Addressing Khorasani Nationalists and Other Haters of Afghans/Pashtuns
This is going to be a long post, so bear with me.
Over the past two weeks, I've seen several posts here from people frustrated by the racism, historical revisionism, and false claims about Pashtuns being spread on social media, often by Khorasani nationalists and, in some cases, Hazara, Uzbek, Punjabi, and other ethnic nationalists.
Given my own background, I figured I would offer my two cents on the issue. I am half Pashtun from my father's side which is from Kandahar and I belong to the Alekozai tribe, and half Tajik Afghan. I do not approach this from the perspective of being hostile toward one ethnic group or blindly defending another. I am proud of both sides of my family and, above all, proud to be Afghan. My issue is with ethnic nationalism, racism, and historical revisionism regardless of who is doing it.
I think most people here already understand that the Khorasani nationalist crowd you encounter online represents a very small but extremely vocal minority. A lot of this discourse also seems to come from diaspora users who have never actually lived in or visited Afghanistan but use the current Taliban regime as a representation of all Pashtuns and Pashtun culture. It's absolutely moronic and makes no sense. If the Taliban represents Pashtuns and Pashtun culture as a whole, then by the same logic al-Qaeda or ISIS would represent Muslims and Islamic culture as a whole. A political or militant organization does not become the embodiment of an entire ethnic or religious population simply because many of its members come from that population.
Personally, I think most of these people are better ignored. They are a tiny minority, and social media amplifies people who would otherwise have very little influence. But if you do want to engage with their arguments, then at least make them defend those arguments historically.
The first thing I would ask any Tajik/Khorasani nationalist is why they act as though all Tajiks or Persian-speaking peoples constitute some naturally unified bloc. When I lived in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014, plenty of Tajiks had very negative views of Panjshiris, and some outright hated them. Not ordinary, everyday Panjshiris, but people still associated with the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, related political groups, and the political networks surrounding them, including their cronies. People from Mazar had their own views about other Tajik communities. The same could be said of Herat and other predominantly Tajik areas. Panjshiris themselves had plenty of internal political disputes, rivalries, and even outright hostility toward one another. In other words, "Tajik" has never meant that everyone thinks alike politically, culturally, regionally, or even religiously.
Take my own cousins from my mother's side. They are Herati Tajik Shia who grew up in Peshawar before returning to Afghanistan in 2004. They would always tell me how glad they were that their family had gone to Pakistan rather than Iran because, at least in Peshawar, they were surrounded by other Afghans, and by that they meant Pashtuns as well as people from Afghanistan's other ethnic groups. One of my cousins even owned a women's clothing shop with a Peshawari Pashtun business partner. They remain close friends today. I always found that interesting, especially because my cousins are Shia. You might assume they would have preferred Iran, where they would have been surrounded by other Shia and Persian/Farsi-speaking people, but they were happier being around fellow Afghans in Peshawar.
My mother and her family have also always referred to themselves simply as Afghan. They would never describe themselves as "Afghanistani," Khorasani, Iranian, or Persian. They usually would not even lead with Tajik unless the conversation were specifically about ethnic groups within Afghanistan. Most of the time, they simply say they are Afghan and then mention that they are Herati.
If Pashtuns themselves are not some completely unified group, why would Tajiks, Persians, or Farsiwan somehow be? There have historically been, and continue to be, tensions and prejudices/racism between some Iranians and Afghans, and Iranian anti-Afghan attitudes have not always neatly distinguished between Pashtun and non-Pashtun Afghans. There are also major religious differences: most Tajiks are Sunni, whereas the majority population of Iran is Shia. So I do not understand the attempt by some Khorasani nationalists to portray the entire Persian-speaking world as a naturally unified political or cultural bloc. Even within Persian-speaking societies, there are arguments over national identity, history, cultural ownership, historical figures, and who gets to claim particular contributions to Persian literature and civilization. Persian ultra nationalists shit on Tajik identity all the time. We also know that Tajiks are an Eastern Iranic ethnic group, but they gave up their culture/language and adopted it from the Persians. The claim that Tajiks are ethnically Persian is laughable. Sure, a small minority might be including myself, but the majority of Tajiks are more closely related to Pashutns than they are to Persians.
