When studying Central Asian emigration, the question of why the majority of exiles moved to economically underdeveloped Afghanistan is key. There are several answers: its geographic location, an open frontier free of troops, and shared historical and ethnic identities. The strongest pull, however, was a shared religion.
Most of the exiled Central Asians were Muslims. Their exodus fits within categories of Muslim travel. These movements include the Hajj pilgrimage (hajj), travel for learning and other purposes (rihla), visits to shrines (ziyara), and emigration (hijra). These were not just physical actions, but involved spiritual practices as well. Qur’anic hijra (which means ‘to abandon’, ‘to break linkages with someone’, or ‘to migrate’
in Arabic) began with the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD. Later, hijra, the obligation
to migrate from lands where the practice of Islam is constrained to those lands where, in principle, no such constraints exist, became one of the fundamental precepts of Muslim doctrine.
When the Bolsheviks captured Bukhara during the 1920s, Muslim preachers advised Central Asians, ‘the hijra is a holy obligation now’ (‘Hijrat fard va vojib ast’).18 Muslims accept that if the political environment is not conducive to the exercise and propagation of Islam, then one must declare his country an enemy territory (dar ul-harb) and wage a holy war (jihad) against it until it is restored as an Islamic state (dar ul-Islam). If not, one should migrate (perform hijra) and leave the country altogether (Masud 1990:29).
Ideally hijra is the transition of the mind from a state of dishonesty to one of purity (see Emil Nasritdinov in Chapter Ten). The crucial impetus behind hijra is to maintain one's religious and cultural identity;
pragmatic motivations must be secondary to this desire. Ideally, the exiles or muhajeers should migrate to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In the first half of the twentieth century, the religious elite of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Afghanistan often found shelter near Muslim shrines in these holy cities (See Balci 2009). Doctrine and practice do not always precisely coincide, and the exercise and significance of the Islamic faith in any given historical setting cannot readily be predicted from first principles of dogma or belief (Masud 1990:18).
Dale Eickelman proposes the idea of flexible Islam, arguing that ‘the motives for action in general, as for (Muslim) travel in particular, are inevitably mixed — a combination of holy reason and social, economic, and political concern’ (Eickelman and Piscatori 1990:5). In this context, hijra is a ‘normal’ migratory process and social action operating in an Islamically-determined cultural context.
Most Central Asian migrants fled to Afghanistan. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918–1923, many considered independent Afghanistan to be the only legitimate Islamic state in the region. In the 1920s the country served as a place of refuge for the Muslims of
18 This information was recorded in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in February 1991 during my interview with Bashir Baghlani. His father Kasir, being the head of the one of the first Soviet collective farms (kolkhoz) in Kulob, migrated to Afghanistan in 1929.
Bashir Baglani was born in 1931 and in the 1980s headed the Ministry of Justice of Afghanistan. He returned to Dushanbe in 1989, after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan, and later migrated to Germany.
Central Asia, as well as for some 20,000 co-religionists from British India, who constituted the Hijrat movement (Minault 1982). The poor Afghan country could not offer muhajeers any economic benefits, only the restoration (real or false) of a spiritual balance violated by external oppression.
In other words, it was a religiously imagined ‘journey of the mind’
across geographical and political lines, an escape from reality, a reflection of the deeply cherished popular utopia of dar-ul Islam,19 the imagined
‘golden village’, an ideal home for Muslims. In exile, between muhajeers and ansars (hosts, in this case the Afghan Muslims) a new bond of unity (mu’akhat) was established.
This universal, supranational religious identity that transcends political borders has survived in spite of colonial divides and the introduction of the secular concepts of the nation state and nationalism.
Relatedly, it is worth mentioning that doctrinally hijra is at odds with a secular understanding of emigration and diaspora formation, as it rejects the concept of the nationalism of a particular ethnic group, and that of the homeland as a territory where the group resides and to which it is culturally bound. Ideally, hijra would encourage Muslims to separate from those who rejected migration from dar ul-harb. Religious doctrine would unite muhajeers with a new state on a supranational, i.e., religious, basis. Meanwhile (secular) diasporas cherish the memory of the state of origin. Diasporas never completely abandon the idea of returning to a historical homeland. In contrast to muhajeeri groups, diasporas are inclined to identify themselves more with the abandoned mother country than with a new host state.
While in exile, the muhajeers faced many difficulties, including differences in language, culture, race, and nationality that inevitably existed inside the Islamic community or umma. They had to accept the fact that every state, including an Islamic state, cannot be absolutely protected from wars, revolutions, rebellions, and other violent conflicts.
19 In fact, this utopia has pre-Islamic roots. It is worth mentioning the imagined country, ‘Chambuli Maston’, taken from the Tajik-Turkic epic ‘Gur Ughli’, which gave shelter to the weak and defeated and provided them with justice and happiness. In Soviet times a Tajik popular poet, Mirsaid Mirshakar (1912–1993), created a powerful image of the Soviet state as a ‘Qyshloqi Tilloi’, that is, a ‘Golden Village’.
In spite of this, Central Asian muhajeers and exiled mujaheeds saw their religion as a source of agency and emancipation, as it helped them to find a safe haven in Afghanistan and facilitated common ground with local Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other Afghan groups. Muslim faith and piety, as symbolic capital, strengthened muhajeers’ social status and self-confidence. Local Afghans treated them simultaneously as exiled co-religionists and as foreign people, known as ‘beyond the river’
(poridarya). Belonging to the imagined Muslim brotherhood (umma), that rejects political, geographical, and ethno-national borders as well as to a temporal, Uzbek-Tajik (Bukharan or Ferghanan) community ensured material wellbeing, cultural continuity, and emotional balance among refugees and émigrés. In this light, the region under study emerges as a place where new forms of identity are formed, which do not fit the customary understanding of nationality and ethnicity.
Members of Central Asian diasporas and irredentists constitute a very large part of the Afghan population today. The appearance of half a million Central Asians during the 1920s and 1930s had an important impact on the history of Afghanistan. In spite of their ethnic multiplicity, these ‘minorities’ have always been to a certain extent aware of their group identity as different from the Pashtun majority of Afghanistan and related to abandoned compatriots ‘beyond the river’. This connectedness is emerging with increasing intensity. Islamic and ethnic solidarity in Central Asia, where frontiers are not ethnographically grounded, has been a significant cause of political destabilization, weakening centralized power and loosening international control on both sides of the Amu Darya. It has always been a crucial prerequisite for Central Asian insurgency that Afghanistan is available as a potential place of escape, since it is loosely controlled by central government and populated by fellow Muslims of similar ethnicity. Such a situation existed in the USSR in the early 1920s, in Afghanistan at the end of that decade and the beginning of the 1930s, and in the recent past: in the beginning of the 1990s, government authority collapsed once again and civil wars began in Tajikistan and Afghanistan simultaneously.
The frontier between these two countries again became a maelstrom of regional instability, with the arrival of a great number of migrants seeking a chimerical ‘state of purity’.