Nestled in the very highest mountain valleys of the southern Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Karakorum ranges lies a region about the size of Switzerland that is inhabited by at least 36 different ethnolinguistic communities that, until the nineteenth century, remained both culturally distinct and politically independent from their lowland neighbours. As the world around them became Islamic (and Buddhist on its eastern edge), they maintained a tradition of complex polytheism until the end of the nineteenth century, which a few Kalash communities in Pakistan still preserve. In the Indo-Iranian Muslim world, the lands were called Kafiristan and their people Kafirs (unbelievers). While modern researchers have taken to calling the region Peristan (land of fairies), after the spirits that are believed to inhabit its highest peaks, the people who live there have no common name for themselves or the region in which they live.

Roots of Peristan offers a wide-ranging sample of recent scholarly research and debates from a (slightly delayed due to COVID-19) 2022 multidisciplinary international conference that was held in Rome and brought together over 40 researchers from 16 countries to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first Hindukush Cultural Conference, which was held at Moesgård, Denmark in 1970. It is a massive piece of work (950 pages) and the editors, Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo, are to be congratulated for producing it so quickly—an amazing feat that anyone who has waited for many years to see published conference volumes that are a quarter of this size will appreciate. The quality of the contributions varies considerably. Many are short and show little sign of have been worked on after they were delivered at the conference whereas others are of book-chapter length and rewritten to stand independently for a larger audience. With the exception of the linguistics contributions, most of the chapters focus on the Pakistani regions of Chitral and Baltistan, while Afghanistan's ‘Peristani’ provinces of Nuristan, Kunar, and Laghman receive far less attention. This is not surprising: new roads (particularly the Karakorum Highway to China) have made these formerly remote regions in Pakistan much more easily accessible over the past 50 years, whereas those in Afghanistan must still be reached on foot and were plagued by wars during the same time period.

The two volumes are divided into five sections: Ethnography, Linguistics, History, Antiquity, and Comparisons, although many are interdisciplinary and defy such simple categorisation. For this reason, it is perhaps better to review some cross-cutting themes: insider versus outsider perspectives; comparative and historical linguistics as evidence in understanding how the various peoples of the region came to inhabit it; and debates over religious and cultural traditions.

From the point of view of their Muslim neighbours, it was the Kafirs’ polytheistic religion, wine drinking, and violent defence of their borderlands that made them a classic ‘Other’ whose internal differences were of no interest. Bernardini's ‘Timur and the Siyahpušan’ describes how even the great Tamerlane's army suffered defeat there in 1399 and Pello's ‘Baba Siyar and the soul of the unbeliever’ shows how fact and fiction were combined to create a Kafir trope in Persian poetry that was sometimes ethnographically specific and at other times metaphorical. Crowley's ‘The politics of Peristan’ explores how the nineteenth-century British interest in the region was spurred on by legends that its inhabitants were fair-skinned descendants of Alexander the Great and hence ‘lost Europeans’. This led to many speculative theories about their origins and inspired Rudyard Kipling's 1888 novel, The Man Who Would be King. In 1935, research took a more sinister turn when Nazi Germany dispatched an expedition there to validate its theories of Aryan racial superiority. Cowley notes that the European far right of today is still enamoured by the idea of a racial/linguistic affinity with the threatened non-Muslim Kalasha people in Pakistan. In the late 1990s, that affinity inspired a well-financed Greek NGO to construct a set of oversized schools and museums for the Kalasha that included a raft of classical motifs that were designed to visually link their culture to that of the ancient Greeks, at least until the Afghan Taliban crossed the border to shut them down about a decade later. These outsider perspectives contrast sharply with Kalasha's moving ‘A traditional Kalasha funeral and feast in the twenty-first century’ that describes the death and funeral of his grandmother, who was one of the most prominent woman leaders of her generation. It vividly depicts the divisions in an extended family between those who remained proud polytheists and those who had converted to Islam but were brought together by kinship and cultural cohesion to hold a very large traditional funeral and expensive community feasts in her honour. It is also a reminder that, as successful as many of the many contributions to this volume are in analyzing such rituals, in scholarly terms, they rarely capture the holistic cultural values that caused them to be replicated, generation after generation, and do not exist independently of the people who produced them.

