Mythologies of the Hazara Tribes
The Hazaras are an ethnic group who inhabit and originate from Hazaristan (Hazarajat) region, located in central parts of Afghanistan and generally scattered throughout Afghanistan. However, there are significant and almost large minorities of them in Pakistan and Iran, notably in Quetta, Pakistan and Mashhad, Iran. Some overarching Hazara tribes are Sheikh Ali, Jaghori, Muhammad Khwaja, Jaghatu, Qara Baghi, Ghaznichi, Behsudi, Dai Mirdad, Turkmani, Uruzgani, Dai Kundi, Dai Zangi, Dai Chopan, Dai Zinyat, Qarlugh, Aimaq Hazara, and others.
The Hazaras (Persian: هزاره, romanized: Həzārə; Hazaragi: آزره, romanized: Āzrə) are an ethnic group and a principal component of the population of Afghanistan, native to, and primarily residing in, the Hazaristan region in central Afghanistan and the northern regions of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan. They are one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, and a significant minority group in Pakistan, mostly in Quetta, as well as in Iran. They speak the Dari and Hazaragi dialects of Persian. Dari is one of the two official languages in Afghanistan. Hazaras are considered to be one of the most persecuted groups in Afghanistan, and their persecution has occurred various times across previous decades.
Hazara, also spelled Ḥazāra, ethnolinguistic group originally from the mountainous region of central Afghanistan, known as Hazārajāt. Poverty in the region and ongoing conflict since the Afghan War (1978–92) have dispersed many of the Hazara throughout Afghanistan. Significant communities of Hazara also exist in Iran and Baluchistan (Pakistan). The exact number of Hazara is unknown—estimates vary wildly—but the total reckons confidently in the millions.
The Hazara speak an eastern variety of Persian called Hazaragi with many Mongolian and Turkic words. Most of them are Shiʿi Muslims of the Twelver faith, although some are Ismaʿīlī or Sunni. They live in fortified villages of flat-roofed houses of stone or mud built wall-to-wall around a central courtyard, overlooking the narrow valleys in which they cultivate rotating crops of barley, wheat, and legumes as well as various fruits and cucumbers. The vast treeless mountains that dominate the landscape are used chiefly for pasturing sheep.
The Hazara are an Afghan ethnic minority group of mixed Persian, Mongolian, and Turkic ancestry. Persistant rumors hold that they are descended from Genghis Khan's army, members of which mixed with the local Persian and Turkic people. They may be remnants of the troops that carried out the Siege of Bamiyan in 1221. However, the very first mention of them in the historic record doesn't come until the writings of Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire in India. Babur notes in his Baburnama that as soon as his army left Kabul, Afghanistan the Hazaras started raiding his lands. The Hazaras' dialect is part of the Persian branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. Hazaragi, as it is called, is a dialect of Dari, one of Afghanistan's two largest languages, and the two are mutually intelligible. However, Hazaragi includes a large number of Mongolian loanwords, which provides support for the theory that they have Mongol ancestors. In fact, as recently as the 1970s, some 3,000 Hazara in the area around Herat spoke a Mongolic dialect called Moghol. The Moghol language historically is associated with a rebel faction of Mongol soldiers who broke off from the Il-Khanate.
The Hazara people are an Afghan ethnic group originally from the mountainous region of central Afghanistan called Hazarajat. The Hazaras made up almost 67 percent of the country’s population before the 19th century, making them the largest of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups at the time...but centuries of persecution violently diminished the once-thriving community.
A late 19th-century massacre, enslavement, political rebellions, and religious conflicts ended hundreds of thousands of Hazara lives. Some survivors scattered, leaving Afghanistan to start new lives in Iran or Pakistan. Many of those who remained were displaced within Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to the dominance of other groups. They were not protected under Afghan law until 2004. Little is known about Hazara origins, though one theory claims the group descended from Mongols who invaded Afghanistan with Genghis Khan.
Neither is the current number of Hazara people known for sure. While some accounts maintain that the Hazaras are one of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic groups—albeit commanding about 20, not 67, percent of the population—others believe they constitute less than 9 percent. Regardless of exact numbers, they remain the third largest ethnic group in the country.
The Hazara people or the Hazaras are an ethnic tribe native to the Hazarajat region of Central Afghanistan. They speak a variant of the Dari language known as the Hazaragi. The Dari language is a variant of the Persian. The Dari and Pashto are the official languages of Afghanistan. The Hazaras are Twelver Shia Muslims and are the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and a significant majority group in Pakistan. The Hazaras are organized in tribes with the Daizangi representing 57.2% of their population. In recent years, the Hazara were included as part of the "Afghan state," and the tribal affiliation is diminishing. Smaller tribes such as the Daemirdadi, Waziri, and Kolokheshgi are the minorities of the Hazara tribes. Researchers cannot fully reconstruct the origin of the Hazaras, but due to their physical appearance, it is believed that they might have a close relationship with the Turkic and Mongols. Their facial bone, culture, language similarities, and general appearance closely resemble those exhibited by Central Asian Turks and Mongolians. Genetic analysis of the Hazara DNA has shown partial Mongolian ancestry, and it is believed that invading Mongols interacted with the local Iranians and formed the separate group.
