{"book":"adl0957","page":145,"text":"108\n\nothers. A man who is in difficulty or has a favour to ask goes\nto the house or tent of an Afghan on whom he depends, and\nrefuses to sit on his carpet, or to partake of his hospitality until\nthe boon is granted. The honour of the party thus solicited\nwill incur a stain if he does not grant the favour asked of him.\nSo far is this practice carried, that a man over-matched by his\nenemy, will sometimes go Ninawati to the house of another man,\nand entreat him to take up his quarrel, a request with which the\nother is obliged to comply. A still stronger appeal is made when a\nwoman in distress sends her veil to an Afghan, calling upon\nhim as her brother, and imploring his assistance for herself\nor her family. From this custom arises the obligation of\nprotecting and defending a fugitive, even against the govern-\nment, irrespective of his crime. Those who seek shelter under\nthe roof of an Afghan are to be defended at all cost. The code\nfollowed by an Afghan is :\n\n(1) An Afghan must grant to all fugitives the right of\nasylum.\n\n(2) An Afghan must offer hospitality even to his dreaded\nenemy.\n\n(3) An Afghan must wipe out insult with insult.\n\nAnother strange custom goes by the name of “Ghag-\nKawal”, which literally means “calling”. A lover, who is unable\nto secure the object of his love by any other means, usually\nresorts to this national custom. Repairing to the residence of\nhis beloved, he fires into the air just in front of her door, there-\nby declaring his attachment to the girl. He then approaches her\nfather or guardian through the elders of the tribe, entreating to\nforgive him for his audacity, and imploring the hand of his\ndaughter in marriage. Refusal of such a request often leads to\ntribal feuds.","chars":1723,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00145.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/145","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/145","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}