Reading the Power of Printed Orality in Afghanistan: Popular Pashto Literature as Historical Evidence and Public Intervention (original) (raw)

Introduction – Means, Modes and Motivations: Further Reflections on Writing Histories of Afghanistan

2021

The idea to publish the Roundtable papers here in Afghanistan was Dr. Nile Green's, and I am grateful to him for that suggestion and more importantly for his many valuable contributions to the field of Afghanistan Studies. 1 Dr. Green has organized many conferences and events on Afghanistan (and other topics!) leading to a number of publications including a set of Roundtable papers in 2013. Collectively, those essays drew attention to issues of enduring historiographical relevance for Afghanistan including the methodological challenges of integrating source languages and genres across multiple eras; the importance of various forms of travel and mobility; the need to account for sub-national groups, transnational

Rethink Pashtun’s Historiography as a Narration of Violence, Displacement and Resistance

Shnakhat, 2024

This article tried to rethink and reconstruct a critical analysis of Pashtun’s historiography as a case study of Waziristan. This study experiment with patterns and perceptions in primary historiographical writings in comparison with the non-local writings which draw a foundational basis for the building of community in contemporary Waziristan. This is a de-ideologized and de-mythologized process of textual understanding of the Pashtun historical knowledge about reclaiming past and its reflection in the psychology of people in present. There is hermeneutical labor in the written documents which are unlearned through textual analysis. The fundamental concern of applying history for understanding the challenges which encountered by community in Waziristan. This article tried to understand the politics of narrative in the construction and reconstruction of historical consciousness and memory formation in Waziristan studies. This analysis is based on selected indigenous and native primary sources critique which produces and reproduces in the last five decades among local writers, researchers, historians and literary critics which explored regional historiographic patterns and perceptions. Keywords: Pashtun, historiography, Waziristan, narrative, textual consciousness, epistemic violence and applied history.

Afghanistan in Ink Literature between Diaspora and Nation

Iranian Studies, 2020

A photograph of Afghan president Dr. Ashraf Ghani onboard a flight back to Afghanistan was recently tweeted by his spokesperson. Surely, a rather quotidian occurrence in our digital age. Yet, it is the book that Dr. Ghani—an ethnic Pashtun, married to a Lebanese Christian, educated mainly outside of Afghanistan, and until recently residing in the West—was engrossed in that is of interest. Ghani, seated on a flight back to Afghanistan, was intensely focused on Tarikh-e Baihaqi, the eleventh century historical work on the Ghaznavid empire, that also serves as one of the most celebrated works of classical Persian prose. This certainly confounds a common accusation against Ghani in some Persian-speaking circles in Afghanistan that he is a Pashtun nationalist intent on disarming the literary and cultural milieu of Persian in Afghanistan. It also presents another point for consideration: Afghans, however much removed from the physical space of Afghanistan, are committed to a literary past, often engaged, and deployed in creative ways in the present.

Afghanistan Historiography and Pashtun Islam: Modernization Theory's Afterimage

History Compass, 2007

In contrast to major developments in general South Asian historiography, the historiography of modern Afghanistan has largely persisted as something of a scholarly throwback to the ‘modernization theory’ trend of the 1950s and 60s. The way Pashtun experiences of Islam have been treated in history writing draws heavily upon this larger modernization-oriented thematic, which in turn has existed in a dialectic with journalistic and policy-oriented writing. This article analyzes a number of scholarly works in which questions of Islam and social change in Pashtun polities form a major focus. The article focuses on works focusing on the pre-1979 situation, which has been examined only perfunctorily in works of authors employing more current analytical techniques. The article identifies a number of appropriate thematic questions in existing work which could improve our understanding of the cultural history of pre-1979 Islam in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and raises a few new questions worth investigating.

Deciphering the History of Modern Afghanistan

The historiography of modern Afghanistan is undergoing a transformation that involves tension between varieties of data, on one hand, and interpretative frameworks for that information, on the other hand. Textual sources in multiple languages are increasingly in dialogue, as are local and global voices addressing the history of Afghanistan. Growing awareness of interregional and international forces impacting the geographical space of Afghanistan has generated conversations among scholars working within and across historical eras and geographic frames of reference. Transnational and trans-temporal orientations have contributed to an interdisciplinary historical discourse where textual information shares analytical space with cultural, material, and visual data from modern Afghanistan. Greater volumes and more types of textual data have led to a historiographical shift away from isolationist views of the country to analyses that treat the territory and people of Afghanistan in relation to a wide assortment of external contexts, actors, and resources. For example, the increasing use of Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and colonial sources is revealing an ever-widening and highly influential range of relationships between Afghans and non-Afghans inside and outside the territory of Afghanistan that are being examined through prisms such as technology transfer and intellectual exchange, architectural and infrastructure development, literary and sartorial practices, and patterns of social and spatial mobility.