Mikhail Pelevin, "Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times" (Brill, 2025)

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025).

Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto

literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830,

the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto

letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of

Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's

Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza,

and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman

Momand (Rahman Baba). This

book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently

marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this

history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the