Meanwhile, going back to social media, there are plenty of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and members of Afghanistan's other ethnic groups who proudly display the Afghan flag in their social-media bios and openly identify themselves as Afghan. And inevitably, you will sometimes see Khorasani nationalists show up in the comments trying to "correct" them by insisting that Afghan means Pashtun only. It does not seem to matter, because the owner of the account often pushes right back and says that they are proud to be Afghan.
So if you want to engage Khorasani nationalists or anyone else who claims Pashtuns are only around 350 years old and/or originated in India, ask them these four questions. They should be able to answer them if they apparently know more than the researchers, linguists, historians, and scholars who have dedicated significant portions of their careers to studying Pashtun history, language, culture, and identity.
1. Who created the Pashtun identity?
- If Pashtuns suddenly appeared only 350 years ago, then who were the founders?
- When exactly did Afridis, Yusufzais, Khattaks, Mohmands, Wazirs, Ghilzais, Abdalis, and all the other tribes supposedly decide that they were members of a new ethnic group called Pashtun?
- Who chose the name Pashtun/Pakhtun?
- What historical event marks the creation of this identity?
- Where are the contemporary records describing this supposedly enormous ethnogenesis taking place during the 17th century?
You cannot take the earliest written source you personally know about and declare that everyone mentioned in it came into existence at that moment.
2. Why was "Afghan" already historically associated with Pashtuns?
Most of you already know that before Afghan became the modern national identity encompassing all peoples of Afghanistan, the term had historically been used as an ethnonym associated with Pashtuns.
- So if Pashtuns supposedly did not exist until around 350 years ago, how do you explain older references to Afghans as an identifiable population?
- Who supposedly decided that this already-existing ethnonym would suddenly be attached to a newly invented ethnic group?
The history of the ethnonym Afghan and the history of the modern state of Afghanistan are related, but they are not the same historical question.
3. Where did the Pashto language come from?
This is probably the biggest problem with the claim Khorasani nationalists make about Pashtuns.
Most of you already know that Pashto is not an Indo-Aryan language. It is an Iranian language, conventionally classified among the Eastern Iranian languages.
- So if Pashtuns and Pashto were supposedly created only 350 years ago, what language were these people speaking before then?
- Who created Pashto?
- How did a supposedly newly created language acquire inherited Iranian vocabulary, morphology, grammar, and systematic sound changes connecting it with much older stages of the Iranian language family?
Historical linguists can even reconstruct an earlier Proto-Pashto stage. Pashto also preserves inherited features and correspondences connecting it to the wider history of the Iranian languages, including correspondences with ancient Iranian languages such as Avestan. It did not simply appear out of nowhere in the 1600s.
Languages do not magically acquire thousands of years of linguistic development because someone decides to invent an ethnicity.
4. Why confuse surviving written evidence with the birth of a people or language?
The earliest document you personally know about is not the birthday of an ethnicity. Likewise, the earliest surviving book written in a language is not the day that language was invented. Languages can exist orally for centuries before developing extensive surviving written traditions.
By the 17th century, Khushal Khan Khattak was already writing sophisticated literature in Pashto while speaking about Afghans/Pashtuns as an existing collective people. Think about what that means. He was not sitting there inventing a language from scratch or announcing that all the tribes had suddenly become a brand-new ethnic group called Pashtuns/Afghans. The language, tribal identities, and broader ethnic consciousness already existed. What changes in that period is the quality and quantity of the historical documentation available to us. That is not the same thing as saying the people themselves suddenly appeared.
None of this means that modern Pashtuns have existed completely unchanged for thousands of years. Of course they haven't. Pashtun identity developed through ethnogenesis, tribal migration, assimilation, intermarriage, political change, and cultural exchange, just like Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Persian, and practically every other major ethnic identity in the region.
That is normal human history. But there is a massive difference between saying:
"Modern Pashtun identity developed gradually over centuries."
and saying:
"Pashtuns were invented 350 years ago and are actually Indians."
The first is a perfectly reasonable historical argument.
The second raises some very basic questions about history and historical linguistics that Khorasani nationalists or anyone else repeating it should be expected to answer. If the enormous body of research devoted to Pashtun history, identity, genealogy, linguistics, and culture still cannot give us one simple, definitive origin story for the Pashtun people, how the hell are Khorasani nationalists on social media supposedly able to do it?
I hope this gives some of you peace of mind.