190–192 Many Afghans held the travellers responsible for a growing taste for hashish among Afghans themselves.^: 192–193 In 1975 the Afghan government told American diplomats that it saw no urban drug problem apart from foreign transients; the American cable added that widespread traditional use of hashish was overlooked or not regarded as a problem. The export trade of these years is covered in Afghan hashish trade.

War and prohibition since 1978

Hashish smoking spread during the war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. David Macdonald, a former drug adviser to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, was told in 1999 by the head of the Taliban's drug control commission that many mujahideen had been paid or rewarded with hashish, which they often smoked before battle. In Kandahar the hashish smoking of some commanders and their men in 1992–94 came to stand for the breakdown of moral order in the civil war.

Under the Taliban government of the late 1990s hashish was seen as a traditional Afghan vice. The Taliban banned cannabis production early in their rule, calling its production and use un-Islamic, and the ban appears to have held where they dominated.^{: para. 19} In 1997 they declared that Islam did not permit the use of hashish or heroin.

A national drug use survey in 2009 found cannabis, mostly as hashish, to be the most commonly used illicit drug in Afghanistan. Up to 630,000 adults used it regularly, and in the year of the survey 8.1 per cent of adult men had used it against 0.2 per cent of adult women. Cannabis users began younger than other drug users, typically at 18 or 19, and use was highest in the northern and southern regions.^: 14–15 Of the 9,034 officers of the Afghan National Police who tested positive for drugs in screening by the Ministry of Interior in 2009 and 2010, 80.5 per cent tested positive for tetrahydrocannabinol. By 2019 hashish smoking had spread among young, educated townspeople. In 2008 the NPR correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported from Kandahar that hashish, unlike opium, was more or less socially acceptable there and widely smoked by men, and that hashish cigarettes, called "cigarette-tees", were sold in many shops.

In March 2020 the Taliban decreed a ban on cannabis cultivation and hashish production in the areas they controlled. Farmers in Ghazni and Paktika interviewed by the Afghanistan Analysts Network accepted that the crop was haram, forbidden in Islam. One of them, a part-time farmer who smoked hashish himself, approved of the ban on that ground, and others held that money made from cannabis was not legitimate income. The Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed told the network that complaints about hashish smoking among young men had been a main reason for the ban.

See also

• Afghan hashish trade
• Charas
• Chilam
• Hashish