AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0110
Tanvir Ahmed
{"title":"Miraculous Edges of Rebellion: On the Strange History of Ḥājjī Mīr Khān","authors":"Tanvir Ahmed","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0110","url":null,"abstract":"In this article I consider different accounts of the 1709 uprising in Kandahar led by Mīr Ways Khān, often remembered and revered by the name Ḥājjī Mīr Khān. Narratives of the uprising guide us through a world in which supernatural happenings are held to be constitutive elements of social and political fortunes. Despite this, the strange and miraculous aspects of the rebellion are not often considered in contemporary analyses of the event. I argue that a focus on these miraculous edges of rebellion offers us one way by which to disentangle Mīr Ways Khān’s rebellion from an axiomatic teleology of tribe, kingdom, and nation-state: a teleology that has shaped securitized visions of Afghan pasts. Rather than herald the end of the Safavid dynasty or foreshadow the rise of today’s Afghanistan, the revolt was used across archives to telegraph divergent futures that never came to pass.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135850640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0113
Mikhail Pelevin
{"title":"A Note on Qandahar Pashtuns: An Early Eighteenth-Century Pashto Source and Its Literary Context","authors":"Mikhail Pelevin","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0113","url":null,"abstract":"The article offers a discussion of a little-known Pashto document from 1712 containing presumably the earliest report on the Ghilzay revolt of 1709 in Qandahar and a few additional notes on relations between the Abdālī chieftains and the regional Safavid authorities. The text has been preserved in the Tārīkh-i muraṣṣaʿ (The Ornamented History) by Afżal Khān Khaṫak (d. c. 1740/41). The content, stylistic peculiarities, and underlying tribalist ideologies of the document are examined with an overview of sporadic remarks about Qandahar Pashtuns in the writings of Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak (d. 1689). To better comprehend the specificity of Afżal Khān’s account as a specimen of Pashtun “counter-narrative,” the article considers the text in the broader context of available sources, predominantly in Persian, which impart mostly retrospective data on the activities of Pashtun tribes in the Qandahar region. The article also includes a full translation of the Pashto text under study.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135850002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0111
Marco Ferrario
{"title":"The Social Network: The Local Experience of Empire(s) Across Ancient Afghanistan","authors":"Marco Ferrario","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0111","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a comparative analysis of two corpora, the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan and the Aramaic Documents from Ancient Bactria, to show how empires that attempted to rule over the territory of present-day Afghanistan (and beyond through Northeastern Central Asia), relied upon particular strategies of control and exploitation of people and natural resources. In particular, it highlights the crucial role of inter-aristocratic ties within the imperial administrative apparatus, which in turn offered local elites a valuable resource to exploit within the arena of local politics, sometimes even to the detriment of the empire itself. Against this backdrop, a dialectical relationship emerges between central and regional authorities. Understanding the social mechanisms of such a dialectic is crucial to make better sense of the reasons for the expansion, consolidation, and fall of empires, ancient and modern, in this region of Eurasia. Building on recent scholarship on both the Late Antique and the wider Early Medieval Iranicate world, this article seeks to show how a diachronically broad-ranging and boldly comparative methodology can substantially enrich our understanding of Eastern Iran and Central Asia under the Achaemenids, despite the challenging evidentiary record at hand.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135849366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0114
Akbar Zare Shahabadi, Sayed Mohammad Firozi, Mohammad Torkashvand Moradabadi
{"title":"Mapping Social Happiness in Kabul: A Case Study of Educated People between 15 and 40 Years Old","authors":"Akbar Zare Shahabadi, Sayed Mohammad Firozi, Mohammad Torkashvand Moradabadi","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0114","url":null,"abstract":"Happiness has been studied from philosophical, social, religious, cultural, and economic perspectives. According to global statistics, Afghanistan was ranked as the saddest country in the world in 2021 and 2022. The current study aims to study social happiness and the factors that have affected it among people in Kabul in the age range of 15–40 with academic degrees since the Taliban returned to power. It is based on an applied survey conducted with quantitative methods. The data were obtained by means of the Oxford Happiness questionnaire and analyzed through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Social happiness among this population is significantly related to the variables of gender, ethnicity, occupation, income, household, religiosity, social hope, and anomie. However, marital status, ethnicity and occupation do not appear to play a central role. The general level of happiness was found to be below average (47.5), which is influenced by the overall situation in Afghanistan. Regression analysis indicates that gender, household, income, religiosity, and social hope significantly affect social happiness.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135850492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0112
M. Jamil Hanifi
{"title":"“Afghan” in Afghanistan: Idols in the Land of Idols","authors":"M. Jamil Hanifi","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0112","url":null,"abstract":"A perennial anomaly in the academic, political, and popular discourse about “Afghan” and “Afghanistan” is the chronic absence of an informed and systematic engagement with the epistemology and semantic construction of the Persian identity label “Afghan” and its derivative use in the cultural, political, social, and spatial configuration of “Afghanistan.” This article offers a brief overview of, and a corrective to, this cultural and linguistic disposition. The essay examines the widespread use, the cultural and historical roots, and linguistic seeds of the ethnonym “Afghan” and its derivative toponymal “Afghanistan.” The essay excavates the Buddhist stance and the epistemological cradle of the Persian morpheme from which the term “Afghan” is derived. This exercise in the ethnology of Afghanistan locates the country and its people in historical “deep time” and in the context of several cultural layers and processes rather than a cultural construct in isolation. It aims to serve as a springboard for a corrective etymological awareness for the production of academic and political texts and discourse dealing with Afghanistan and its people.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135849871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AfghanistanPub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.3366/afg.2023.0103
Fatima Mojaddedi
{"title":"Notes on the Wire: Telegraphic Opening and Ideology in Modern Afghanistan","authors":"Fatima Mojaddedi","doi":"10.3366/afg.2023.0103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/afg.2023.0103","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the cultural and political force of the telegraph in early twentieth-century Afghanistan where new media technology influenced the social milieu and transformed the sense of contemporary consciousness. I consider how wired and wireless telegraphy were interwoven with Allied imperial aims in the inter-war years and specifically how they became a much-anticipated medium of global connectivity and of ideological anxiety and political sabotage. I argue that at the heart of this tension there was a much deeper ambivalence about the place of ideological and cultural difference in the modern era of technological acquisition and a concomitant anxiety about the task of interpreting that difference.","PeriodicalId":40186,"journal":{"name":"Afghanistan","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47921708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}