As one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the Hazara people have endured various forms of oppression from Pashtun rulers and governments, including slavery, systematic expulsion from ancestral homes and lands, and massacres. These experiences have led some to consider Hazaras to be one of the “most persecuted people in the world”. In the late 19th century, Pashtun ruler Abdur Rahman Khan sought to bring the Hazara people in their homeland of Hazarajat under his rule. He waged a brutal war against the community, which resulted in bloody “massacres, looting and pillaging of homes, enslavement” and the transfer of Hazara land to Pashtun tribes. It is estimated that Hazarajat lost some 60 percent of its population to ethnic cleansing, which has led some scholars to term the carnage a genocide.
The Hazara ethnic minority lives largely in Afghanistan, and makes up around nine per cent of the country's population, however there are also communities living in Iran and Pakistan. Their name is Persian for “one thousand” and relates to a myth that the Hazara descended from 1,000 troops that accompanied Genghis Khan during the conquest of the Eurasian base. The group is overwhelmingly Shiite rather than Sunni Muslim, giving them two major points of difference from the majority of the Afghan population. “The cultural differences are not enormous, but extremist groups like the Taliban movement, which is made up of Sunni Muslims, tend to regard Shiite Muslims as heretics on doctrinal grounds. And while Hazaras tend to be a fairly harmless group in the community in which their based, to extremists their very existence can be an affront.”
The size of the Hazara population, as with other communities in Afghanistan, is highly uncertain as the country’s authorities have never conducted a national census of the population. However, it is broadly recognized that none of the country’s ethnic groups form a majority, and the exact percentages of each group as part of the national population are estimates and often highly politicized. The size of the Hazara community has also declined significantly as a result of forced migration, land grabbing and persecution. They were once the largest Afghan ethnic group, constituting nearly two-thirds of the total population of the country before the 19th century. Some estimates suggest that more than half of the Hazaras were massacred, forced to flee or taken into slavery during the 1891-93 Hazara War when the Afghan King Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) led a genocidal campaign of violence against Hazaras. Many of the Hazaras who fled the persecution by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan settled in the Indian subcontinent or Iran, laying the foundation of the Hazara communities that now live in the Pakistani city of Quetta and various districts in Iran’s eastern provinces. These communities have increased in size as more Hazaras who fled from Afghanistan over the past four decades have settled within them, especially in Quetta.
Hazaras are also known in Iran as Berberis or Khawaris. There is a subtribe of the Chahar Aimaq known as Hazara and it is Sunni, unlike most Hazaras who are Shi'ite. Other groups believed to be related to the Hazaras but identified by other names are Taimanis and Tatars. Taimanis were formerly clustered on the eastern and western peripheries of Hazara territories; those the west have in the twentieth century been associated with the Aimaq. The Tatars (sometimes "Tajiks") of Kahmard and Sayghan were formerly known as Hazara Tatars and retain phenotypic and cultural similarities with the Hazaras; they are now Sunnis. The Moghuls of Ghor may also be related to the Hazaras. Among the Hazaras, and culturally indistinguishable from them, are "Sayyeds" (or "Hazara Sayyeds") who claim descent from Muhammad. Hazaras are a Mongoloid people historically associated with the Hazarajat of central Afghanistan, once known as Barbaristan and later as Gharjistan; they are now dispersed in neighboring countries. The Hazarajat has been shrinking over the last hundred years. Currently it includes all of Bāmiān Province and the western portions of Ghazni and Wardak provinces and the northern portion of Uruzgān.
The Hazara are an intriguing people, with a rich culture and mysterious origins. Their history is one fraught by religious persecution and political oppression. Yet they have managed to keep their language and culture relatively intact for thousands of years. Hazaragi is currently spoken by about 2.21 million people, mainly in Afghanistan (about 1.77 million) but also in Iran and Pakistan. (Hazaragi: A Language of Afghanistan, 2009) Some linguists believe this number to be declining as Hazaragi speakers are adopting standard Persian. Relatively few studies have been published in English to enhance our understanding of the Hazara people and their language. In this analysis, I will first take a closer look at the linguistic characteristics of the language, followed by an analysis of the history that has shaped it in order to provide reasons for a decline in speakers and possibilities for the future of Hazaragi.
The Hazara people are one of just a few ethnic groups whose origin is unknown. Hazaras' ancestral homeland is Hazarajat. It is the third-largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. According to the ancient history, Hazaras are believed to be of Turko-Mangol origin because of Turk and Mangol tribes. The Hazaras speak Hazaragi and are divided into many sub-tribes. The Hazara sub-tribes have not been extensively studied for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup/haplotypes, despite their unique genetic makeup and historical migration patterns. Mitochondria are specialized energy-producing organelles which contain their own DNA. Mitochondrial DNA has distinct properties, such as a lack of recombination, a faster evolutionary pace, haploid maternal inheritance, and a larger copy number each cell and high rates of variation which is highly useful in challenging situations, such as those involving deteriorated and outdated samples. Mitochondrial DNA has become a widely used genetic marker that provides a distinctive maternal ancestry depiction of a person's genetic pin code worldwide. There are three hypervariable regions of mtDNA. HVR regions I and II show the greatest amount of individual differences, as these are highly polymorphic and have the highest levels of variation in the mtDNA making it a valuable tool for identifying human genome. Since these sections lack genes, they exhibit a mutation rate that is 10 times higher than the coding area.
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