Historical and comparative linguistics have always played an outsized role in the study of Peristan because it is home to so many different languages that were extinct elsewhere or previously unknown. To a non-linguist, the conflicting debates about the comparative development of the Indo-Aryan and other language groups are nigh on impenetrable, but the evidence that is derived from such detailed studies, as well as new genetic data, is central to answering questions about the timing of the settlement of its many ethnolinguistic groups and the differences between them. In this regard, Strand's ‘Kâmbojâs and Sakas in the Holly-Oak Mountains: on the origins of the Nûristânîs’ is one of the most interesting chapters. The oral history of the Kom in Nuristan claims that they are the elite descendants of horse-riding Sakas who formerly dominated vast stretches of the lowlands before failed wars with the Muslim Ghaznavid Turks ended the Hindu Shahi kingdom and pushed them into the mountains. Although the way of life of these people changed almost completely, Strand notes that their monumental carved wooden tomb effigies all depicted men on horseback in a land in which no horses could have been raised. Similarly, the Kom maintained a class structure in which a skilled caste of low-ranking artisans, bari, produced elaborate wood carvings, jewellery, and daggers that its elite members used to compete for status (described in Klimberg's ‘High status and sexuality symbolism in Kafiristan’ and Wutt's ‘Symbols in Pashai culture’). This was not typical of the neighbouring groups that the Kom had displaced, who were far more egalitarian, and it raises interesting questions about how high mountain areas became different types of refuge zones, depending on who took control of them. It also problematises the concept of an ‘indigenous people’ in which every group appears to have a story about how it was pushed out of one place and then displaced another people to make its home elsewhere.

Whether the polytheistic religions that were practised in the region are a variety of Hinduism has long been debated. Looking at the Kalash winter solstice festival, Witzel's ‘Indra among the Kalasha’ argues that deities such as Indra are Indo-Iranian in origin and owe nothing to the Brahmanical Hinduism of medieval India. Halfmann's ‘Nuristani theonyms in light of historical phonology’ comes to the opposite conclusion. This debate also shows up more tangentially in Sperber's ethnographic study, ‘The pure goats of the Kalasha’, in which the concept of pure and impure are key elements. Moscatelli and Filigenzi's ‘Non-Buddhist customs of Buddhist people’ reminds us that the flow of religious ideas was not always one-way: the Gandharan Buddhist religious art that flourished during the first few centuries CE employs many erotic themes and deities that appear to have derived from the Peristan region. It may well be that the binary Muslim/polytheist model that we see today as a one-way street was more likely two-way (and more permeable, too) before the arrival of the iconoclastic Muslim Ghaznavids at the beginning of the eleventh century.

For an outsider who is reading this work, there is a sense that, even when discussing the living peoples of the region, the approach is backward-looking, as is implicit in its subtitle, ‘The pre-Islamic cultures of the Hindukush/Karakorum’, because today's Kalash and their culture are not pre-Islamic, but polytheist, as they have been for centuries—perhaps millennia. And, even if all of the Kalash adopted Islam, it would not mean the end of Kalash culture, but rather a change within it. Thus, just as the editors were keen to substitute Peristan for Kafiristan, perhaps the category of pre-Islamic is equally ethnocentric. Surprisingly, there is no discussion (linguistic or historical) about the expansion of the Pashto language and its speakers who now occupy the lands on Peristan's southern border. More ink is spilled in discussing the Ghaznavid Turks than the Pashtuns, who now dominate the lowlands (the one exception being Green's fascinating ‘Christian missionaries, Pashtun middlemen, and the attempt to convert Kafiristan’). How the Pashtuns and their language became dominant deserves more attention, particularly regarding whether their spread constituted a displacement of existing people or was part of a process in which existing communities adopted a new language and ethnic identity. As the study of Peristan proceeds, it should ensure that it does not keep its eyes so focused on the past that it loses sight of the equally important contemporary world of which it is a part.