← Writing

The Muslims of Little Tibet

on the baltis of baltistan, the kache of lhasa, and what they kept

Contents 6 sections
  1. IIntroduction
  2. IIBolor
  3. IIIA Tibetan prince in Kashmir
  4. IVWhat they kept
  5. VThe Kache
  6. VIWorks consulted

Introduction

In the Karakoram, south of K2, live Muslims who speak a form of Tibetan older than the speech of Lhasa. They are the Baltis, and their country, Baltistan, was called Little Tibet. Their mosques were built in the Tibetan manner, some with the Bon swastika carved into their beams. Far to the east, in Lhasa itself, lived another community of Tibetan Muslims, the Kache, descended from Kashmiri traders.

This essay follows both.

Bolor

Baltistan’s old name is Bolor. Chinese sources of the eighth century know two kingdoms by that name, Great Bolü, roughly Baltistan, and Little Bolü, around Gilgit. Little Bolü stood on the road from Tibet to the west, allied to the Tibetan empire with some twenty small states around it. In 747 the Tang general Gao Xianzhi crossed the Pamirs with ten thousand men, took Little Bolü by surprise, captured its king and queen and cut Tibet’s road. The modern name Balawaristan, used by some in Gilgit-Baltistan today, comes from the same word.

Bolor appears in Arabic too. A plaque copied by al-Azraqi records that al-Ma’mun’s armies defeated the ruler of Bolor, “lord of the mountain of Tibet”, around 815, as The Tribe in the Tantra describes.

The region also took in Buddhist refugees. When Tibet expelled its foreign monks after a smallpox epidemic in 739, they were sent to Gandhara, and according to Berzin a large number of them settled in the mountains of Baltistan (Berzin, “From King Songtsen Gampo to King Trisong Detsen”). Before Islam, the Baltis followed Bon and Buddhism.

A Tibetan prince in Kashmir

Islam reached the region through Kashmir, and the first Muslim ruler of Kashmir was a Tibetan. Rinchana, a prince from Ladakh, seized power in Kashmir in 1320. He came under the influence of a Sufi from Turkestan, Sayyid Sharaf al-Din, called Bulbul Shah, accepted Islam and took the name Sadr al-Din. He ruled until 1323.

The Sufi orders that followed came from Iran. Mir Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadani, a Kubrawi master from Hamadan, preached in Kashmir in the 1370s and 1380s, and Baltis credit him with bringing Islam to their valleys. The Chaqchan mosque at Khaplu is traditionally said to have been founded in his time. Around 1500, Mir Shams al-Din ‘Iraqi brought the teaching of the Nurbakhshi order to Kashmir and Baltistan. The order is named after Sayyid Muhammad Nurbakhsh, who died in 1464. It combines Shi’i theology, Sunni law and Sufi practice, and today it survives almost only in Baltistan.

About sixty per cent of Baltis are Twelver Shi’is today, about thirty per cent Nurbakhshis and about ten per cent Sunnis.

What they kept

The Baltis kept a great deal. Their language is highly archaic, closer to Classical Tibetan than the speech of Lhasa: it still pronounces many of the consonant clusters that written Tibetan preserves and the central dialects lost. The country’s own name in Tibetan script is Baltiyul, བལ་ཏི་ཡུལ.

Their religious buildings kept older signs. The swastika, yungdrung in Tibetan, the emblem of Bon, is carved on the wooden planks of historic mosques and khanqahs and is still considered auspicious. Village rituals still show respect to the lha and the lu, the gods and water spirits of Bon. Mosques and Sufi lodges were built in a style that is unmistakably Tibetan.

Shigar Fort, called Fong Khar, “the fort on the rock”, was the seat of the rajas of Shigar. Symbols of several religions are carved into the wooden beams of its residential palace. It has been restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Small communities of Bon and Buddhist believers, some three thousand people, remain in the Kharmang valley of Baltistan and in western Kargil. Eastern Ladakh, Leh and Zanskar, is still mainly Buddhist.

The Kache

The Tibetan word for Kashmir is kha che, ཁ་ཆེ, and Kashmir is Kache Yul, the country of the Kache. In Tibet the name came to mean a Muslim.

Kashmiri Muslims were living in central Tibet by the fifteenth century. A permanent community existed in Lhasa no later than the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617 to 1682), who gave it privileges. It elected a committee of five to manage its affairs, settled its disputes by the Shari’a, traded freely in other Tibetan towns and was exempt from taxes. The story of the land he gave them for a mosque, the “park of the far-reaching arrow”, is told in The Kingdom at the End of Time.

The Kache married into Tibetan families. Most descend from Kashmiri, and sometimes Persian, Arab or Turkic, men through the father’s line and from Tibetan women through the mother’s, though the reverse is not rare. China counts them officially as Tibetans, unlike the Hui Muslims, who are classed separately. After 1959 many left for India, and a Tibetan Muslim community still lives in Srinagar.

One of them wrote a book every Tibetan knew. Khache Phalu’s Advice, verse counsel on ordinary life by a Kashmiri Tibetan Muslim merchant, appeared in the eighteenth century. For two hundred years it was read, memorised and quoted across Tibet, by monks and by people who could not read at all (Dickie). One of its verses is about impermanence:

They keep coming and they keep going. All who come must go in the end.

Khache Phalu’s Advice, tr. Tenzin Dickie

Works consulted