The Inquiry into the History of the Hazara Mongols of Afghanistan

Abstract

ONE OF THE PUZZLES which confronts students of Afghanistan is the presence there of Mongols interspersed among Afghans, Persians, and Turks. Very little information has been available concerning them, and the circumstances of their coming to Afghanistan have been a matter of conjecture rather than of history. The best known of these Mongol peoples are the Hazara Mongols, or Hazaras, whom the writer visited in 1938-39 for ethnographic study. That they were Mongoloid was attested by their sparse beards and high cheekbones. That they were Mongols seemed probable enough in view of the general history of the area. That they were descended from military garrisons left in Afghanistan by Chinggis Khan in the early part of the thirteenth century AD, as is frequently stated by European writers, seemed open to question. If the ancestors of the Hazaras came directly from Mongolia to Afghanistan, why did their language, an archaic Persian, contain so many more Turkic words than Mongol? Since the writer was interested in comparing the culture of the Hazaras with that of the medieval Mongols, it seemed wise to determine as precisely as possible the historical relationship between the two peoples. Tracing the history of the Hazaras was not an easy task. Central Asia, including both Mongolia and Afghanistan, lies on the fringes of the historical world. For the Mongols we have The Secret History, originally compiled by anonymous Mongol authors ca. 1240 AD. For Afghanistan we have the Tabakat-i Nasiri of Minhaj-ud-Din, who was an officer in the Ghurian army which resisted Chinggis Khan when that Mongol conqueror invaded Afghanistan. Other than these two works we are dependent on historians who were primarily concerned with events in Iran, China, or, somewhat later, in Turkestan. At times these historians follow events into central Afghanistan; at others they turn their attention elsewhere, leaving an historical void. Thus one can do no more than assemble such fragmentary data as are available and from these infer the general outlines of Hazara history. The Hazaras, who number approximately half a million souls, dwelt until the end of the nineteenth century in the Hazarajat, a mountainous region ex-