Source: The Washington Post

By Tim Craig

KALASH VALLEY, Pakistan — Hidden up in the mountains near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the Kalash tribe loves homemade wine and whiskey, dances for days at colorful festivals, and practices a religion that holds that God has spirits and messengers who speak through nature.

Long before the campaign of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, the villagers fretted over whether they needed walls or do-not-enter lists to protect them from their more-conservative Muslim neighbors — ultimately deciding that the towering heights of the Hindu Kush would protect them.

But over the past century, Muslims from modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan began moving in. Now villagers say their Kalash culture and religion are threatened by forced conversions, robberies and assaults.

“We are scared,” said Yasir Kalash, the manager of a hotel here in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. “They capture our lands, our pastures and our forests, and sometimes take our goats and women. . . . We are afraid in the next few years we will be finished.”

Though the area is called the Kalash Valley, Kalash settlers actually live in three separate valleys that make up an eastern prong of Pakistan’s 1,000-square-mile Chitral Valley.

The Kalash religion was once widespread in Central Asia, but the 4,200 villagers who live here in the Chitral Valley make up the last known Kalash settlement in the world. And now those villages are yet another test of Muslim­dominated Pakistan’s tolerance for minorities and cultural diversity.

The Kalash tribe is so fearful of being overrun that its members are considering packing up their children and goats and embarking on a modern-day pilgrimage in search of a new country.

“The younger generation think they cannot live here anymore,” said Zahim Kalash, 34.

In June, a two-day riot erupted on this plateau after Kalash villagers said a 15-year-old girl was tricked into converting to Islam. Last month, two Kalash goatherds were killed in a mountain pasture, the latest in a series of attacks on the tribe. And heated arguments are erupting over practices as simple as using the local spring water.

Read more