“We are from Changîzistân!” joked one of the Hazaras who befriended me in a hostel for pilgrims in the Iranian city of Mashhad. He referred to the belief that the Hazaras are descended from the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan who swept across Asia in the thirteenth century.
You may have read yesterday’s news: on the previous day, a bomb exploded in a Hazara wedding hall in Kabul, killing at least sixty and wounding at least three times as many. Responsibility was claimed by Islamic State. The Hazaras are victimized, and have been for centuries, because they happen to have adopted the Shi’a variety of Islam. (This is why they go as pilgrims to the great Shi’a ritual at Mashhad.) The worst massacres of the current nineteen-year Afghan war, and of the umpteen previous Afghan wars, have been of Hazaras.
Their homeland, the Hazârajât, is the central region of Afghanistan, mountainous, impoverished, and neglected because the main east-west route across the country goes in a semicircle around the south. (I had to go that way when I went on from Mashhad into Afghanistan.) According to my friends, many Hazaras had been expelled into Pakistan. You could see Hazaras in the Afghan cities working as porters, staggering under enormous loads.
Are they really descended from the Mongols? One of my friends, Yûnus Khân “Changîzî,” could have been: he was massive, with a face the world-conqueror might have had. The language they came to speak, Hazâragi, is, like the Dâri of Kabul is a dialect of Persian. Hazâr is Persian for “thousand,” and the idea is that it referred to some Mongol regiment that got left to settle here – rather like Urdu, which meant “army” and became the name of a language originally associated with the Mongols. But the Hazara actually call themselves Azra. It maybe that, like other ethnic groups such as the Kurds, they are a blend of peoples that have drifted across the region over the centuries.
(Another wry remark of my friends was that “We are the hazâr-râ, the thousands”, using the Persian plural ending for £things” as opposed to “people”.)
President Trump expects to reach a deal with the Talibân, who, in exchange for withdrawal of American troops, will promise not to use Afghanistan as a base for terrorism in other parts of the world. How likely is that to end the victimization, within Afghanistan, of Hazaras and of women?
__________
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Iran must have been interesting but a difficult place to visit for a number of nationalites of which I happen to be one!that whole region is a ‘hot potato’.afganistan, Balochistan, Kashmir to name but a few of the troubles at present.the power struggle between India, China and Pakistan seems in some ways central to the problem.all very sad but no end in sight.
I am overjoyed by the talibans’ promise…same as I was for kim’s promise to trump to denuclearize
same promise…same results…ya think? 😏
You might as well say ‘how likely is that to end the victimization of anyone and everyone outside the self-selected leaders that control the virulent sects, and tarnish all Muslims and the Koran in doing so.