Hazara

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.

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Little is known for certain about the origin of the Hazara, who may be of at least partial Mongol descent. Their presence in Afghanistan has been attested since the beginning of the Mughal dynasty in the 16th century. The Hazara were largely autonomous until the 1890s. Their forceful and brutal integration into the nascent Afghan state by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khān’s predominantly Pashtun armies sowed the seeds of lasting enmity between the Shiʿi Hazara and the Sunni Pashtuns on both religious and ethnic grounds. Since then the Hazara have faced significant marginalization, persecution, and displacement, perhaps most zealously by the Taliban in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.