How Pashtuns Treat Refugees
Posted on Mar 6, 2019 by Trevor in Religion
The extraordinarily stingy reception the U.S. generally gives refugees and asylum seekers is a point of embarrassment for me. Throw in the unconscionable treatment of children and families that have made the news this year and we look downright evil.
As a point of comparison with how the we treat refugees, consider an anecdote from Malala Yousafzai’s book where she describes her people fleeing as the Pakistani military sought to drive the Taliban out of the region:
In Mardan there were already big camps of white UNHCR tents like those for Afghan refugees in Peshawar. We weren’t going to stay in the camps because it was the worst idea ever. Almost two million of us were fleeing Swat and you couldn’t have fitted two million people in those camps. Even if there was a tent for us, it was far too hot inside and there was talk that diseases like cholera were spreading. My father said he had heard rumours that some Taliban were even hiding inside the camps and harassing the women.
Those who could, stayed in the homes of local people or with family and friends. Amazingly three-quarters of all the IDPs were put up by the people of Mardan and the nearby town of Swabi. They opened the doors of their homes, schools and mosques to the refugees. In our culture women are expected not to mix with men they are not related to. In order to protect women’s purdah, men in families hosting the refugees even slept away from their own homes. They became voluntary IDPs. It was an astonishing example of Pashtun hospitality.
Here in the U.S., one of the largest countries in the world, and the wealthiest in history, we place severe restrictions on the number of refugees we accept. Perish the very thought that we’d put them up in our own homes. These Pashtuns certainly put us to shame.
